Modeling the meta-organization trajectory of empowerment through its dynamic of mediation between public policy and MO members’ needs - a longitudinal and multiple cases study

The aim of this paper is to model the meta organization trajectory of empowerment, through their dynamic of mediation during a long period (nearly 10 years), in which political and socio-economic changes have taken place. The meta organizations are becoming more and more numerous. So, the question of their evolution through time is important : some of them are becoming more powerful, others totally disappear. In line with the MO literature, we develop an original double theoretical approach (1) by considering MO as an organizing actor through a strong role of mediation between differents kind of actors, embedded in a territory through three main dimensions : governance devices, functionality of resources created and shared values; (2) by combining this MO approach with a social psychology perspective of empowerment concept (Avelino et ali, 2019), based on the activation of 6 ingredients : relatedness, autonomy, competence, impact, meaning, resilience, we defend the idea that this combinaison could be useful to catch the MO transformation. To answer our research question, we adopt a qualitative approach, more precisely a longitudinal and multiple cases study. We investigated three differents business MO in Provence Alpes Cote d'Azur (PACA) region, in the south of France: the "Culture Industries and heritage" (ICP) MO, The "Care Services" (PSP) MO and the business Tourism "Provence Côte d'Azur Events" (PCE) MO. We led two surveys in 2011 and in 2021 with a total of 19 interviews. Our main findings suggest that there is an important variability for the same MO through time via the evolution of governance devices, the functionalities created in inter-organizational spaces, and the collective identity redefined according to the relationship with public policies and territories. Some empowerment ingredients are more relevant than others in understanding this variability over time. Our first results lead us to believe that each dimension of analysis mobilizes one or two ingredients in priority to remain a living actor. The "competence" ingredient is activated in the "functionality of resources created" dimension. The "relatedness" ingredient appears to be more active in the "shared value" dimension. Concerning the "governance devices" dimension, the "autonomy" and "resilience" ingredients are activated to implement participatory governance devices and to allow the MO to adapt quickly to its ecosystem.