Umeå universitets logga

This paper examines a unique form of community-based organizing in which decentralized, volunteer-led groups operate autonomously around a shared system-level goal. Drawing on an inductive case study of “parkrun”— a global initiative for promoting and sustaining local running communities—we analyze how individual communities reconcile the need for both local autonomy and centralized control as they self-organize over time. Our analysis reveals three self-organizing tensions: operational, volunteering, and membership, that local communities grappled with and had to renegotiate to sustain engagement. We show that the co-existence of autonomy and control is not a static design choice but rather a dynamic, ongoing accomplishment that is actively enacted through everyday organizing practices. We integrate these insights into a process model that explains how communities self-organize within, and contribute to, a stable and globally coherent organizational system.