Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

Meta-organizations—from voluntary organizations to social movements—can be a seedbed for various alternatives to capitalist social orders in contemporary societies. They engage in forms of collective action that are conceptualized here as the compounding of coordinated initiatives by multiple actors with the aim of producing collective goods. Concepts such as “organization” and “organizing” refer to specific ways of coordinating collective action. In their analytic structure, neither organization nor organizing refers to specific issues, questions, or conflicts: indeed, the same types of organizations and organizing—or modes of coordination (Diani, 2015)—may refer to highly different instances of action. This applies further to meta-organizations and meta-organizing which deal with the coordinated production of collective action for the collective good; yet meta-organizations seldom are theorized in connection to social movement kind of collective action.

Meta-organizations attempt to create order among independent member organizations to build collective identification, build bases of collective action, and reach collective goals. Meta-organizations represent layered forms of decided social order (Berkowitz et al., 2022): competing on autonomy, meta-organizations may struggle with their weak power over members and the resistance that any intervention on autonomous decision-making carries (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2019). The introduction of elements of decided order, such as formal membership, rules, authority, or sanctions, may be considered particularly problematic in contexts where interactions and participation are (assumed) based on emergent issues and autonomy in coordination and control (Laamanen et al., 2019), such as in various new civic movements. This is highly relevant to collective action for social change. Sometimes, the introduction of elements of decided order results in meta-organizations, originally created to coordinate multiple independent organizations around specific issues/campaigns, turning into formal organizations with their own distinct profiles (see, e.g., Diani, 1995). Other times, organizations keep their independence while remaining involved in the multiplex networks of resource exchanges and overlapping memberships that are distinctive of social movement modes of coordination (Diani, 2015, 2022).

One crucial question is whether, under certain conditions and at specific points in time, certain patterns—or certain “modes of coordination”—are more suitable (or perceived as more suitable) to conduct certain types of mobilization to collective action than others. The dominant mode of the past—the mass, bureaucratic organizations striving to provide an encompassing framing and synthesis of different issues—is increasingly being replaced by different types of meta-organizing. In the context of contemporary anti-capitalist struggles, organizing predominantly takes the form of either loose coalitions that mobilize recurrently yet on diverse agendas, or that of actions conducted by small organizations or informal issue-specific networks (e.g., workers in logistics and the underqualified service sector). Multilevel and multiactor collective action provides scale and diverse expertise to deal with grand challenges of global capitalism, such as climate change, poverty, and inequality (Berkowitz et al., 2020).

Meta-organizations act as collective agents of sense-making (Berkowitz & Grothe-Hammer, 2022) and play a key role in shaping global orders (Fernandes et al., 2026). They influence how societies view and address issues such as climate change and alternatives to capitalism (Vijay et al., 2025). Recognizing the potentially large scale of contemporary conflicts draws our attention to another challenge that meta-organizations face. In addition to managing the, at times, complex relationships with their grassroots members, they also recurrently face the task of coordinating between meta-organizations, merging more specific causes and campaigns into broader ones.

Current analysis at the intersection of collective action, informal (partial) organization, and forms of meta-organizing is still limited in its scope and in the heterogeneity of actors involved. Thus, for this sub-theme, we are interested in the structures and relations that allow meta-organizations and -organizing to create and sustain alternative orders for collective action. We need to acknowledge that the range of anti-capitalist actions (as well as of other initiatives such as environmental ones) goes from confrontational actions that challenge public and private powerholders (e.g., King, 2011) to prefigurative actions that propose alternative lifestyles and ways of survival (e.g., Dixon, 2014; Laamanen et al., 2022). These may include, among other examples, food networks, worker-controlled businesses, traditional and platform-based cooperatives, organizations focused on service delivery, and the like. Thus, the contextual conditions under which practices become consequential demand a more normative approach to collective action of partial organizing and meta-organizations (Berkowitz & Bor, 2018; Berkowitz & Dumez, 2016). Then, while we take the form of coordination of anti-capitalist struggles as our starting point, we also need to attend to other instances of collective action with a variable level of radicality.

Questions to be addressed in the sub-theme might include the following:

• Can meta-organizational theory provide insight into organizing struggles against capitalism differently, and how?
• In which conditions and contexts do meta-organizations matter for social change?
• How do varieties of radicality impact meta-organizing collective action? Are certain patterns of coordination shared with all instances of large-scale, sustained collective action, regardless of the divisions between radical and moderate positions and profiles?
• Which interorganizational dynamics need to be accounted for (e.g., which participants, which principles, which practices, what forms of authority, what formality / partiality)?
• In which ways do anti-capitalist form of coordination struggle differ from current modes of coordination of collective action in capitalist social order?
• How do the different meta-organizations work together to maintain or change the global social order? 

• Ahrne, G., & Brunsson, N. (Eds.). (2019). Organization outside organizations: The abundance of partial organization in social life. Cambridge University Press.
• Berkowitz, H., & Bor, S. (2018). Why meta-organizations matter: A response to Lawton et al. and Spillman. Journal of Management Inquiry, 27(2), 204–211. https://doi.org/10.1177/1056492617712895
• Berkowitz, H., & Dumez, H. (2016). The concept of meta-organization: Issues for management studies. European Management Review, 13(2), 149–156.
• Berkowitz, H., Crowder, L. B., & Brooks, C. M. (2020). Organizational perspectives on sustainable ocean governance: A multi-stakeholder, meta-organization model of collective action. Marine Policy, 118, 104026.
• Berkowitz, H., Brunsson, N., Grothe-Hammer, M., Sundberg, M., & Valiorgue, B. (2022). Meta-organizations: A clarification and a way forward. M@n@gement, 25(2), 1–9.
• Berkowitz, H., & Grothe-Hammer, M. (2022). 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. In A. A. Gümüsay, E. Marti, H. Trittin-Ulbrich, & C. Wickert (Eds.), Organizing for societal grand challenges (Vol. 79, pp. 115–138). Emerald Publishing.
• Diani, M. (1995). Green networks: A structural analysis of the Italian environmental movement. Edinburgh University Press.
• Diani, M. (2015). The cement of civil society: Studying networks in localities. Cambridge University Press.
• Diani, M. (2022, July 9). Network multiplexity in collective action fields as “partial organizing”: A comparative illustration [Paper presentation]. 38th EGOS Colloquium, Vienna, Austria.
• Dixon, C. (2014). Another politics: Talking across today’s transformative movements. University of California Press.
• Fernandes, J. A. L., Baldi, M., Lopes, F. D., & Berkowitz, H. (2026). Meta-organizations and the making of a neocolonialist global order. In H. Berkowitz, S. Bor, & N. Brunsson (Eds.), A world of meta-organizations (pp. 149–171). Edward Elgar Publishing.
• King, B. G. (2011). The tactical disruptiveness of social movements: Sources of market and mediated disruption in corporate boycotts. Social Problems, 58(4), 491–517.
• Laamanen, M., Forno, F., & Wahlen, S. (2022). Neo-materialist movement organisations and the matter of scale: Scaling through institutions as prefigurative politics? Journal of Marketing Management, 39(9–10), 857–878. https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2022.2143549
• Laamanen, M., Bor, S., & den Hond, F. (2019). The dilemma of organization in social movement initiatives. In G. Ahrne & N. Brunsson (Eds.), Organization outside organizations: The abundance of partial organization in social life (pp. 293–317). Cambridge University Press.
• Vijay, D., Berkowitz, H., Huybrechts, B., Audebrand, L. K., Barros, M., & Fotaki, M. (2025). Another world is possible—it is already here: A review and research agenda on alternative organizing. Academy of Management Annals. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2024.0102