Organisation as a Taboo? Chances and Risks of Explicitly Dealing With the Issue of Organization in Inter-Organizational Transformative Initiatives

Abstract

Nowadays, innovation and transformation appear as leading ideas in nearly all societal fields. Against the background of rapid technological development, globalisation, ecological challenges, and social change, perspectives of desired futures have to be developed, and how these perspectives should be realised has to be negotiated. With the latter, questions of organisation arise. This paper contributes to the examination of organisational aspects of transformation in the field of education. The research on the development process of the inter-organisational initiative Educational Lab reveals that awareness of organisational aspects is not a matter of course. The lab's participants share a vague vision of innovative education and a commitment to the idea of intervening in the educational system. Apart from that, heterogeneity, conflicting institutional logics, and a lack of awareness of the "organisational self "are setting the scene. Organisational aspects seem to be taboo. The explorative qualitative case study research, conducted in a transdisciplinary research setting, leads to seven hypotheses on dynamics concerning organisational aspects of the establishment process. The theoretical conclusions drawn are twofold: First, avoiding the "organisation" issue increases uncertainty in complex constellations. It hinders an initiative, and at the same time, it is a kind of self-protection in a situation where roles and responsibilities and the consequences of organisational determinations are unclear. Secondly, in little-established inter-organisational transformation initiatives, new organisational designs that take tension areas into account and facilitate organisational agreements are needed. Thus, it seems promising to understand inter-organisational constellations as hybrid organisations and to further elaborate adequate concepts that are able to grasp real-world complexity and give orientation to organisational practice.