From A Clash Of Social Orders To A Loss Of Decidability In Meta-Organizations Tackling Grand Challenges: The Case Of Japan Leaving The International Whaling Commission

Héloïse Berkowitz () and Michael Grothe-Hammer ()
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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
Michael Grothe-Hammer: NTNU - Norwegian University of Science and Technology

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Abstract: Meta-organizations are crucial devices to tackle grand challenges. Yet, by bringing together different organizations, with potentially diverging views on these grand challenges, meta-organizations need to cope with the emergence of contradictory underlying social orders. Do contradictory orders affect meta-organizations' ability to govern grand challenges and if so, how? This article investigates these essential questions by focusing on the evolution and intermeshing of social orders within international governance meta-organizations. Focusing on the International Whaling Commission and the grand challenge of whale conservation, we show how over time incompatible social orders between the meta-organization and its members emerge, evolve and clash. As our study shows, this clash of social orders ultimately removes the ‘decidability' of certain social orders at the meta-organizational level. We define decidability as the possibility for actors to reach collective decisions about changing an existing social order that falls under a collective's mandate. We argue that maintaining decidability is a key condition for grand challenges' governance success while the emergence of ‘non-decidability' of controversial social orders can lead to substantial failure. We contribute to both the emerging literature on grand challenges and organization theory.

Keywords: social order; meta-organization; grand challenge; governance; marine ecosystem; decidability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Published in Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 2022, 79, pp.115-138. ⟨10.1108/S0733-558X20220000079010⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-03271137

DOI: 10.1108/S0733-558X20220000079010

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