Thousand Plateaus: A geology of collective action among organizations

Collective actions among organizations, or inter-organizational arrangements, take incredibly diverse empirical forms. Literatures studying these phenomena have irreconcilably focused on their network dimensions or organizations dimensions. This paper seeks to move beyond the network/organization dichotomy by developing a method for a geology of inter-organizational relations. To do so, we build on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of rhizome. We develop an analytical ‘rhizome framework’ that studies six elements in inter-organizational arrangements: connections among organizations, heterogeneity, multiplicity, asignifying rupture (impact of a breach in the connections), cartography of interactions, and decalcomania. We provide a different and complementary understanding of inter-organizational arrangements as a stratification of more or less rhizomic forms. We define a research agenda on categorization of arrangements based on our rhizome framework.