Meta-Organization Formation and Sustainability in Sub-Saharan Africa

In response to recent calls for theory to predict and explain the phenomenon of “meta-organizations,” we set out to identify the causes of their formation. Using a cross-case comparison of multiple case studies in sub-Saharan Africa, where nine focal firms varied in their response to the complexities of sustainability, we examined how and why some firms approached sustainability through a meta-organization while others did not. Our findings show that meta-organizations may be an effective means of managing the complexity of sustainability when participants exhibit an openness to innovative forms of collaboration—which, in turn, rests on complex systems framing and experiential embeddedness—and when they collectively undergo a four-stage process of meta-organization formation that transforms dormant resources into critical sources for achieving systemic goals. Our results also suggest that meta-organizations may be particularly well suited to addressing institutional and market voids, which typically constitute highly complex economic and social contexts. In addition to making contributions to the extant literature on interorganizational relationships and networks, this paper, to our knowledge, is the first to examine the appropriateness of the meta-organizational form in less developed economies, extending the potential generalizability of its application to multiple economic contexts.