Innovative strategies for building collaborative capacity in large-scale global organizing: A case narrative of birthing the United Religions Initiative

The 21st century is a high technology, high interactive age driven by globalized communications, globalized economy, globalized environment. These life-changing trends have triggered unprecedented search for a metaculture that inspires innovative organizing strategies & life-centric, self-organizing paradigms for building collaborative global partnerships.; This dissertation therefore celebrates a complex social creation of a bio-centric global culture. It is offered as a grand narrative on building collaborative competencies in large group contexts, aiming toward a generative large scale global organizing theory. Using Appreciative Inquiry and Chaordic Organizing concepts it aims at contributing innovative organizing strategies, an organizational social architecture, and a global valuing system for building and sustaining a global organization for peace and development. This work provides new lenses for social action and organizing beyond the usual administrative science models. The emphasis is on dialogue, co-leadership, and community co-creation rather than management, power, and control. A village metaphysical model of community collaboration & participative consciousness that is deeply informed by indigenous knowledge, religious values, and oral traditions of organizing is articulated. It combines elements of socio-rationalistic conceptions of science through an interpretive form of inquiry, innovative organization structuring, and appreciative relationship building processes. It provides a set of propositions highlighting village self-organizing principles and village dialogical concepts. These propositions offer explanatory power and strategic leverage for co-construction of a global organizational culture & sustenance of community.; The study is a five-year case development narrating the birthing of a global organization—the United Religions Initiative. It highlights cutting edge strategies used to design, develop, and launch a global peace and development organization-movement by global citizens of diverse religions, professions, and cultures from seven continents. Organized around sub-plots of Global Summits and African Regional Conferencing this narrative is a search for requisite large-scale organizing approaches that build capacity for authentic relationships. It celebrates global organizing that scales up human collaborative partnerships in a millennium driven by technological global trends. It's an action research to seek out, understand, & interpret socially constructive factors that constitute a central organizing framework and a self-organizing social valuing system for co-construction of shared life and peace building in large group contexts.