Staying together while learning: Relational work & the construction of collective institutional agency
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2025
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University of Cape Town
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Due to the complex nature of Grand Challenges (GCs), the literature is consistent that organizations must work collectively to address them (Berrone et al., 2016; Dorado, 2005). However, because these challenges are also uncertain and evaluative, there is often little agreement about what constitutes desirable change, or what path to take to get there. In complex, uncertain and evaluative contexts (Ferraro et al., 2015), therefore, it may be the case that a plurality of views and lack of consensus about approach are important elements to be maintained rather than minimized. Despite the possible advantages of maintaining a plurality of solutions and views in collective approaches to GCs (Verweij et al., 2006), we still understand very little about how organizations in collectives may work to preserve this multiplicity while simultaneously constructing collective agency. This qualitative, inductive, and exploratory study draws upon the single case of Catalyst 2030, a large, global network of nearly 3,000 organizational actors addressing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Through in-depth interviews and participant observation, the research aims to understand the ways in which organizational actors experience GCs, in light of persistent, though possibly useful and generative, differences in the ways in which a challenge is perceived and approached. Second, the study aims to understand the expectations and aspirations of organizational actors when they come together to address GCs. Third, the research explores the types of relational practices that emerge amongst organizational actors operating within GCs, and how these practices contribute to the construction of collective agency toward institutional work (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). The findings from the study are three-fold. First, I detail three ‘experience sets'—fragmentation, time precarity, and path ambiguity—that reveal the ways in which organizational actors cognitively and emotionally perceive GCs. I then describe four ‘collaboration frames'—coordinated action, advocacy, social learning, and meaning-making—which represent a diverse set of expectations by organizational actors when initiating a collective effort to address GCs. Finally, I explore three forms of relational work that members of Catalyst 2030 perform on an ongoing basis to maintain a balance between reflection and action that sustains the work of collaboration amongst network members. The three areas of relational work I outline are: legitimizing heterogeneity work, wayfinding work, and brokering work. I conclude with a discussion on how these findings relate to the literature on collective agency, developing a process model of ‘collective institutional agency', the facility by which organizational actors construct a “conscious sense of group as agent” (Cerulo 1997) in order to perform institutional work in addressing complex, uncertain, and evaluative GCs.
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Schweer, C. 2025. Staying together while learning: Relational work & the construction of collective institutional agency. . University of Cape Town ,Faculty of Commerce ,Graduate School of Business (GSB). http://hdl.handle.net/11427/42668