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The European Union (EU) has repeatedly underlined the importance of higher education, research and innovation as drivers in the further development of Europe—economically, socially and culturally. One of the latest policy initiatives by the European Commission (EC) intended to promote this agenda is the European Universities Initiative (EUI) where alliances between universities across national borders are to identify new approaches for boosting European scientific cooperation. It might be argued that this development represents an attempt to find an organizational solution to the European policy ambitions in higher education, research and innovation. This article presents a framework for analysing European university alliances. Based on interviews with persons occupying key leadership and management roles in ten alliances, the article analyses the potential gains and perils alliances might face along four dimensions: their internal coordination, their ways of resolving conflicts, the commitment of member universities and the cultural characteristics of the alliances.

In response to recent calls for theory to predict and explain the phenomenon of “meta-organizations,” we set out to identify the causes of their formation. Using a cross-case comparison of multiple case studies in sub-Saharan Africa, where nine focal firms varied in their response to the complexities of sustainability, we examined how and why some firms approached sustainability through a meta-organization while others did not. Our findings show that meta-organizations may be an effective means of managing the complexity of sustainability when participants exhibit an openness to innovative forms of collaboration—which, in turn, rests on complex systems framing and experiential embeddedness—and when they collectively undergo a four-stage process of meta-organization formation that transforms dormant resources into critical sources for achieving systemic goals. Our results also suggest that meta-organizations may be particularly well suited to addressing institutional and market voids, which typically constitute highly complex economic and social contexts. In addition to making contributions to the extant literature on interorganizational relationships and networks, this paper, to our knowledge, is the first to examine the appropriateness of the meta-organizational form in less developed economies, extending the potential generalizability of its application to multiple economic contexts.

Few industries have been pressured to develop corporate social responsibility (CSR) standards and policies like oil and gas. This has translated into the creation of non-governmental organizations and branches of the oil and gas firms focused on CSR. However, given the intrinsic complex characteristics of this industry, its global reach, and the fact that its operations affect and involve a wide variety of stakeholders, CSR issues cannot be defined and implemented exclusively at the industry or firm levels, but require the participation of other actors affected directly or indirectly by oil and gas activities. In this paper we argue, first, that oil and gas CSR issues are collectively constructed through meta-organizations (organizations composed by other organizations), and, second, that the complexity and variety of CSR issues require companies to build industry-specific and non-industry-specific collective actions. Based on how oil and gas firms participate in this multi-level co-construction of CSR issues, we created a typology of meta-organizations as infra-sectoral, sectoral, cross-sectoral, and supra-sectoral meta-organizations.

Research into meta-organizations – or organizations whose members are organizations – does not explain the observation that members may decouple themselves from ‘parent’ organizations and form ‘child’ organizations that pursue more targeted objectives. Addressing this gap, we study two interlinked meta-organizations – the first created to tackle broad sustainability issues, and the second as a ‘spin off ’ to confront the grand challenge of sustainable urban mobility. Mobilizing insights from organizational imprinting, we identify conditions under which members break away from their parent and elucidate how the child organization inherits organizational features from its predecessor while acquiring new ones during the spin-off process. We contribute to meta-organization scholarship by stretching understandings of their post-creation dynamics. We build on organizational imprinting literature by indicating how imprinting processes play out in unconventional organizational forms previously overlooked. Our findings encourage policymakers and practitioners to reflect on how to promote and manage meta-organizations more effectively to address complex social issues.

Purpose This paper aims to investigate how orchestration mechanisms characterizing meta-organizations can support sustainability-oriented innovation (SOI) leveraged by digital transition. Design/methodology/approach This study adopted a qualitative approach. The authors collected qualitative data from 41 in-depth interviews with key informants, participatory longitudinal observations and secondary data analysis related to a digital innovation hub (DIH) and its network. Findings The findings reveal how meta-organizations, such as DIHs, advance SOI – considering the potentialities of digital technologies – through four orchestration mechanisms: collaboration platform setup, SOI resource arrangement, SOI process enablement and SOI scale-up. Each mechanism is founded on recurrent SOI practices identified as aligning, assembling and progressing, and each is characterized by specific activities that depend on meta-organizations’ evolutionary purposes related to the stages of the creation process. The activation of mechanisms concerns a process outlining three sequential evolutionary trajectories: for assessing and regulating interaction, for promoting and coordinating collective action and for creating a collective identity. Originality/value This study contributes to meta-organization and orchestration research oriented toward SOI and leveraged by the digital transition, and considers the distinctive orchestration mechanisms and practices required to support SOI leveraged by the digital transition. Differently from previous research on orchestration and meta-organizations, this study considers the time perspective, and thus, the sequentiality of mechanisms (evolutionary trajectories) to achieve the purposes characterizing the stages of meta-organizations’ creation process.

