Meta-organizations for Sustainability Transformations: Navigating Tensions Between Imperatives of Transition and Meta-organizationality

Abstract How do we change social orders to deliver a sustainable future? A growing literature in organization studies argues that meta-organizations are part of the answer. Meta-organizations have been shown to be well equipped for tackling grand challenges, yet paradoxically they also tend to resist change due to their inertia. In this paper, we move beyond the question of whether and how meta-organizations act as vectors of transition to address the question of how some of the defining organizational attributes of meta-organizations – which we call ‘meta-organizationality’ – create tensions for sustainability transitions. We argue that these tensions result from frictions between the imperatives of transitions, i.e. conditions for achieving broad socio-technical transformations for sustainability, and the imperatives of meta-organizations, i.e. the implications resulting specifically from their meta-organizationality. We unpack four tensions, which we frame as ‘multi-referentiality–directionality’, ‘layering–diffusion’, ‘dialectical actorhood–coordination’, and ‘multi-level decidedness–reflexivity’. We argue that transformative meta-organizations are those that successfully navigate these tensions to produce sociotechnical system changes. This work has several implications for organization studies, meta-organization studies and transition studies, and offers several avenues for research.