Inter-organizational Boundaries Research Articles

Balancing Project Management Success and Operation Success in Public Projects: A Comparative Study of Intra- and Interorganizational Boundary Perspectives

Balancing Project Management Success and Operation Success in Public Projects: A Comparative Study of Intra- and Interorganizational Boundary Perspectives

Sustainable development goals research in higher education institutions: An interdisciplinarity assessment through an entropy-based indicator

Since 2015, the United Nations has urged higher education institutions (HEIs) to adopt an interdisciplinary approach towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In other words, universities are encouraged to transcend any single disciplinary perspective in exploring sustainable development issues. This study examines the importance of driving the scientific production of HEIs towards the SDGs as a concrete institutional contribution to sustainable development. While bibliometric tools for the SDGs are currently emerging, the existing models have not focused on interdisciplinarity or on their usefulness as decision-management tools to drive SDG-related research at a micro-scale (i.e. the institutional level). This study proposes a novel multi-step methodology. It develops an initial case study, which applies information system design theory (ISDT) to map and assess interdisciplinary research into each SDG at an Italian generalist university (University of Turin). Utilising a quantitative text analysis, we examined a database containing over 30,000 entries representing the university’s SDG-related scientific production from 2015 to 2019. Subsequently, we conducted a social network analysis (SNA) of co-authorship to measure interdisciplinarity for each SDG. We defined interdisciplinarity as collaboration among researchers in diverse disciplines. We employed a modularity algorithm to select bottom-up clusters of researchers from diverse departments. Finally, we analysed the identified clusters to propose an Interdisciplinarity Sustainability Index (ISI) capable of identifying the most investigated and interdisciplinary SDGs. Ultimately, our results enable the quantification of interdisciplinary SDG research via the proposed methodology. The study helps to visualise inter-departmental collaborations and thus informs university managers’ efforts to identify and coordinate compatible research groups to bridge inter-organisational boundaries.

Boundary resource interactions in solution networks

PurposeThis study aims to explore the interactions between two different and potentially complementary boundary resources in coordinating solution networks in a digital platform context: boundary spanners (those individuals who span interorganizational boundaries) and boundary interfaces (the devices that help coordinate interfirm relationships, e.g. electronic data interchanges, algorithms or chatbots).Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted a multiple case study of three firms using digital platforms to coordinate solution networks in the information communication technology and lighting facility industries. Data were collected from 30 semi-structured interviews, which are complemented by secondary data.FindingsAs task complexity increases, smarter digital interfaces are adopted. When the intelligence level of interfaces is low or moderate, they are only used as tools by boundary spanners or to support boundary spanners’ functions. When the intelligence level of interfaces is high or very high, boundary spanners design the interfaces and let them perform tasks autonomously. They are also sometimes employed to complement interfaces’ technological limitations and customers’ limited user ability.Research limitations/implicationsThe industry contexts of the cases may influence the results. Qualitative case data has limited generalizability.Practical implicationsThis study offers a practical tool for solution providers to effectively deploy boundary employees and digital technologies to offer diverse customized solutions simultaneously.OriginalityThis study contributes to the solution business literature by putting forward a framework of boundary resource interactions in coordinating solution networks in a digital platform context. It contributes to the boundary spanning literature by revealing the shifting functions of boundary spanners and boundary interfaces.

Boundary-spanning coordination: Insights into lateral collaboration and lateral alignment in multinational enterprises

Interorganizational boundary spanning between multinational enterprises requires substantive internal “lateral collaboration” and “lateral alignment.” However, how actors coordinate laterally between multiple nodes and across multiple boundaries for interorganizational boundary spanning is unclear. This qualitative study of a large multinational demonstrates how actors collectively build and maintain interorganizational relationships through collective boundary spanning. To coordinate this activity, actors strategize and map contributors for collective action and then synchronize their communication and problem-solving to ensure lateral collaboration and alignment. This article contributes to the extant literature by a providing a framework depicting how boundary-spanning coordination leads to lateral collaboration and lateral alignment.

