Meta-Organizations and Alternatives to Dominant Orders

In this session we want to expand ongoing discussions on meta-organizations - organizations whose members are themselves organizations - and alternative organizations. There is a growing interest in sociology, organization studies and across disciplines to investigate how alternative organizations - those that depart from capitalist, heteropatriarchal, colonialist and imperialist orders - can transform societies and bring about a more sustainable and just order. In doing so, voices from both academia and practice have repeatedly foregrounded the need for collaboration and alliance-building among alternative organizations, e.g., through secondary cooperatives, federations, movements and international groups. Thus, there is a growing need to better understand the processes, mechanisms and consequences of such collaborations, including potential forms of opposition, risks of co-optation and mission drift.

In this session, we invite contributions that investigate how such meta-organizing can help alternatives, by building solidarities and collective capacities that may create conditions and possibilities for broader societal transformation, and by providing collective infrastructures through which alternatives can buffer, negotiate, or challenge pressures from dominant orders (e.g., state actors, lobbying industries or other elite groups). Additionally, we invite critical explorations of how the adjustments, inevitably occuring at the meta-organizational level, may influence the transformative potential of alternatives. We also seek to explore under what conditions meta-organizations of alternative organizations can themselves be considered ‘alternative’, how this alternativity manifests in practice, what are its effets on the constitutive organizations.