Meta-organizing social skill ecosystem : identifying local job opportunities for young workers in rural Senegal

A growing literature in management focuses on the many forms of organizations and partnerships involving multiple stakeholders (Bryson and al. 2015). Some of these cross-sector partnerships are organizations organizing other organizations and can therefore be conceptualized as "meta-organizations" (MO) (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2008; Berkowitz and al. 2022). Some scholars argue that such meta-organizations could play a crucial role in solving issues that no organization alone could resolve (Berkowitz, et al., 2020; Chaudhury et al., 2016; Fernandes & Lopes 2022). Recent studies argue for instance that meta-organizations are well equipped to jointly develop solutions to tackle grand social challenges (Berkowitz and Grothe-Hammer, 2022) and that multi-stakeholder membership and local embeddedness are key conditions to do so (Berkowitz et al., 2020). Indeed, in some cases, these meta-organizations are intermediary actors that enable member organizations in a given region, territory, sector or professional branch to organize collective action and to transform members towards more sustainability (Berkowitz et al, 2020; Berkowitz and al. 2022). In that sense, we could argue that such meta-organizations enable members to link "global thinking issues" and "local or place-based actions" by fostering community coordination (Marquis and Battilana 2009). This is especially observed when organizations question collectively the skills and activities needed to sustain regional sustainable development. There is indeed an emergent but growing body of literature that focus on workforce and skills development, not only for a single organization but from an ecosystemic perspective (Hodgson and Spours, 2018; Brown, 2022; McGrath and al. 2023) The ecosystemic perspective highlights the need to consider skill development as embedded in a specific context and responding to local organization's needs. These works mainly focus on the coordination of actors needed to elaborate and sustain the skill ecosystem, which is referred as "mediation activities" (Wedekind and al. 2021), that place-based MO could contribute to organize. However, our understanding of the development and roles of such mediation activities supported by a place-based MO is still limited. That's why in our research, we want to answer the following questions: whether and how a place-based meta-organization can contribute to the emergence of a social skill ecosystem? Building on a case study of a project in rural areas in Senegal, our aim is to analyze how a local and multi-stakeholder meta-organizing process can lead actors to think differently about their territory as a social skill ecosystem. It consists in considering working together in order to handle complex social issues, in our case identifying jobs and training opportunities for young people.