5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

Meta-organizations, organization of organizations, are an important and multifaceted phenomenon in modern society. Hundreds of thousands of meta-organizations like the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), International Air Transport Association, the Southern African Development Community (SADC), STOP pollution, Latin American Network for Fair affect and shape our lives around the world. Furthermore, in certain contexts such as African countries, such organizations exist in the informal sector. This is the case of village tontines, groups of traditional chiefdoms or even religious associations. Meta-organizations have been promoted as an important device to organize collective action and address complex societal problems like marine biodiversity, environmental pollution, or gender inequality. While meta-organizations present specific characteristics that both make them well equipped to enable organizations to collectively tackle such problems, at the same time their nature creates tensions for sustainability transformations and justice. More work is needed to understand these aspects.

We invite scholars to submit their abstracts related to meta-organization research, sustainability and justice. We are particularly interested in studies of the Global Souths.

Submissions can thereby be theoretical, empirical, or methodological in nature. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Different types, levels and degrees of meta-organizations and meta-organizing process
• The specificities of meta-organizations in Global Souths
• Sustainability actions, frameworks and principles developed by meta-organizations
• Societal effects and transformative power of meta-organizations
• Resulting meta-organizational tensions relative to sustainability and/or justice
• Governance and accountability in and of meta-organizations
• Meta-organizations in informal sector