EGOS 2024 Milan
SWG 1 The (partial) organization of meta-organizations
Convenors: Héloïse Berkowitz, Nils Brunsson, Michael Grothe-Hammer
For this first year of the Standing Working Group on Meta-organizations and Meta-organizing we're calling for papers on the (partial) organization of meta-organizations.
Meta-organizations are organizations that have other organizations as their members (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2005). The notion of meta-organization encompasses a diversity of organizations including international governmental organizations and non-governmental organizations, multi-stakeholder initiatives, cross-sectoral partnerships, inter-organizational alliances and associations, project network organizations, network administrative organizations, collaborative governance organizations, and many more. But whereas these types of organizations are usually analyzed within their own debates, the concept of meta-organization allows for discussing and understanding the characteristics and consequences of this form of organizing on a broad and generalized scale (see, e.g., Bor & Cropper, 2023; Brankovic, 2018; Karlberg & Jacobsson, 2015; Laurent et al., 2020; Megali, 2022; Rajwani et al., 2015; Valente & Oliver, 2018; Zyzak & Jacobsen, 2020).
For nearly two decades now, meta-organization theory (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2005, 2008) has represented a major break from the mentioned discourses, which usually exhibit one of two tendencies (Berkowitz et al., 2022). They tend to treat meta-organizations like their "conventional", individual-based counterparts, without reflecting on the particular effects that stem from putting an organization on top of organizations. Or they frame meta-organizations as inherently non-organizational phenomena such as "networks", and, hence, often overlook the organizationality of the phenomenon. Meta-organization theory on the other hand, has provided us with the basic and yet fundamental insight that part of the environments of organizations are often just other levels of organization, and this creates a number of challenges.
Meta-organizations often compete with their members for autonomy and actorhood. They face an unprecedented intermingling of multiple levels of structures, cultures, and decision-making. And they are often unwilling or unable to organize their members too much. Therefore they are often only "partially organized", using a selective combination of organizational elements (membership, hierarchy, rules, monitoring and sanctions; see Ahrne et al., 2016) in stronger or weaker forms. Yet, some meta-organizations are relatively strongly organized while others are barely noticeable as organizational to begin with. While these varying degrees of "partialness" of meta-organization let the former ones look like "normal" organizations, and the latter ones as networks and collaborations, meta-organization theory allows to see their commonalities.
The concept of partial organization (Ahrne and Brunsson 2011) refers to a social order that is crucially based on decisions, an order that is therefore highly specified, potentially immediate, accountability-producing, and furthermore inherently paradoxical. The concept invited organizational scholars to put decisions back to the core of organization theory by declaring decisions the fundamental aspect of organization. In a series of works building on this common ground, they proposed to expand organization theory (Ahrne et al., 2016; Ahrne & Brunsson, 2019; Grothe-Hammer et al., 2022) by combining the classical notion of formal organization with the notions of meta-organization and partial organization (i.e. certain decided types of social order that can be seen as organizational; Ahrne & Brunsson, 2011; and decidable or non-decidable; Berkowitz & Grothe-Hammer, 2022).
Building on this ground, recent years have seen several further contributions that used partial organization to account for the specific nature of meta-organizations (Berkowitz & Souchaud, 2019; Garaudel, 2020; Lupova-Henry et al., 2021). Scholars have also brought in other theoretical perspectives like the Communication as Constitutive of Organizations school and sociological system theory, in order to unpack different form of organizationality of partial and meta-organization (Grothe-Hammer et al. 2022), as well as identifying different densities of decisions about said organizationality – which Berkowitz and Bor (2022) call "decisionality".
Despite these rich and manifold developments in terms of both theoretical development and empirical applications, we still know relatively little about the dynamics of organizing in, of, and by meta-organizations and their emergence, development and evolution, especially in terms of their partialness and in respect to the interplay of decided/non decided and decidable/non decidable orders.
Submission information here : https://www.egos.org/2024_Milan/SUB-THEMES_CfPs
Deadline for submission of short papers: the 9th of January 2024
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Heloise Berkowitz
CNRS LEST Aix Marseille University
Aix En Provence Cedex 01
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