Transformational Ability of Energy Network Companies: The Role of Institutional Logics and Boundary Spanners

Energy network companies play a vital role in energy transitions. The transformational ability of these companies influences the process of energy transitions and the effectiveness of policies in this domain. This study shows the need for managers of network companies as well as scholars and policy makers operating in the midst of energy transitions to acknowledge the importance and value of boundary spanners in improving the transformation ability of these companies to play their role in facilitating energy transitions. Evidence comes from an in-depth analysis of an energy network company in the Netherlands. Our findings show that the transformation ability of energy network companies depends on various instances of boundary spanning as these organizations address differing or conflicting intra- and inter-organizational institutional logics when contributing to an energy transition. In the context of energy transitions, inter-organizational boundary spanning generally demands more resources and attention than the spanning of intra-organizational boundaries. Additionally, intra-organizational boundaries affect inter-organizational relationships, particularly in the policy arena. Our findings indicate that to carry out the type of institutional change that an energy transition requires, more attention and resources should be dedicated to intra-organizational boundary spanning, even as the need to connect external stakeholders increases.

Towards a sociomaterial approach to inter-organizational boundaries: How information systems elicit relevant knowledge in government outsourcing

This article furthers a sociomaterial framework to examine inter-organizational boundaries in government IT projects. It engages in a dialogue with the practice theory-based approach to boundary spanning and utilizes analytical tools and epistemologies drawn from the social studies of technology. It aims to contribute to a situated, material understanding of inter-organizational boundaries. We argue that boundaries in outsourcing relationships can be de facto enacted through definitions of what counts as relevant knowledge. Information systems have a key role in eliciting such definitions, thus establishing knowledge asymmetries and regimes of inclusion and exclusion. The article responds to the call to value the role of artefacts in IT research. Furthermore, it eventually shows that understanding knowledge asymmetries triggered at the micro-level of information systems can help to examine macro-scale transformations between the public and the private sectors. To illustrate the framework, two ethnographic case studies of governmental IT projects are discussed. The first case concerns a permit and licence submission service in Italy. The second case analyses a 20-year-long database integration carried on at the Dutch land registry. In the first case, information systems made relevant a form of knowledge developed by contractors; in the second case, the integration process valued knowledge developed in-house. Three sets of implications are drawn for the theory and practice of inter-organizational IT projects. To conclude, the article focuses on inter-organizational boundaries involving the public and the private sectors and foresees a novel interdisciplinary research direction at the confluence of information systems and political studies.

The contingencies of medical restratification across inter-organisational care networks.

The contemporary social organisation of medical work is characterised by internal hierarchies and stratification in the form of professional elites and managerial hybrids. This paper examines the changes in medical restratification brought about by the introduction of inter-organisational care networks. The study focuses in particular on the social position of doctors and the contingencies that enable or constrain intra-professional hierarchies across inter-organisational boundaries. This ethnographic study of major system change within the English healthcare system finds that a relatively small group of 'multiplex' elites have significant influence in both national policy-making and regional service re-configuration based upon multiple sources of clinical and reputational capital. Subsequent forms of restratification at the regional level are found to mirror such status markers whilst also revealing important local contingencies, especially where professional markers of distinction are coupled with and dependent upon organisational markers of distinction.

