Collaborations among organizations may happen through a variety of inter organizational arrangements, such as alliances, supply networks, industrial districts, policy networks or meta-organizations. We join recent efforts in analysing this plurality and diversity of organizations by drawing on the concept of rhizome to study inter-organizational arrangements. We aim to provide tools which can help analysis, comparison and cumulating knowledge about inter-organizational collaborations by moving beyond categories (which are often specific to one field, theory, sector, and so forth). To do so, we build on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of rhizome and develop an analytical rhizomatic framework focusing on connections among members, heterogeneity of members, multiplicity of interactions and connections, asignifying rupture in the connections, cartography of interactions, and decalcomania in the adoption of knowledge. On this basis, we develop an inter-organizational web approach of collaborations among organizations and outline possible applications and research venues.

Entrepreneurial ecosystem research has expanded significantly in recent years; nonetheless, we argue that the role of the entrepreneurs in relation to those systems remains inadequately theorized. Drawing on a discourse analysis of 147 publications, we identify four dominant discourses that position entrepreneurs along the axes of agency and embeddedness. Those discourses frame entrepreneurs as (1) shaped by ecosystem externalities, (2) interactive components within relational systems, (3) active agents strategically reshaping their environments, or (4) actors who both influence and are influenced by ecosystem structures. While each of those perspectives offers valuable insights, they collectively conceptualize entrepreneurs as occupants of structural positions, rather than people having experiences. Consequently, there is limited understanding of how entrepreneurs interpret, navigate, and emotionally engage with ecosystem conditions. To address that gap, we introduce a novel perspective for studying entrepreneurial ecosystems. We label it the entrepreneur‑focused entrepreneurial ecosystems (EFEE) perspective, and it focuses on experience as a core explanatory mechanism. The EFEE perspective integrates micro-foundational, practice-based, and interpretive approaches to demonstrate how entrepreneurs’ sensemaking, learning, and capability development shape the routines and configurations upon which ecosystems are built. We also conceptualize ecosystems as service-providing systems, meaning that research could use service-design methods to capture entrepreneurial journeys, touchpoints, and value co‑creation. That would yield experiential evidence linking micro-practices to ecosystem transformation. Overall, this perspective extends entrepreneurial ecosystem theory by reinstating the entrepreneur at the centre and providing a foundation for more inclusive, entrepreneur‑centred policy and ecosystem design.

This research identifies the strategic actions that food companies take to foster sustainability transition by inviting innovations from the packaging industry. While much research has been devoted to the role of policy in creating the need for more sustainable products and services, little is known about the role of incumbent companies in scaling innovations that advance sustainability transitions. This study draws on data collected from food producers, food packaging producers, and food packaging material producers to investigate the role of food companies in scaling sustainable technologies by creating a demand-pull for packaging innovation. We illustrate five actions undertaken by food industry firms that help to scale up the technological innovations in food packaging. These are labeled (1) Signposting, (2) Demanding, (3) Incubating, (4) Orchestrating, and (5) Integrating. Our findings indicate that incumbent firms might not just work solely to protect their competitive positions but can also play a central role in scaling sustainable technologies by producing a demand-pull for innovation. The study also provides insights into how policy pressure on one socio-technical system (food production) creates pressure on another connected socio-technical system (packaging) to scale sustainable technologies through the supply chain.

How do we change social orders to deliver a sustainable future? A growing literature in organization studies argues that meta-organizations are part of the answer. Meta-organizations have been shown to be well equipped for tackling grand challenges, yet paradoxically they also tend to resist change due to their inertia. In this paper, we move beyond the question of whether and how meta-organizations act as vectors of transition to address the question of how some of the defining organizational attributes of meta-organizations – which we call ‘meta-organizationality’ – create tensions for sustainability transitions. We argue that these tensions result from frictions between the imperatives of transitions, i.e. conditions for achieving broad socio-technical transformations for sustainability, and the imperatives of meta-organizations, i.e. the implications resulting specifically from their meta-organizationality. We unpack four tensions, which we frame as ‘multi-referentiality–directionality’, ‘layering–diffusion’, ‘dialectical actorhood–coordination’, and ‘multi-level decidedness–reflexivity’. We argue that transformative meta-organizations are those that successfully navigate these tensions to produce sociotechnical system changes. This work has several implications for organization studies, meta-organization studies and transition studies, and offers several avenues for research.

We analyze a multi-stakeholder process that succeeded in creating a joint forest management strategy for the city of Jyvaskyla, Finland. The analysis draws on the participants' own account of the process, elicited via interviews and questionnaires. We attend to critical context and process factors to account for the success of the collaborative process and evaluate the effectiveness of the agreement in terms of ecological and social outcomes. The process created a practical agreement, which increased the share of protected forests and introduced new biodiversity protection measures for commercial and recreational forests. It also created innovative solutions, like the new concept of a nature value forest, which helped the parties to negotiate around their differences. However, disagreement over the impacts of forest management practices, especially continuous cover forestry, remained. The crucial contextual conditions contributing to the agreement were strong initiating leadership and political mandate, which motivated the participants to engage in collaborative dialogue and stick with the process. The key process factors were a third-party facilitation and joint fact-finding. Most importantly, the process was not constrained by a pre-defined agenda or assumptions related to the status quo, but the participants were granted considerable influence over decisions and outputs.

