Theory–method interfaces in cross-sector partnership research

Abstract

Cross-sector partnerships are not a new idea. Examples of cross-sector work date back to the beginnings of organizations. Back then, such collaboration was seen as necessary not only for the creation of the private goods that now form the very foundation of our daily lives (steel, automobiles) but also for funding the development and delivery of public goods (day care, pensions, and healthcare and most of the economic and social infrastructure within which we operate). Over time, however, the nature, scope and consequences of cross-sector partnerships have been claimed, and credited, to one of three disciplines – in this order: for-profit organizations, governmental organizations and non-profit organizations. Pockets of thinking and writing about cross-sector partnerships developed, withorganizational studies focusing on profit-making entities and sociology examining public and non-profit institutions.These pockets maintained their original focus on the creation of new public value (Sagawa, 2001) and gradually moved towards crossdisciplinary fertilization (Selsky and Parker, 2005).However, they grew increasingly disconnected from mainstream theories and tests of partnerships more generally – this despite suggestive evidence that cross-sector partnerships remain an active lab for experimenting with new practices, and often help organizations overcome known barriers (Rondinelli and London,2003), develop new capacities (Crosby and Bryson, 2010), and more generally experiment with novel ideas (Barrett et al., 2000) and unprecedented roles (Simo and Bies, 2007) in ways that other inter-organizational relations might not (Parmigiani and Rivera-Santos, 2011).Our chapter seeks to reduce this disconnect by systematically revealing what the literature on crosssector partnerships has been adding to our community and to organizational studies scholars more generally. We start from one beachhead: the subset of studies which coined, claimed andcriticized the “cross-sector” aspect of such-named partnerships. For this review, we collected, analysed and reported only on publications that had“cross-sector” in their title.We did not choose this beachhead for its representativeness or comprehensiveness of all the prior work that speaks of or speaks to the thinking and practice of cross-sector partnerships; rather, our intention was to showcase the collective undertaking of a community of scholars’ coming of age.Our focus on“cross-sector” titled studies enabled us to explore the unfolding contribution of “cross-sector” thinking for understanding partnerships, across disciplines and time; however, our narrow angle necessarily leaves out the plethora of alternative terms used to describe similar collaborative efforts, especially at higher levels of analysis (for such macro views we recommend the chapters by Kolk, 2014; Hamann, 2014, in Part A; the reflections by Zadek, 2014;Nijhuis, 2014, in Part D; and recent reviews by Kourula and Laasonen, 2010); Branzei et al., 2011; Hull et al., 2011; Austin and Seitanidi, 2012a, b; Laasonen et al., 2012). Hereon, we focus exclusively on those studies that explicitly and deliberatelyacknowledged, documented, challenged and extended the “cross-sector” aspects of partnerships.Taken together, this subset affords insights into the unfolding meaning and mandate of cross-sector partnerships since the term was first used in the title of a publication in 1997. To keep pace with a changing and socially impactful phenomenon (Crane and Seitanidi, 2014), the portfolio of theories and methods has grown substantially. Initially, cross-sector studies took on one new theory and/or method at a time. Some scholars borrowed tasks and tools from different disciplines – especially the public, non-profit and for-profit disciplines; others created unexpected interdisciplinary vistas (Hull et al., 2011). New theory-method combinations pushed against the boundary of the pheno-menon to surface new questions and answers. At first, scholars within and across disciplines took singular snapshots; as the perspectives multiplied and diversified, comparisons and contrasts pieced together a more dynamic picture, rife with complexity and conflict (for a review, see Gray and Purdy, 2013 in Part B, also Fiol and O’Connor, 2002) but also rich in possibility (Plowman et al., 2007; Le Ber and Branzei, 2010b). Some interfaces have been generative in their own right – a great example of how a theory-method interface can become generative is the chapter by Selsky et al, in Part C of this volume which challenges us to employ forecasting, visioning and scenarios methods so we can “take the future seriously” and deal with it “deliberately”. Over time, (ever changing) combinations of theories and methods enabled the growing community of cross-sector scholars to keep pace with ever new possibilities uncovered by practice (especially Bryson,Crosby, Parker, Selsky, and their co-authors; see also the reflection by Stafford and Hartman, 2014 in Part B). Our chapter is a research synthesis.We“seek to summarize past research by drawing overall conclusions from many separate investigations that address separate or related hypotheses [with the goal] to present the state of knowledge concerning the relation(s) of interestand to highlight important issues that research has left unresolved […] and to direct future research so that it yields a maximum amount of new information.”