Séminaire MetaOrgTrans: Scaling and meta-organizing

Le 14 octobre nous aurons le plaisir d'écouter Daniel Petrovics sur "Like Mushrooms After Rain: Rhizomatic Meta-organizing and Scaling the Impact of Community-based Enterprises". Le séminaire aura lieu en ligne et en salle 1, à 14h00 CET. Il se tiendra en anglais.  

Daniel Petrovics is a postdoctoral researcher studying the role of meta-organizations in scaling community enterprises for sustainability, as part of the SCENSUS project at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. He completed his PhD at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR), focusing on the development of energy communities. He has worked as a research associate at the Institute for Environmental Studies (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) on EU-funded projects such as NEWCOMERS (Horizon 2020) and RESILIO (Urban Innovation Action).

His current work focuses on the scaling of community enterprises, such as energy communities and shared mobility solutions as part of the SCENSUS project. He has a keen interest in studying how initiatives targeting climate mitigation and adaptation at the local urban scale organize at the meso-level and how they form meta-organizations and umbrella organizations. To study these initiatives he has worked with a broad range of literature including polycentric governance thinking and strategic niche management.

Title: Like Mushrooms After Rain: Rhizomatic Meta-organizing and Scaling the Impact of Community-based Enterprises

Abstract: 

Meta-organizations, formal collectives whose members are other organizations, have become the prime vehicles through which member organizations scale their collective impact. By shifting the unit of analysis to community-based enterprises (CBEs) we offer new insights into the dynamics of meta-organization. Unlike firm- or state-based members, CBEs join federations not merely to pursue efficiency or regulatory coordination, but to expand place-embedded social and ecological missions. This raises distinct challenges: the very federations that provide CBEs with resources and legitimacy may simultaneously undermine the participatory governance and locally rooted purposes that define them. Existing scholarship on hybrid organizing has suggested that CBEs might balance these tensions, yet it remains unclear how they actually manage to scale while safeguarding their foundational values. Our contribution is demonstrated through an embedded case study of the Dutch community energy field based on 40 interviews and 60+ archival documents. Our analysis introduces rhizomatic meta-organizing - an organic, multi-layered and non-hierarchical process in which functions migrate to those supra-local layers best positioned to serve member needs. We uncover three mutually reinforcing mechanisms that together create a value-preserving scaffold: 1. distributed alignment, 2. recursive capacitation, and 3. mediation-as-translation. In combination, these mechanisms allow CBEs to scale their impact, extending collective reach without surrendering local autonomy or mission integrity. The study contributes (i) to CBE and hybrid-organization scholarship by revealing a previously undocumented rhizomatic path to scaling, (ii) to meta-organization theory by recasting supra-organizational authority as principle-based coordination rather than mere rule-setting, and (iii) to debates on social impact scaling by specifying when supra-local scaffolds complement, rather than supplant community control.