“Everyone has felt it’s their project”: Strategically enacting ‘equality’ in the tug-of-war of meta-organizing

Meta-organizations - organizations made up of organizations - are increasingly prevalent today, especially to tackle societal challenges. Meta-organizing is a strategizing activity characterized by particular types of inter-organizational relationships. We adopt the Strategy-as-Practice perspective to explore the strategizing practices of participants in a meta-organization with 15 member organizations. We find that participants engage in both strategizing for the home organization and for the meta-organization, attempting to influence meta-organizational strategies for the strategic benefit of member organizations, and attempting to influence organizational strategies for the benefit of the meta-organization. Such practices of strategizing involve the continuous restaging of ‘equality’ between member organizations. This staged equality masks the differences in time and resources that organizations contribute to meta-organizational activities