Drawing on the calendars of the biggest French scouting organization from 1936 to 2019, we investigate how a material artifact can leverage organizational hybridity. Whereas ideational arrangements are generally considered the sole contributors to the structure and functioning of organizational hybridity, we demonstrate that material arrangements can also play an active role. Indeed, our results highlight that the institutional plurality of scouting is scripted into a material artifact—the organization’s calendar—and provides to organizational members a material narrative of this institutional context. The active role of the considered material artifact is expressed two ways. First, even though this material narrative appears sufficiently stable to successfully encode, manage, and recount institutional plurality, the calendar also provides sufficient plasticity for integration of some major institutional changes. Second, the calendar sits at the crossroads of the organizational and individual levels, as an object supporting sense-giving and as an object influencing sense-making, respectively.
