The Relevance of Meta-Organizations
Call for abstracts
IV ISA Forum of Sociology
July 14-18 2020, Porto Alegre, Brazil
Organizations that have other organizations as their members are an important phenomenon in modern society. Scholars have termed these organizations “meta-organizations” and assert that they have certain characteristics distinctive from other types of organization (Ahrne & Brunsson 2008). Hundreds of thousands of meta-organizations from very local levels like chambers of commerce or city business associations, to national levels like trade union federations, and global levels like the International Air Transport Association or World Meteorological Organization, affect and shape our lives around the world. Meta-organizations are in many cases interrelated or even nested into each other, linking levels between the local and the global. Moreover, meta-organizations like the International Whaling Commission or the European Women’s Lobby, have been crucial in tackling numerous societal challenges like the ozone hole, species extinction, environmental pollution, or gender inequality.
However, despite their importance for society, we still know surprisingly little about the characteristics and effects of meta-organizations. While scholars have presented some important insights on meta-organizations in recent years, many aspects still remain unexplored. Therefore, we invite scholars to submit their abstracts related to meta-organization research. Submissions can thereby be theoretical, empirical, or methodological in nature.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
- Societal effects of meta-organizations
- Emergence, life, and death of meta-organizations
- Tensions between meta-organizations and their members
- Different types of meta-organizations, strengths, and weaknesses
- Complexity of meta-organizations, different levels, and degrees of meta-organizing
- Embeddedness of meta-organizations into other organizational contexts
- Specificities of meta-organizations in Latin America Session
Organizers: Göran AHRNE, Stockholm Centre for Organizational Research (Score), Sweden, goran.ahrne@sociology.su.se, Heloise BERKOWITZ, CNRS (UMR5303), TSM-Research, France, heloise.berkowitz@gmail.com, Nils BRUNSSON, Stockholm Centre for Organizational Research (Score), Sweden, nils.brunsson@fek.uu.se, Michael GROTHE-HAMMER, Helmut Schmidt University, Germany, michael.grothe-hammer@hsu-hh.de
More information about the conference here: https://www.isa-sociology.org/en/conferences/forum/porto-alegre-2020
