This paper explores how large-scale social-driven collaborations might grow in scale and help promote political change. We present the results of a qualitative investigation of a complex platform where multiple and hybrid collaborations co-exist and where civil society plays a central role. Based on a longitudinal comparative case study, we draw a processual model describing micro-practices and pathways of engagement. We show that the emergence of these collaborations requires a new type of convener, one that is able to manage the interplay between the sharing/co-creation of abundant resources and the coordinated decentralization of informal authority. Our study extends existing debates on the role of resources and authority, showing the complementarity between possession and practice perspectives of power. Finally, we identified synergies between collaboration and social movement literatures, particularly showing that large-scale collaborations could be mobilized to refine social movement agendas and achieve more purposive collective action.

This paper examines how distributed leadership involving actor-object couplings may contribute to coordinated action across disparate thought worlds. We draw on ideas from French pragmatist sociology and on a case study of a successful collaborative research project involving participants from academia, government and practice settings to show how various kinds of objects (including material artifacts, more abstract concepts and human-material assemblages such as committees and procedures) come to participate in the leadership practices of multiple individuals, allowing the connection among different worlds. We suggest that adjustments between groups involved in collaborative work do not necessarily occur through the sharing of a common vision but through the ability of leaders to translate projects in terms that can be appreciated by the groups that must be mobilized. These translation activities are distributed widely between leaders and objects that co-construct each other. Objects frame action and give meaning to people, participating in the construction of leaders' roles.Leadership 0(0) 1-33

Public controversies have attracted increasing attention in the organization studies literature. They emerge when critical issues are not defined and understood in the same way by different stakeholders, influencing the way they evaluate the worth of other actors, objects, and situations. In this paper, we show how the “orders of worth” perspective of Boltanski and Thévenot may throw light on the evolution of an evaluation process occurring during a public controversy. In particular, we study the Quebec student conflict of 2011 and 2012 that followed a proposed major increase in higher education tuition fees. We conducted an in-depth case study based on media coverage of the actions and discourses of the major actors to examine how objects and actions associated with a controversy are successively defined, redefined, and evaluated over time through a series of tests of worth. Our article contributes to the organizational literature on public controversies by drawing attention to the role of six types of evaluative moves in situations of controversy, and by offering an abductively developed model for understanding the evaluation process as it evolves over time. We suggest that actors, through these evaluative moves, may displace the object of a test, and therefore the foci for evaluation, through actions intended to bolster their positions.

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