Global Integration without Ownership:Designing International NGOs

Abstract

An enduring challenge facing multinational organizations is how to coordinate among globally dispersed units and member organizations. Despite a substantial body of work on global integration, there has been little research on the mechanisms of integration under conditions of weak ownership--where the center has little formal authority over its units or in meta-organizations where independent firms are linked by system-level goals. We examine this problem in an organizational context where ownership is particularly weak--international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs)--with special attention to the design of organizational and governance structures for achieving integration. We identify a number of distinct organizational structures (federation, confederation, network, and constituency support organization), and we clarify the mechanisms of formal and informal authority for integration available to the center under each structure. We also examine the design of governance structures, that is, the allocation of decision rights in governing bodies in order to build commitment to shared goals. We further argue that, in contexts of weak ownership, these structural mechanisms require active efforts by the center to legitimate them. We assemble our findings into a model of global integration comprised of formal authority, informal authority, and their sources of legitimacy.