Convenors:

There is an increase in the prevalence of organizations working together in order to achieve outcomes none of the organizations can achieve on their own (Huxham & Vangen, 2005, Provan & Kenis, 2008). At the same time, challenges to overall well-being – environmental degradation, poverty, education for all, mobility, chronic health issues – remain persistent because they comprise interconnected problems that cross boundaries between industrial, non-profit and governmental sectors. Such wicked problems or grand challenges have to be tackled through the collaborative efforts of organizations (Head, 2008, Dentoni et al., 2018, Gray & Purdy, 2018). But organizations also collaborate to achieve collective outputs they cannot achieve on their own to further their own missions like developing and delivering (new) services and products, combining their sales efforts or jointly creating ecosystems that provide customers with complementary goods and services (Lavie, 2006; Shipilov & Gawer, 2020). Therefore, through these collaborative efforts they overcome the limitations of their own capacities, resources, and knowledge. They hereby manifest themselves as purpose-driven institutions and the ‘good life’ is hoped to emerge in such organizational forms as a collective construct (see Call for the EGOS Colloquium theme 2023).
 
By participating in these collaborative arrangements, organizations still need and want to accomplish their core missions despite increasing interdependencies and contributing to solving a collective problem or achieving a collective output. By operating through interorganizational arrangements they lose part of their sovereignty and collaborating with other organizations can create dependencies and risks that can be hard to manage (Considine, 2002). Therefore, if we want to enable organizations to tackle collective problems and achieve collective outcomes and facilitate them in fulfilling their missions in a networked society, they must get the leeway to do so on the one hand, but we need to establish accountability and monitor and manage the risks on the organizational as well as on the collaboration level on other hand.
 
Classical hierarchical governance and accountability concepts are thus challenged in this context and the question is what other governance and accountability concepts and arrangements are possible, in order to support the effectiveness of collaborative organizational forms (Ehren & Perryman, 2018; Sabel & Zeitlin, 2012). For example, existing accountability systems often only hold the single organization accountable for their individual performance and as such might even function counterproductive in producing value at the collective level of the collaboration. However, not monitoring the risks of such activities could also endanger the functioning or even the financial sustainability of the organizations but also the functioning and effectiveness of the collaboration as a whole. In addition, the question arises who is morally but also legally responsible and accountable when things go wrong in a collaborative endeavor and how we can avoid accountability getting lost in the diffusion or even the evaporation of different responsibilities (Willems & van Dooren, 2011)?
 
In this sub-theme, we therefore focus on collaborative organizational forms that consist of three or more organizations, that attempt to achieve an outcome that none of them could do individually. We aim at discussing the types of collaborative arrangements, their governance and accountability models from theoretical and empirical viewpoints. Submissions might address but do not have to be limited to the following questions:

 
We welcome empirical as well as conceptual papers that focus on the organizational level or the level of the collaboration or explore mutual influences. Empirical settings can be in the private, non-profit or public sector or cover cross-sector collaborations.