Recommendation of: Thousand plateaus: A rhizomatic approach of collaborations among organizations. Round#3

Scholars of organizations, working from diverse epistemic and disciplinary perspectives, have long grappled with this phenomenon, attempting to capture and explain the varied forms of what can broadly be termed inter-organizational arrangements.They have examined what characterizes such arrangements, how they differ or resemble one another, what drives their emergence, how they evolve over time, and what effects they produce.Whether framed as networks, alliances, districts, or meta-organizations, these arrangements challenge traditional notions of organizational boundaries and invite new ways of thinking about how organizations relate, strategize, pool resources, and shape collective outcomes.The paper "Thousand plateaus: A rhizomatic approach of collaborations among organizations," co-authored by Hlose Berkowitz and Sanne Bor, exactly problematizes the pluralism of relations that organizations have with other organizations by suggesting a novel way of theorizing the variety of resultant relational arrangements.Taking as a starting point the growing literature on the topic, on the one hand, and the diversity of both concepts and empirical instances, on the other, the authors invite the reader to adopt a more fluid approach in thinking about collaborations among organizations.To this end, Berkowitz and Bor bring in Deleuze and Guattari's concept of rhizome, which acts as the theoretical axis of the paper.Seen through this lens, forms of collaboration are more like a web, which, similarly to a rhizome, "can grow from any point and may create new shoots and connections and does not have a clear hierarchy" (p.4).They are by definition complex, dynamic, and layered.I recommend this paper primarily because it highlights the importance of understanding how collaborative forms are produced, sustained, and reshaped through practices, relations, and materialities.It asks us to focus 1 on becoming rather than being, on process rather than structure.I salute the authors' critical engagement with Deleuze and Guattari's framework and their reflection on its limitations for the analysis of inter-organizational arrangements.The paper can also be read as an invitation to explore the possibilities offered by the rhizomatic approach, as well as a productive way of thinking about organizational collaboration.In doing so, it opens conceptual space for acknowledging ambiguity, overlap, and emergence, which often characterize real-world organizational interactions.The paper is especially valuable for scholars interested in alternative ways of theorizing complexity, fluidity, and non-linear forms of organizing.Peer Community in Organization Studies very much welcomes such creative endeavours.