Continuity and Change in Spin-off Meta-organizations: An Imprinting Perspective

Research into meta-organizations – or organizations whose members are organizations – does not explain the observation that members may decouple themselves from ‘parent’ organizations and form ‘child’ organizations that pursue more targeted objectives. Addressing this gap, we study two interlinked meta-organizations – the first created to tackle broad sustainability issues, and the second as a ‘spin off ’ to confront the grand challenge of sustainable urban mobility. Mobilizing insights from organizational imprinting, we identify conditions under which members break away from their parent and elucidate how the child organization inherits organizational features from its predecessor while acquiring new ones during the spin-off process. We contribute to meta-organization scholarship by stretching understandings of their post-creation dynamics. We build on organizational imprinting literature by indicating how imprinting processes play out in unconventional organizational forms previously overlooked. Our findings encourage policymakers and practitioners to reflect on how to promote and manage meta-organizations more effectively to address complex social issues.