Moving Out and Back In: Unpacking Boomerang Employment and its Consequences

As employee mobility drastically increases for the modern workforce, returning to one’s previous employer (“boomerang” employment) is increasingly becoming a career pattern pursued by both job seekers and organizations. Having crossed inter-organizational boundaries at least twice (upon turnover and re-entry), boomerangs characterize a unique and understudied type of mobility within and between organizations. Five papers comprising this symposium explore (1) what boomerangs bring to the table both in terms of their own performance behaviors and their influence on the behaviors of their coworkers and (2) how boomerang employment differs from other types of employee mobility patterns, e.g., stayers, multiple movers, and alumni who do not become boomerangs. Leveraging the hybrid nature of boomerang employment, this symposium seeks to deepen our understanding of the boomerang phenomenon while contributing to broader scholarship on employee mobility, careers, and human resources. In with the Old? Examining When Boomerang Employees Outperform New Hires Presenter: JR Keller; Cornell U. Presenter: Rebecca Rheinhardt Kehoe; Cornell U. Presenter: Matthew James Bidwell; U. of Pennsylvania Returning Employees: They Are Back But Are They Here To Stay? Presenter: John E. Delery; U. of Arkansas Presenter: Dorothea Roumpi; Pennsylvania State U. Presenter: Samantha A. Conroy; Colorado State U. You Can’t Go Home Again: Cooperative Performance Behavior Between Boomerang and Incumbent Employees Presenter: Thorsten Grohsjean; Bocconi U. Presenter: Gina Dokko; U. of California, Davis Presenter: Philip Yang; U. of Tuebingen Are Boomerangs More Like Movers or Stayers? Somewhere in Between? Or Something Else? Presenter: Rhett Andrew Brymer; U. of Cincinnati Presenter: Yeongsu Kim; U. of Massachusetts - Amherst Presenter: John Mawdsley; HEC Paris Presenter: Peter D Sherer; U. of Calgary Presenter: Robert Leonard; Miami U. Ohio Going Backwards to Move Forward: The Link Between Career Competencies and Boomerang Employment Presenter: Rebecca M. Paluch; Sauder School of Business, U. of British Columbia Presenter: Yuna Cho; Yale School of Management

How Emergencies Launched Restorying at the Military Post Office

Narratives can aid entrepreneurs in articulating opportunities during emergencies. This layered account organizational autoethnography explores the restorying of “Operation Santa Claus”, a broad-based appeal to members of a military community to volunteer at the post office during the annual winter holiday mail surge. Contingencies reduced the potentiality of the future, forcing a public service entrepreneur at the military post office to revive elements of the past, present, and future to co-construct a novel narrative that reinterpreted shared values. As a result, an adhocracy was created that superseded interorganizational boundaries and empowered customers of the military post office by temporarily transforming them into co-producers. This article is targeted towards scholars of entrepreneuring, storytelling, adhocracies, and practitioners facing contingencies.

Data science in the design of public policies: dispelling the obscurity in matching policy demand and data offer

Data Science (DS) is expected to deliver value for public governance. In a number of studies, strong claims have been made about the potential of big data and data analytics and there are now several cases showing their application in areas such as service delivery and organizational administration. The role of DS in policy-making has, on the contrary, still been explored only marginally, but it is clear that there is the need for greater investigation because of its greater complexity and its distinctive inter-organizational boundaries. In this paper, we have investigated how DS can contribute to the policy definition process, endorsing a socio-technical perspective. This exploration has addressed the technical elements of DS - data and processes - as well as the social aspects surrounding the actors’ interaction within the definition process. Three action research cases are presented in the paper, lifting the veil of obscurity from how DS can support policy-making in practice. The findings highlight the importance of a new role, here defined as that of a translator, who can provide clarity and understanding of policy needs, assess whether data-driven results fit the legislative setting to be addressed, and become the junction point between data scientists and policy-makers. The three cases and their different achievements make it possible to draw attention to the enabling and inhibiting factors in the application of DS.

Boundary spanners in crisis management

PurposeCrisis management increasingly requires coordination and collaboration between multiple organizations. This means that inter-organizational boundaries have to be spanned by dedicated organizational members (i.e. boundary spanners). This paper aims to describe which features facilitate the work of boundary spanners in crisis management.Design/methodology/approachA case study, consisting of 26 interviews, has been conducted in the Netherlands to explore how civilian and military representatives effectively spanned inter-organizational boundaries.FindingsFive features are identified that enable boundary spanners to improve crisis management coordination and collaboration. Boundary spanners are likely to be successful when they (1) serve long terms, (2) are sensitive to partners' concerns, (3) have considerable discretion, (4) are politically skilled and (5) prove influential in their own organization.Practical implicationsCrisis organizations can extend boundary spanners' term length, broaden their discretionary space and give them more influence to facilitate their work. Additionally, in the selection process, it would be well to choose organizational members who display a sensitivity to the interests of crisis partners and possess political skill.Originality/valueMultiple studies have reiterated the key role of boundary spanners in enabling crisis management coordination and collaboration. Yet, this study is the first to provide a systematic analysis of key features that help boundary spanners to reach this goal.

