Meta-Organizations for Transformative Change

Meta-organizations – organizations whose members are themselves organizations – have emerged as important drivers of collective action to enact transformative change, changes that increase sustainability and responsibility in organizations, industries, and society as a whole.

At the same time, the current challenges in business and society create a paradoxical moment where meta-organizations can expand, maintain, or shrink horizons of collective action for transformative change. They can expand horizons through framing, reframing, and organizing resistance; they maintain horizons by shaping internal and external structures; or meta-organizations can deliberately close them, preventing societal transformations towards just and sustainable orders. But when and how this happens remains understudied.

Bringing together eleven contributions drawing on a rich diversity of theoretical perspectives and empirical contexts, this volume advances our understanding of the functioning and actions of meta-organizations in the face of a wide range of issues, including plastic pollution, tobacco regulation, gender and minority marginalization, social movements in the Global South, and other contemporary challenges. The volume highlights both the promises and the limitations of meta-organizations in expanding, maintaining, and shrinking horizons of collective action. It also calls for further research on how meta-organizations can be deliberately transformative, actively contributing to reordering the world, power dynamics, and relations in pursuit of sustainability and justice. This is critical reading for scholars interested in meta-organizations more broadly, as well as for those who specialize in advancing sustainability and responsibility.

Georg Reischauer studies technological changes in business and society at Leuphana University Lüneburg and Johannes Kepler University Linz.

Heloise Berkowitz is a Senior Research Fellow at LEST, CNSR, Aix Marseille Université, France, and Senior Researcher at IBEI, Spain.

Ashley Metz is an Assistant Professor at Tilburg University, the Netherlands.

Sophie Michel is a Full Professor in Organization Theory at EM Strasbourg Business School, France.