Meta-organizations for sustainability transformations: Navigating tensions between imperatives of transition and meta-organizationality
Héloïse Berkowitz () and
Sanne Bor
Additional contact information
Héloïse Berkowitz: LEST - Laboratoire d'Economie et de Sociologie du Travail - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, AMU - Aix Marseille Université
Sanne Bor: LUT - Lappeenranta–Lahti University of Technology [Finlande]
Post-Print from HAL
Abstract:
How do we change social orders to deliver a sustainable future? A growing literature in organization studies argues that meta-organizations are part of the answer. Meta-organizations have been shown to be well equipped for tackling grand challenges, yet paradoxically they also tend to resist change due to their inertia. In this paper, we move beyond the question of whether and how meta-organizations act as vectors of transition to address the question of how some of the defining organizational attributes of meta-organizations—which we call ‘meta-organizationality'—create tensions for sustainability transitions. We argue that these tensions result from frictions between the imperatives of transitions, i.e. conditions for achieving broad socio-technical transformations for sustainability, and the imperatives of meta-organizations, i.e. the implications resulting specifically from their meta-organizationality. We unpack four tensions, which we frame as ‘multi-referentiality–directionality', ‘layering–diffusion', ‘dialectical actorhood–coordination', and ‘multi-level decidedness–reflexivity'. We argue that transformative meta-organizations are those that successfully navigate these tensions to produce sociotechnical system changes. This work has several implications for organization studies, meta-organization studies and transition studies, and offers several avenues for research.
Keywords: meta-organization; sustainability transition; meta-organizationality; grand challenges; transition intermediaries; tensions; decisions; actorhood; Multi-referentiality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-04493940v3
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Published in Journal of Organizational Sociology, 2024, ⟨10.1515/joso-2023-0001⟩
Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-04493940v3/document (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04493940
DOI: 10.1515/joso-2023-0001
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().