Understanding Organizational Boundaries in an Interorganizational Context

Grand challenges and wicked problems call for interorganizational collaboration strategies to understand problem complexity and identify potential solutions. Such strategies push forward beliefs that multiple stakeholders and societal organizations collectively can create better and more desired futures. This conceptual paper advances our understanding of organizational boundary in the context of interorganizational interaction by asking and answering: What organizational boundaries are in an interorganizational context and what happens to organizational boundaries when two organizations interact? Crossfertilizing boundary literature with a metaphysical debate in philosophy about the relation of contact when a boundary demarcates two entities, we identify three scenarios that could happen to their organizational boundaries when two organizations interact: 1) one of the organizational boundaries dissolve into context, 2) organizational boundaries remain separate, and 3) organizational boundaries merge into one. In addition, we propose clarifying, separating, and assembling as three main processes to transmute different individual and subjective categorization of "us" and "them" from different organizations into a collective and objective demarcation of responsibilities and patterned behaviors across organizations. We discuss how our conceptual propositions contribute to understanding and facilitating interorganizational collaborations.