Multi-organizational couplings of societal domains: a typology of meta-organizations in a functionally differentiated society

Abstract This article offers the first theorization of the significance of meta-organizations for today’s functionally differentiated society. Meta-organizations are organizations whose members are other organizations. By contrasting them with individual-based organizations and with multi-organizational configurations such as networks, fields, or markets, we show how meta-organizations couple societal domains—such as politics, the economy, sports, or science—in ways unavailable to individual-based organizations or to any other multi-organizational configuration. The key feature that makes this possible is their double orientation toward societal domains: the meta-organization’s own orientation and that of its member organizations. Based on this distinction between two layers of orientation, we develop a typology of how meta-organizations couple societal domains, identifying four types: monophonic, straddling, buffering, and mingling.