Achieving Integrated Care for Older People: What Kind of Ship? Comment on "Achieving Integrated Care for Older People: Shuffling the Deckchairs or Making the System Watertight for the Future?"

This paper considers an implication of the idea that proposals for integrated care for older people should start from a focus on the patient, consider co-production solutions to the problems of care fragmentation, and be at a system-wide, cross-organisational level. It follows that the analysis, design and therefore evaluation of integrated care projects should be based upon the journeys which older patients with multiple chronic conditions usually have to make from professional to professional and service to service. A systematic realistic review of recent research on integrated care projects identified a number of key mechanisms for care integration, including multidisciplinary care teams, care planning, suitable IT support and changes to organisational culture, besides other activities and contexts which assist care ‘integration.’ Those findings suggest that bringing the diverse services that older people with multiple chronic conditions need into a single organisation would remove many of the inter-organisational boundaries that impede care ‘integration’ and make it easier to address the interprofessional and inter-service boundaries.

Funnelling through foundations and crime stoppers: how public police create and span inter-organisational boundaries

ABSTRACTPublic police require a reliable supply of resources to operate effectively, and police increasingly seek resources from private organisations and individuals. Since police departments are public bodies, they encounter boundaries in doing so. The key challenge for public police is how to access private resources for initiatives while seeming to avoid real or alleged influence from private entities providing them. This article examines policing across inter-organisational boundaries and boundary negotiation by investigating two kinds of private organisations – police foundations and Crime Stoppers organisations – operating in Canadian jurisdictions, and which reflect significant trends in public police practices. Both organisational models were established by public police in the United States in 1970s, have proliferated, and now commonly operate adjacent to – but not within – North American police departments. Both models, and especially how they connect, create distance from, and otherwise relate to public police, lend insight into how boundaries are maintained, negotiated, and spanned. Implications of these arrangements for future research and the public good are discussed.

Women and inter-organizational boundary spanning: A way into upper management?

This study analyses the presence of gender segregation in Spanish exporting firms. Both women's access to managerial positions (vertical segregation) and women's achievement of managerial roles that are socially associated with communal attributes (horizontal segregation) are tested. We argue that boundary-spanning (henceforth, boundary management) in export interfirm relationships benefits from relational and communal skills and therefore could not only offer an opportunity for women to gain access to management positions but also put them at risk of falling into a rut before achieving other control-based managerial roles. This empirical study examines the characteristics (personal and firm-level) of Spanish female managers in charge of export management through independent channels. A multivariate analysis has been performed to compare female managers with male managers both in boundary management and in the position of finance director, a control position closer to a socially stereotyped masculine role. The results show that women have slightly higher access to boundary management jobs than finance management jobs, as well as a significantly lower promotion time than male colleagues, but they also corroborate that there is a smaller percentage of women than men in any management positions, with female managers working in younger firms with fewer resources for export activity.

A bureaucrat’s journey from technocrat to entrepreneur through the creation of adhocracies

How we understand entrepreneurship is a function of the stories we tell. This article uses insights from process theory to explore the ways in which an entrepreneur can employ a story to mobilize others to shed conflicting viewpoints to converge with the abstract. In this story, regulation as a reification of past procedures did not fully account for organizational realities of mailroom inspections conducted by the military post office, so an appeal to foundational values was adopted to alter the shared vision of future potentiality and overcome bureaucratic barriers through the creation of adhocracies. As a result of overcoming interorganizational boundaries, a technocrat became an entrepreneur by changing the view of stakeholders from a fixed audience to active co-authors during the spawning of adhocracies. The creation of adhocracies in this story is explored through an autoethnographic layered account, which is a storytelling approach that mirrors the co-construction of the narratives found within this paper’s vignettes. The understanding of entrepreneurship provided in this paper challenges commonly held assumptions of entrepreneurship, in addition to corporate, organizational and public service entrepreneurship, as well as the methods and writing styles to explore these concepts.