Accelerating the sustainability transition demands managers to more intensively and more frequently envisage in supererogatory acts. Supererogatory action is not legally or morally required but consist of praiseworthy acts beyond duty that have the capacity to build a better future. This perspective paper argues that strategic decision-making during sustainability transitions should be more supererogatory, and research should pay more explicit attention to the supererogatory acts of managers and business organizations. Supererogation is especially important in any transition, where the business environment is changing rapidly and fundamentally, where stakeholder preferences conflict and first-mover advantages are significant. Our argument is that perceived rightness and confidence are prerequisites for managers to envisage desirable futures and act in ways that transcend duty. We also critically reflect on the threats implied by supererogatory management. Our arguments are illustrated by interview data collected from Finnish managers with first-hand experience with supererogatory acts in the current sustainability transitions of the food packaging industry. We call for empirical research explaining the role of supererogatory management in driving sustainability transitions in different settings and hope that this perspective paper can spur the awareness of managers and policy makers regarding the power of supererogatory acts in management.

Meta-organization theory has shied away from a systematic consideration of the complexities and consequences of resource acquisition patterns, instead assuming member organizations furnish the resources their associations require. The theory reflects empirical enquiry, which has focused primarily on the most visible form of resources, the association's finance budget and staffing. This paper develops a conceptual framework to show the wider range of ways in which meta-organizations acquire resources and presents a resource-flow perspective. We utilize insights from resource dependency theory to specify two dimensions of resource flow. The first addresses the source of resources, distinguishing those acquired from the meta-organization's membership from those acquired from external interests. The second concerns whether the meta-organization secures control over the use and allocation of acquired resources, or not. We identify four resource flows utilizing these two dimensions: member resourcing, associational resourcing, contributed resourcing and generated resourcing, and discuss how each resource flow relates to meta-organizational activity, highlighting when a particular flow can be expected. The resource-flow perspective allows us to adapt existing typologies to define a conceptual space onto which variations among meta-organizations can be mapped. This space focuses on the expected level of resource engagement of members in the meta-organization and the extent of resource contribution from interests in the meta-organization's environment. Finally, we discuss areas for development of the resource-flow perspective and its potential to support future research.

This chapter builds on Chapters 5 and 6 on food and human waste and considers the institutional, policy and consumer aspects of food packaging, which produces a major proportion of the global waste, plastic waste in particular. However, food packaging is a double-edged tool as it is needed in order to promote ecologically sustainable development, as it is an efficient way to prevent food waste. This chapter argues that we need to reduce both food and packaging waste via creating more sustainable packaging solutions, the challenge of which is not primarily a technological one. Authors of this chapter argue that because of the underlying layers of institutions, policies, and consumer behaviour, first the roles of different actors in the transition process towards CE food packaging should be considered, instead of the technological questions put forward. Based on a wide array of interviews with stakeholders in Finland, this chapter analyses how consumers, policy-makers, NGOs, and businesses view their possibilities and barriers, power and responsibilities to promote the transition towards CE food packaging.

Merging scientific and stakeholder knowledge plays a critical part in knowledge co-production processes, yet it is far from straightforward. We describe knowledge co-production processes by drawing on experiences from four strategic research cases that all sought to integrate scientific and stakeholder knowledge, while demonstrating the different settings and methodological choices for knowledge co-production in environmental research. To facilitate systematic analysis, we utilized the knowledge-weaving framework by Tengo et al. (2017) to examine co-production through the phases of knowledge mobilizing, translating, negotiating, synthesizing and applying. We also considered the inclusiveness of the weaving processes, where our results show that all of the study cases were able to engage participants across the four phases. Our analysis indicates that the framework is useful for unpacking the different phases of the knowledge-weaving process as well as the variety of activities that are used throughout the process. However, the results also emphasize the long-term nature of these processes, as knowledge-weaving activities were used predominantly in the mobilize and translate/negotiate phases and less at later phases of the process. This indicates that the benefits may be foreseen in similar future actions through the initiated learning and change processes.

Meta-organisations often lack the monitoring and sanctioning power associated with the organisation of individuals, and thus they can be considered partially organised. Little research investigates the extent to which meta-organisations, in general, and clusters in particular are organised. The current meta-organisation literature thus perpetuates an implicit assumption that all meta-organisations are equally incomplete. This chapter challenges this assumption and theorises about variations in organisational structures of meta-organisations. To do so, it transposes the partial organisation concept and specifies at the meta-organisation level: 1) degrees of structural organisationality, as measured by the selective combination of membership, hierarchy, rules, monitoring, and sanctioning, and 2) degrees of decisionality - that is the extent to which each organisational component is itself the object of decisions. By combining structural organisationality and decisionality, the chapter identifies four dynamic meta-organising profiles: thin partial meta-organising, thin meta-organising, thick partial meta-organising, and thick meta-organising. The chapter contributes to current efforts to advance meta-organisation theory and proposes an analytical tool to investigate this phenomenon. At the same time, it provides insight into the conceptualisation of clusters as social actors.

While meta-organisations are understood as aiming to protect members from destructive influences of their environment, some meta-organisations do actively promote change and support their members in this process. This chapter aims to provide insights into the potential roles meta-organisations play in sustainability transitions. To do so, the chapter develops a conceptual framework describing meta-organisational roles based on their purposes and orientations. The proposed framework is then applied in empirical research into the food packaging cluster in Finland. The chapter finds that a cluster not organised into one single meta-organisation but multiple, overlapping meta-organisations tends to lack or miss the change-facilitation role. This may inhibit its ability to contribute to large-scale transitions towards sustainability, especially when none of the overlapping meta-organisations can take on the change-facilitation role.