Why You Need to Know about Meta-Organizations

We live in a world fraught with not only organizations, but also meta-organizations. Meta-organizations are organizations with other organizations as members, rather than directly individuals. From international organizations like FIFA or the WTO, to national industry or business associations like the Groupement des Exportateurs Cacao & Café du Cameroun and the American Petroleum Institute, or transnational peasant movements like la Vía Campesina, meta-organizations are everywhere around us and play important roles in creating decided orders among organizations. Yet we rarely think of them in those terms, and we rarely examine their distinctiveness. Being an organization and having organizations as members has significant theoretical implications that I will discuss in this presentation.