IJVs’ CEOs as Boundary Spanners and Inter-Organization Cooperation

Integrating boundary spanning and organizational identification theories, we posit that a boundary spanner’s organizational identification (i.e., the sense of oneness with an organization) is an important factor shaping inter-organizational relationships. We examined CEOs of international joint ventures (IJVs) as the boundary spanners. We found that organizational identification of an IJV’s CEO with a parent firm is positively related to cooperation between the venture and that parent, and this relationship is stronger when the level of goal incongruence between parents is higher. The cooperation between the foreign (but not local) parent and the IJV is in turn positively related to the IJV’s performance. This study extends extant research by revealing the role of a boundary spanner’s organizational identification in inter-organizational boundary spanning as well as inter-firm goal incongruence as a boundary condition for this role.

New perspectives on the "silo effect": initial comparisons of network structures across public health collaboratives.

We explored to what extent "silos" (preferential partnering) persist in interorganizational boundaries despite advances in working across boundaries. We focused on organizational homophily and resulting silo effects within networks that might both facilitate and impede success in public health collaboratives (PHCs). We analyzed data from 162 PHCs with a series of exponential random graph models to determine the influence of uniform and differential homophily among organizations and to identify the propensity for partnerships with similar organizations. The results demonstrated a low presence (8%) of uniform homophily among networks, whereas a greater number (30%) of PHCs contained varying levels of differential homophily by 1 or more types of organization. We noted that the higher frequency among law enforcement, nonprofits, and public health organizations demonstrated a partner preference with similar organizations. Although we identified only a modest occurrence of partner preference in PHCs, overall success in efforts to work across boundaries might be problematic when public health members (often leaders of PHCs) exhibit the tendency to form silos.

Boundary Spanning in Global Software Development: a Major Indian Vendor case

How does a global company deal with inter-organizational boundary spanning activities? If the company is a vendor from an emerging economy, and the client a Western multinational company in need of major transformations, the answer to this question challenges prior research. This paper builds on a field study of Indian IT vendor managers who are responsible for developing client relations and coordinating complex global development projects. The authors revise a framework of boundary spanning leadership practices to adapt it to an offshore outsourcing context. The empirical investigation highlights how imbalances of power, exacerbated in the case of an Indian vendor and a European client, need to be taken into account. The paper thus contributes with a context sensitive understanding of inter-organizational boundary work. Taking the vendor perspective also leads to problematization of common assumptions on boundary spanning activities regarding their reciprocity, desirability and stability and thereby gen...

Stakes and struggles in liminal spaces: construction practitioners interacting with management-consultants

Although external consultant interventions are usual in construction organizations to mediate strategic change, micro-level analyses of these interactions remain scarce. We draw on rich data from a qualitative case study and focus on observations of a set of three management-consultant strategy workshop interventions, aka away-days, with top, middle and project managers, respectively, in a large construction company in Sweden. Our analysis uses the conceptual construct ‘liminality’ to frame the intervention practice and elements of Bourdieu's theory of practice to examine the unfolding of the interaction at the boundary interface. The consultants failed to achieve take-up of their novel ideas, and the workshops became sites of contention in which power struggles were played out between two very different fields of expertise. Using an integrated framework provides better understanding of power struggles at intra- and inter-organizational boundary interfaces.

Curating collections of ideas: Museum as metaphor in the management of creativity

We introduce a curatorial metaphor to the management of creative idea generation in order to emphasize and elaborate the importance of managing the creative content, rather than just the size, of collections of ideas. We propose that just as museum curators attend to the shape, maintenance, and usage of their collections in order to facilitate institutional success, managers might focus on collections of ideas with the goal of improving the relevance of the types of creative ideas generated to the needs of organizational innovation processes. By considering curatorial activities in light of distinctions between radical and incremental creativity, we offer suggestions for research and practice that are particularly germane to contexts where idea generation efforts can span both intra- and inter-organizational boundaries.