Digital platforms such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are powerful firms, which benefit from having substantial resources and central positions in online industries. Although they are capable of defending their interests autonomously, they still get involved in and fund collective initiatives such as meta-organizations (MOs – i.e., organizations that have organizations as their members), particularly in the online advertising sector. In this article, which is based on an in-depth qualitative case study, we analyze what digital platforms gain from being members of MOs and, reciprocally, what the MOs gain from having these actors as members. We also investigate how these platforms act as MO members, paying attention to the existing literature on MOs. We focus on the Coalition for Better Ads MO, a collective initiative aiming to counter the rise of online ad-blocking. We show that digital platforms that operate in the online advertising market and as web browsers make a significant contribution to the MO. To this end, the MO delegates several organizational elements (i.e., monitoring and sanctioning) to these firms. This delegation reinforces the position of these members and helps them to change the organization of the whole market to their advantage as they control the advertising features (i.e., formats) of their rivals (publishers). The MO gains in credibility and efficiency, but, reciprocally, the MO gives legitimacy to the actions of the platforms, thereby reducing the risk of conflict with stakeholders.

How meta-organizations (MOs) can be engaged in competitive settings remains an underexplored issue, largely because scholars have traditionally emphasized MOs’ tendency toward monopoly (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2005) and focused on potential internal tensions between MOs and their members. However, it is not uncommon for an MO to find itself in competition with other organizations, including nonmember, individual-based organizations. In this paper, adopting an MO theory perspective and drawing on insights from the literatures on competition and representational legitimacy, we investigate competitive tensions within a health policy-related field. Our research question is as follows: how does representational legitimacy become a central object of competition when the representative role of an MO is contested by another organization in a public-policy-related field? Our empirical study focuses on two organizations – one an MO, the other an individual-based organization – that compete for status and authority, ultimately seeking recognition by public authorities as the central, if not official, representative of their field. We highlight the importance of representational legitimacy alongside more classical dimensions of authority based on expertise and knowledge. We also emphasize the meta-organizational form as a distinct type of representative structure, owing to its specific membership composition. Finally, we outline the central role played by policymakers as pivotal third and fourth actors in this competition, having created the conditions for its emergence and persistence.

Trade associations work to influence regulation, government policy, and public opinion on behalf of the collective needs and objectives of their members. They also serve as agents for disseminating and exchanging information within industries, and often act as informal regulators by setting voluntary standards of behavior for industry members. Yet, despite the obvious importance of trade associations for firms, industries, and societies, management and organization researchers have devoted surprisingly little attention to understanding them. In this essay, we argue that researchers must develop a deeper understanding of their purpose, sources of influence, and impact on companies, industries, and society. We go on to discuss three examples of areas of management research—institutional theory, collective identity, and nonmarket strategy—where we believe trade associations are of particular relevance and where existing theoretical perspectives remain limited without an explicit consideration of these important organizations.

This study explores business-driven initiatives (BDIs) for sustainability through the lens of the supply chain practice view (SCPV) in order to determine the practices collectively employed to diffuse sustainability in supply chains. We investigate seven BDIs by collecting and analyzing secondary data complimented by interviews with experts. Following the SCPV, we first outline the drivers of forming or joining BDIs in terms of both responding to needs and challenges and in expectation of gains and benefits. Then, we propose a typology of BDI practices, namely setting industry-specific standards, assessments, and audits, capacity building, stakeholder engagement, information and knowledge management, community building, and leadership and advocacy. Finally, we outline the outcomes of BDI practices for members, their suppliers, and the larger community. We elaborate the categories of practices using case BDIs and compare the case BDIs' structures, the extent of their focus on the social dimensions of sustainability, and their outcomes. The study sheds light on the current state of practices performed in BDIs and the value that can be gained through collective action.

To cope with the new challenges inherent to their political role, civil society organizations must convince their stakeholders about their legitimacy, and metaorganizations (MOs) appear to play a central role in such a context (Ahrne and Brunsson in Scand J Manag 21(4): 429–449, 2005; Bonfils in Scand J Disabil Res 13(1): 37–51, 2011). In this paper, we aim to better understand the legitimating processes of a specific kind of MOs—namely civil society MOs (CSMOs)—considering that CSMOs feature some characteristics that reinforce both internal and external legitimacy issues. Our research is based on an in-depth case study of a French national federation (Fédération Addiction) formed by the merger of two former federations originating in different fields, alcoholism treatment and drug addiction professionals. We confirm the importance of stakeholders’ representativeness in the governance of MOs and especially in multi-stakeholders CSMOs, and we corroborate the assertion that MOs closely relate to categorization-related issues and the categorization process itself in many ways: the legitimacy and the potential for action of MOs depend on the socially perceived appropriateness of the delimitation of the field that they claim to represent, and at the same time categorization is reinforced by the creation of MOs. We contribute to the current literature on MOs in two main ways. First, we show how a change in the relevant categorization may result from the dual and interacting actions of the MOs themselves and public authorities. Second, our case study illustrates how a restructuring of the MOs landscape may strengthen the salience of internal legitimacy issues federative actors are confronted with in order to maintain their representativeness and position in the expanded organizational field. In this dynamic context, external and internal legitimating processes appear closely intricate, and categorization and governance issues appear strongly interrelated.