A Society of Meta-Organizations
By Héloïse Berkowitz
Twenty years have passed since the pioneering work by the Swedish sociologists Ahrne and Brunsson on meta-organizations : that is, organizations whose members are themselves organizations. Catalan fisheries co-management committees, the International Whaling Commission (IWC), the Association of Supervisors of Banks of the Americas (ASBA), the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), Finance Participative France, La Vía Campesina and the European Union (EU) are examples that illustrate the diversity, breadth and scope of meta-organizations’ presence and importance in contemporary societies. Ahrne and Brunsson, and the growing community of researchers on meta-organizations, emphasized the need for and specific nature of this concept compared to other social phenomena and theoretical approaches.
The book A Society of Meta-Organizations argues that it can be useful to look at meta-organizations through different lenses :
1) as a multifaceted empirical phenomenon of significant importance that affects contemporary societies;
2) as a specific analytical approach that shifts the emphasis on certain dimensions of collective action and can be used for studying evolutionary dynamics, or studied in relation with other concepts and literatures;
3) as a theoretical perspective about social orders that sheds lights on the complexity of systems of decisions; and
4) as specific spaces of power dynamics that enable hegemonic and counter-hegemonic collaborations.
Meta-organizations are everywhere, and they have important effects on societies. Empirically, they are both quantitatively widespread and qualitatively diverse. They can range from local, highly specialized collectives to large, generalist global actors. Meta-organizations are incredibly diverse, in terms of size, membership, purposes, activities, which makes it impossible to treat them as a single, homogeneous category. Yet across this diversity, some shared characteristics emerge. These similarities point to the analytical value of meta-organizations as a concept—one that helps make sense of contemporary forms of collective action.
Originally introduced by Göran Ahrne and Nils Brunsson, the concept of meta-organization marked a decisive break with dominant ways of thinking about organized collective action among organizations. Rather than treating ‘organizations of organizations’ as if they were conventional, individual-based organizations, or, conversely, as loose networks or institutions without decision-making capacity, the concept highlights their specific nature as decided social orders composed of organizational members. This specificity makes meta-organizations analytically powerful, but also methodologically challenging. Over time, the concept has been developed into an analytical framework that allows researchers to study their internal dynamics, their evolution, and their relationships with other forms of organized intermediation.
Building on this work, the book proposes an integrated, decision-based approach to understanding social orders and meta-organizations. It shows how social orders can be analyzed across multiple dimensions: from the underlying parameters that shape how social orders exist and change, to their structural components, their capacity for collective action and identity, their contextual characteristics, and finally the distinctive effects produced when social orders are nested within one another. This perspective makes visible how decision-making, responsibility, and actorhood are distributed and transformed across levels.
Such an approach also reveals the ambivalence of meta-organizations. On the one hand, they play a central role in organizing collaborations across boundaries and addressing complex collective problems. On the other hand, they contribute to the production and maintenance of unfair global social orders, while diluting responsibility and making accountability nearly impossible. Meta-organizations may become powerful vehicles of hegemonic strategies—sometimes turning into what can be described as organizational monsters. Yet under certain conditions, they can also serve as spaces for counter-hegemonic collaboration, enabling alternative forms of coordination, resistance, and social ordering.
Taken together, these analyses support a central claim of the book: we do not simply live in a society of organizations, but in a society of meta-organizations. Understanding their diversity, their specific characteristics and their effects on social orders is essential to understand how contemporary societies are governed—and for imagining how they might be organized otherwise.
