Place Elasticity and Institutional Translation of Grand Challenges in Cross-Sector Partnerships

Abstract

This work investigates the mediating role of place in how grand challenges translate from policymaking to cross-sector partnerships. By focusing on science and technology parks as tools for tackling the grand challenge of regional innovation, we investigate how place mediates the way policy travels in the institutional field and is transformed along the way, generating unexpected and unwanted consequences for the involved institutional actors. Findings highlight the central role played by place elasticity in the mobilization and transformation of a grand challenge. Specifically, place continuously reshaped its boundaries to first highlight, and then ease, policymakers’ demanding concerns about doing well (managerial concerns) by catalyzing progressive attention around doing good (ethical concerns). We highlight the important role of material-ethical bundles which may first galvanize a partnership, then push it towards failure, and ultimately towards desperate attempts of recalibration which can compromise both managerial performance and ethics. These findings allow us to discuss when and how policy makers may provide guiding or misleading directions for action, why regional governments walk a thin line between mobilizing action and injecting further complexity into a field, and how to tell if cross-sector partnerships stay on course or go adrift with respect to policy indications.