EXPRESS: Tolerated Misalignment: A Meta-Organizational Calculus of Continued Membership in Business Collectives

This conceptual paper addresses a puzzle in business collective action (BCA) research: why resource-independent firms able to pursue collective strategies alone would choose to tolerate memberships in trade associations whose outputs contradict those interests. Resolving this conundrum requires extending existing BCA research – focused on aggregation and trade-associations outputs – to consider internal organizational arrangements through which members constitute these outputs. To do so, we develop the Calculus of Tolerated Misalignment (CTM), a member-centric framework grounded in meta-organization theory. The CTM explains how, through meta-organizational features, firms mobilize internal and external leverage to moderate perceived costs of misalignment. This mechanism allows them to regulate the benefits of trade-association membership when collective outputs diverge from their individual interests. Our research advances BCA and collective-strategy scholarship by shifting focus to a constitutive logic where trade associations serve as bargaining arenas for their members. It also extends meta-organization theory by providing a dynamic model of member-level agency, conceptualizing firms’ trade-association membership as an active strategic-management process.