In the course of the last decade organizations of the Third Sector became an important focal point within political science research: The private and the public sector have continuously forfeited their problem-solving competence regarding the most pressing problems of the social welfare state. Because of that development Third-Sector-Organizations face today a variety of expectations and demands regarding their performance: they are supposed to become one of the main actors in producing and providing social welfare benefits, they should explain and endorse actual politics and its decisions, they should concentrate different interests and act as an advocate for people who are lacking the possibility to voice their own agenda. Thus, Third-Sector-Organizations are viewed as the institutionalization of civic society itself. In order to meet all these expectations, organizations start a complex process of modification and adaptation according to these norms. By incorporating market-specific elements such as professional communication and financial strategies, or elements of civic society such as voluntary work, they try to disengage from the state’s influence and gain an independent status. Combing different organizing principles within Third-Sector-Organizations is called hybridity. This concept and its implications present the theoretical framework of my dissertational thesis. In the proposed paper, I will analyze the conceptual formation of hybridity and discuss its scientific validity by giving a critical perspective on the consequences and outcomes that might occur for these organizations. In that context I will raise the question whether hybrid organizations are more ‘efficient’ in solving societal problems? However, I will also explore the prospective advancement of the Third-Sector-Concept itself since hybridity basically implies the dissolution of sectoral boundaries. The question to be asked here is whether the concept of hybridity demonstrates the prospective ‘latest state of the art’ within Third-Sector-Research?
