Interorganizational collaboration (IOC) is considered a democratic and efficient way to address some of our time’s most urgent societal issues, and the method is increasingly used. IOC is encouraged by the possibilities, expectations, and responsibilities to collaborate, but also by the communicative potential in today’s rich media environment. Using media, such as emails, interactive collaborative software, websites, and more, is today standard communication practice to organize across organizational boundaries. However, despite media’s promises of greater collaborative capabilities and efficiency, the overall perception is that IOCs should make a greater difference.

In this dissertation, I examine how today’s media-driven encouragement of IOC shapes collaboration by analyzing how the collaborative use of media shape collaborative agency. Instead of the dominating functionalistic understanding of media as circuits for information, the dissertation explores media use in IOC from a relational perspective, i.e., as meaning-making practices that shape collaboration. The dissertation focuses on the media use of an IOC dedicated to climate change mitigation in the digital transition during the COVID-19 pandemic, as a case—in particular, how the co-orientation of member perceptions and possibilities about how and why to collaborate through media form certain ideas about collaboration and contribute to certain forms of agency.

By means of qualitative methods and combining theories from media studies and organizational communication, the results show how media use has relational implications that contribute to the agency of IOCs. The studies illustrate how member negotiations about media-related issues, such as technological malfunctions and conflicting media perceptions, are part of processes that shape overarching ideas about how to address the societal problem together. By synthesizing the empirical results, the dissertation indicates three ways in which IOCs’ use of media contributes Swedish climate change mitigation: assembling, netting, and mobilizing. Among its many insights, the study reveals and expands our understanding of the potentials and pitfalls in our taken-for-granted ways of responding to today’s complex societal problems.