Abstract
This dissertation discusses how actorhood of meta-organisations is constructed. Meta-organisations are defined as organisations whose members are other organisations; examples of well-known meta-organisations are the EU, the UN and FIFA. A particularity of meta-organisations is that both the meta-organisationand its members seek to maintain their autonomy, authority, identity, and decision-making capacity (i.e., dual actorhood). Such efforts to construct actorhood often lead to tensions between meta-organisations and their members that have to be managed to achieve collective outcomes. This dissertation asks where and how does balancing of dual actorhood take place and what consequences does this have for the construction of a metaorganisation’s actorhood? Drawing on the empirical setting of accreditation, this dissertation illustrates how actorhood of meta-organisations is constructed through balancing acts in the meta-organisation’s decision-making processes. It argues that the balancing of dual actorhood provides the central conditions for meta-organisations’ actorhood construction. The balancing illustrates how the meta-organisation’s and members’ actor attributes are emphasised, de-emphasised and combined, and is characterised by continuous oscillation between a low and high degree of the meta-organisation’s actorhood. Analysing these processes, it is further argued that dual actorhood is an enabler of rather than a barrier to collective action.