How mixing meta-organization and social enterprise literatures can enhance the understanding of social territorialized clusters like PTCEs in a multi-level perspective?

The objective of this paper is to develop a dialogic discussion about literatures of multi-stakeholder meta-organization (MSMO) (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2005, 2008; Berkowitz et al., 2020) and social enterprises (Borzaga & Defourny, 2001 ; Defourny, Nyssens, 2017). Building upon the analysis of French PTCEs, this paper is a contribution to a better understanding of how multi-stakeholder cooperation dynamics at the territorial scale emerge, develop and, to some extent, are institutionalized. Territorial poles of economic cooperation (PTCEs) are a French type of cluster within the social and solidarity economy that promotes the cooperation between a diversity of stakeholders at the territorial level. Based on comparative and secondary analyses of previous studies on PTCEs in France including our own work (Fraisse, 2017; Bourbousson, Richez-Battesti, 2017, Saniossian, 2020), we will analyze how specificities of PTCEs can contribute to a research agenda for multi-stakeholder meta-organizations (MSMO) and of social enterprises at the territorial level. Our analysis highlights that, on the one hand, there is a sub-conceptualization of multi-stakeholder meta-organizations in the social enterprise literature, focused on the organizational level. On the other hand, the social purpose of MSMO is not enough taken into account in this literature, nor are the institutionalization processes and external pressures in the creation of MSMOs. Meta-organizations are of different types and serve different purposes. They organize collective action between members and share resources and skills between them aiming at developing industries or production. In some cases, they also share sustainable purpose and activities. Focusing on MSMO, we will see that social challenges mainly refer to worldwide goals with creation of globalized MSMOs (NGOs, international firms and international authorities) and that the territorial anchorage of the interorganisational cooperation is not often dealt in the literature. Social enterprise - and more broadly social and solidarity economy - conceptualisation invites to integrate into the analysis of interactions between members in MSMO the diversity of organisations in terms of pluralities of economic and/or social purposes, the modes of entrepreneurship, of decision-making processes and of company ownership regimes. As a result, multi-stakeholder governance issues and resources hybridization are decisive variables for understanding the territorialization of economic cooperation initiated by social enterprises. Based on these differences in conceptual frameworks, we would like to show how fertile a dialogue between meta-organisations and social enterprises literatures could be, in particular when cooperation dynamics and territorial development processes are taken into account.