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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.

Though many Europeans change party choice between national and European Parliament elections, the representational logic underlying this behaviour remains poorly understood. While second-order election theory attributes cross-arena volatility to institutional asymmetries, it cannot explain why switching follows systematic ideological and EU issue-based patterns, or why it increasingly favours Eurosceptic parties. We argue that cross-arena vote switching operates as a mechanism of representational adjustment in multilevel polities. When parties politicize Europe, they make latent disagreements between citizens and their national parties visible, enabling voters to recalibrate representation across electoral arenas. Using harmonized data from the 2024 European Election Study and Chapel Hill Expert Survey covering 25 democracies, we identify three key findings: First, left–right incongruence remains the dominant driver of switching overall, confirming core second-order predictions. Second, EU incongruence becomes influential when parties emphasize Europe in their agendas. Third, this conditional EU effect systematically benefits Eurosceptic parties: when Europe becomes salient, EU-incongruent voters defect toward anti-integration alternatives. These findings reveal that European elections have become arenas of representational choice where citizens strategically adjust alignment across levels of governance and issue dimensions. Vote switching is a corrective response to party–voter incongruence, activated when politicisation makes this mismatch salient with significant implications for democratic legitimacy and the future of European integration.

During the final months of Sri Lanka's 2006–2009 civil war, Sri Lankan armed forces engaged in a disproportionate and indiscriminate shelling campaign against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which culminated in the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians. Conventional wisdom suggests that Sri Lanka undermined international humanitarian law (IHL). Significantly, however, the Sri Lankan government did not directly challenge such law or attempt to justify its departure from it. Rather, it invented a new set of facts about its conduct to sidestep its legal obligations. Though indirect, this challenge was no less significant than had Sri Lanka explicitly rejected those obligations. Drawing on Clark et al.'s concept of denialism, this article details the nature of Sri Lanka's challenge to the standing of IHL. At the core of its denialist move, Sri Lanka maintained that while the LTTE was using civilians as human shields, government forces were adhering to a zero civilian casualty approach. With this claim, Sri Lanka absolved itself of any responsibility for the toll inflicted on civilians and sealed its conduct off from the ambit of IHL. This case illustrates how actors can considerably undermine the law using strategies of contestation far more subtle than direct confrontation.

Distributed cognition, as it considers how technologies augment cognition, informs technology integration in education. Most educational technologists interested in distributed cognition embrace a representational theory of mind. As this theory assumes cognition occurs in the brain and depends on the internal representation of external information, it is informed by a mind/body dualism that separates the individual student from material things. Alternatively, the theory of the extended mind describes the mind as a dynamic system of interactions inclusive of human agents, technologies and other material things. Refusing the mind/body dualism, if one element is removed, the quality of cognitive activity declines. Across the cognitive sciences, there are debates between these representational and extended theories that have implications for what it means to be a student and for technology integration. However, distributed cognition research in educational technology ignores these debates. Instead, this research is conditioned by the discursive practices of a neoliberal assemblage of political, commercial and pedagogical institutions. In this era of high stakes testing, as the individual student is measured, evaluated and otherwise made subject through these practices, this assemblage expresses a tacit commitment to, and is productive of, the subjectivity of the individual student and thus benefits from the representational theory of mind. In this way, regardless of the recognized legitimacy of the theory of the extended mind, sustained by neoliberalism the field of educational technology will not soon question the veracity of the representational theory of mind or the mind/body dualism upon which it depends.