Social partnerships and responsible business: what, why and how?

Abstract

Social partnerships – or the joining together of organizations from different sectors of society to tackle social problems – have been widely hailed as a critical tool for addressing an array of serious challenges facing society.Having first emerged in the guise of public private partnerships (PPPs), initially through the involvement of the private sector in local economic development and urban renewal in the 1980s (Wettenhall, 2003), social partnerships have since become both more encompassing in terms of sectors and issues involved, and more expansive in terms of their global reach.Today, social partnerships cross public, non-profit and private sectors in a range of ways and have been used to tackle everything from climate change and resource conservation to health, education, poverty, local development, and even corruption and organized crime. The growing attention afforded to social partnerships over the past three decadeshas culminated in what some commentators have referred to as the emergence of a “partnership society” (Googins and Rochlin, 2002), a “partnership paradigm” (Glasbergen, 2007) or even a “trend with no alternative” (Richter, 2004).Although such proclamations may be premature, there is no denying that social partnerships are no longer viewed as such exotic or iconoclastic arrangements as they once were. Indeed, the trend towards more partnerships across sectors, and more substantial and longer-lasting relationships among such partners, has been widely alluded to in the literature. Although with the exception of PPPs (see for example Rufin and Rivera-Santos, 2012) hard data on the prevalence of social partnerships are actually quite hard to come by, the message from researchers is consistent and persuasive. Almost a decade ago, Selsky and Parker (2005: 2) noted that “the number of [crosssector social partnerships] has grown very rapidly in recent years” whilst LaFrance and Lehmann (2005: 216) suggested that “corporations have been increasinglypursuing partnerships with public institutions including governments, international organizations and NGOs”. More recently, Seitanidi and Lindgreen (2010: 1) have suggested that “interactions across sectors have intensified in recent years” and Koschmann et al. (2012: 332) have argued that because of their “prevalence and popularity”, social partnerships are “often mandated by funders, expected by local communities, and assumed by policy makers to be the best way of working on social problems.” Along with this apparent escalation in the practice of social partnerships has comea growing body of academic literature dedicated to analysing them. For instance, a recent review of the business-non-profit partnership literature by Laasonen et al. (2012: 521) reveals a “sharply increasing amount of publications in recent years”. Branzei and Le Ber’s (2014) chapter in this volume also provides convincing evidence of an expanding literature dealing with cross-sector partnerships across different academic fields. From no more than one or two published articles a year at the turn of the century, they report more than 25 a year since 2010. Given that we are in the midst of a rapidly expanding field of theory and practice,it is timely to take stock of where we are and to bring some sense of coherence to some of the various proliferating strands of thinking, researching and acting.This Research Handbook is by no means intended to be a comprehensive account of our current stock of knowledge on responsible business and social partnerships, but it does represent an important attempt to bring together some of the most important and influential voices in the debate and to set out some important pathways through an increasingly diverse and multifaceted literature. In this introductory chapter, our aim is to examine the field of social partnershipsand responsible business in terms of three key questions:1 What are social partnerships and responsible business? 2 Why do we need to provide a new perspective on social partnerships andresponsible business? 3 How can we best understand and characterize this emerging field?