Taming the monster – towards an understanding of hybrid organisations and governance Public Money & Management 2018, vol 38(3), pp.162-163 Jarmo Vakkuri and Jan-Erik Johanson University of Tampere, Faculty of Management, FI-33014 University of Tampere, Finland Address for correspondence: jarmo.vakkuri@uta.fi Although, complex societal problems require sophisticated solutions the governance of societal arrangements is largely based upon an assumption of a clear-cut distinction between public and private categories of institutional life. However, with respect to pursuing important societal goals such as improving the level of education, fighting environmental pollution, and maintaining infrastructure, it is difficult to disentangle the goals of public organizations from the contributions of private activity. For instance, education systems cater to the demands of multiple clients: individuals pursuing decent employment, governments seeking competitive advantages, and private business benefiting from the capabilities of the workforce. This gives rise to multiple ownership and control structures within education systems. Therefore, it is important to explore the space between public and private forms of action, the realm of hybrid organizations and hybrid governance (Johanson and Vakkuri, 2017). Consider the current forms of organizing energy delivery and supply and constructing infrastructure worldwide. These societal functions are often organized as state-owned enterprises that aim to combine the politically driven goals of nations while exploiting business logics. The manuals of international organisations (World Bank 2014, OECD 2015) are eager to point out possible pitfalls of combining political and business endeavors, which is supported by the administrative pragmatism emphasizing governable societal choices. In infrastructure development, modern megaprojects such as the Beijing–Shanghai High- Speed Railway or the Airbus A380 not only demand tremendous amount of resources but they also require institutional collaboration among many public and private actors. While these projects may be formally public or private in terms of ownership, they face different forms of ambiguity employing parallel institutional logics (Grossi et al. 2017).