Membership in meta-organizations between organizational membership and inter-organizational relationship : a three-logics model to assess the heterogeneity of meta-organizations and variations among them

In this paper, we advance a specific understanding of the concept of logic of membership in a meta-organizational setting by building on the literature on organizational membership and pinpointing how membership in meta-organizations theoretically connects to the dual nature of meta-organizations as organizational entities and as patterns of inter-organizational relationships. On this basis, we develop and present a new analytical tool aiming at assessing the heterogeneity of meta-organizations and at providing a novel theoretical account of variations among them. This framework is based on the characterization of three fundamental logics of membership, which relate to the fundamental nature of the inter-organizational relationship that connects a member organization to a meta-organization: (1) the logic of service (members as clients and meta-organizations as service providers) pertains to a market-type form of relationship; (2) the logic of representation (members as represented constituents and meta-organizations as representative intermediaries) pertains to a principal-agent form; and (3) the logic of coordination (members as collaborative partners and meta-organizations as structures of inter-organizational coordination) pertains to a collaborative form. We argue that distinguishing between these three logics of membership is important because each affects the very nature of meta-organizations and has very different (meta-)organizational implications, which also means that the source of differentiation highlighted by our three-logics model can shed important light on core issues of the theory of meta-organizations.