The Emergence of a Multi-Organizational View on Business Processes - Experiences from a Double-loop Action Research Approach

In this paper the need for a multi-organizational perspective on business processes is outlined and a multi-grounded solution based on double-loop action research approach is proposed. Today, contemporary organizations’ capability to collaborate is an important competitive advantage and aligning in business networks is an increasingly common business model. Such development emphasizes the need for knowledge regarding how collaborative businesses could be characterized and how the constituent business interactions could be structured as several dyadic relationships in a multi-actor setting. The multiorganizational perspective proposed in this paper builds on pragmatic foundations and combines a language/action approach with a coordinative view on business processes, enabling design of complete action patterns.