The proliferation of public–private partnerships for development as an answer to many public challenges calls for careful evaluation. To this end, tailored frameworks are fundamental for helping understand the PPPs’ impact and for guiding corrective adjustment. Scholars have developed frameworks focusing on the partners’ relationships, the order of effects, and the distinction between outputs and outcomes. To capture a PPP’s complexity and multiple linkages with its environment, we argue that a thorough evaluation should adopt a stakeholder-oriented approach and consider the (...) costs and benefits that a PPP implies for them—especially as taxpayers’ money is involved. For this purpose, we build on a stakeholder-oriented evaluation framework from the nonprofit business partnership literature. In line with our broad evaluation conception, we extend it with the manifold ripple effects that PPPs for development have and include the time dimension for the links between different PPP stages and related outcomes to become clearer. Applying this framework to an illustrative case, we highlight important direct and especially indirect stakeholder outcomes, which a narrow evaluation would omit, point to the challenges involved in the evaluation endeavor, and identify interesting future research areas. (shrink)

The intertwined nature of social, economic, and environmental problems has led to an increase in cross-sector partnerships to create collaborative value. Intermediary organizations can enable these partnerships, but the context shapes what is needed. There is a need to understand how different contexts shape how intermediaries create value. This study fills this gap by focusing on intermediaries in Johannesburg, South Africa. We find there is significant unrealized collaborative value in the context studied. This is due to the coexistence of a (...) limited state combined with a strong incumbent political party. While the existing scholarship on intermediaries is relevant, two particular capabilities are especially important in such a context. First, intermediaries need to focus on seizing opportunities to generate short-term value in order to build trust among partners. Second, they need to strengthen the capacity of the state through lateral influence. Weak and limited states combined with strong political regimes are common in many nations, especially those in transition. In addition, there are a variety of contemporary global political pressures that emphasize greater state autonomy. These contextual pressures make these findings particularly relevant to partnership scholars and practitioners. (shrink)

Cross-sector social partnership case-based theory and research have long argued that nonprofits that engage in more integrative and enduring cross-sector partnerships should increase their organizational capacity. By increasing their capacity, nonprofits increase their ability to contribute to systemic change. The current research investigates this claim in a large-scale empirical research study. In particular, this study examines whether nonprofits that have a greater number of integrated cross-sector partnerships have greater capacities for financial management, strategic planning, external communication, board leadership, mission orientation, (...) and staff management than nonprofits that have other types of interorganizational relationships. Moreover, it examines whether the length of these partnerships is associated with better capacity. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis drawn from surveys of 452 nonprofit organizations suggests that cross-sector collaboration is not systematically related to increased capacity. However, the results suggest that more enduring relationships between government and nonprofit organizations that extend beyond funder–recipient relationships are related to greater strategic planning capacity. Implications for CSSP research are drawn from the results, especially those concerned with the outcomes of CSSPs. (shrink)

This study illuminates how a cross-sector social partnership legitimizes itself toward multiple internal and external stakeholders. Within a single-case study design, we collected retrospective and real time data on the partnership between Deutsche Post DHL and The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Within this partnership, Deutsche Post DHL provides corporate volunteers that support disaster response after natural disasters on a pro bono basis. The main objects that needed legitimacy as well as the audiences from which legitimacy (...) was mainly sought changed over time. In addition, we identified legitimation work as occurring across objects, audiences, and time. Thus, we introduce legitimation work as the purposeful effort of the legitimacy seeker to avoid certain issues while ensuring other issues that are of importance to the conferrer of legitimacy. These findings contribute to micro-level considerations within institutional theory which view legitimacy as socially constructed between legitimacy seeker and conferrer. Hence, we add another perspective on legitimation to the previously existing conceptualizations of legitimacy as a deterministic consequence of institutionalization. (shrink)

The United States National Preparedness System has evolved significantly in the recent past. These changes have affected the system structures and goals for disaster response. At the same time, actors such as private businesses have become increasingly involved in disaster efforts. In this paper, we begin to fill the gap in the cross-sector literature regarding interactions that have systemic impacts by investigating how the simultaneous processes of systemic change and intensifying cross-sector interaction worked and interacted in the context of the (...) preparedness system. We examine these inter-linkages through a qualitative study in the setting of Hurricane Sandy. Drawing from systems theory, we develop a grounded model that provides an explanation for the system change and highlights how cross-sector interaction relates to the changes observed in the system. (shrink)

In emerging countries such as China where the government is gradually withdrawing from involvement in social affairs, firms face dilemmas around relational risks of partnering with different forms of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Affiliated NGOs (those with close relationships with government) are more likely to sabotage the social partnership through misconduct, and are also capable of higher standards of collaborative social performance compared with independent NGOs (those with few such relationships). This study proposes that firms’ political embeddedness helps mitigate relational risks (...) in cross-sector partner selection, and finds that politically connected firms are more likely to partner with affiliated NGOs than with independent NGOs in China. This effect is more pronounced for private firms that are less socially oriented or are located in regions with less-developed formal institutions and social trust. Our findings highlight relational risks relevant to cross-sector partner selection literature and offer important insights into how relational risks can be reduced in cross-sector partner selection in emerging countries. (shrink)

Relations between non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and companies have been the subject of a sharply increasing amount of publications in recent years within academic business journals. In this article, we critically assess this fast-developing body of literature, which we treat as forming a ‘business and society discourse’ on NGO–business relations. Drawing on discourse theory, we examine 199 academic articles in 11 business and society, international business, and management journals. Focusing on the dominant articulations on the NGO–business relationship and key signifiers they (...) rely on, we analyze the problem-settings of articles in order to reveal the statements that are acceptable and appropriate within this field. Our threefold aim is to (1) identify dominant articulations of NGO–business relations in business and society discourse, (2) expose those articulations that are silenced or suppressed by these dominant articulations, and (3) critically assess possible power effects of these discursive dynamics in the field of discursivity. While business and society discourse on NGO–business relations overall remains open to many different articulations, we also find that those articulations that focus on NGO–business partnerships and governance initiatives tend to privilege collaborative and deliberative ways of engaging and marginalize more adversarial subject positions. We call for more recognition of the potentially constructive role that can be played by conflict. (shrink)

This study examines how institutional logics interplay in a cross-sector social partnership that manages refugee integration in a rural district in Germany. In an inductive 15-month case study that drew on interviews and observations, we observe the dynamic materialization of institutional logics in day-to-day practices and an increasing contradiction and even rivalry between community- and market-based institutional logics over time. As a result, we delineate a model explaining the interplay of institutional logics along two dimensions: the dominance of one salient (...) logic and whether conflicts arise among logics. Our analysis also addresses the unifying properties of community as an institutional logic, especially in the context of urgency conditions. In addition, we show the influence of exogenous events and their media coverage on the interplay and conflicts of institutional logics. By unfolding the complexity of refugee integration—one of the global grand challenges of the present—we deepen the current understanding of the specific challenges addressed by cross-sector social partnerships. (shrink)

Management of different types of partnerships plays a decisive role in company performance. Complex business ventures, such as those created to serve low-income populations, usually include both cross- and same-sector partnerships. However, the initial diversity featured in these alliance portfolios diminishes as companies take their ventures up to scale. This article develops theoretical propositions about the evolution and configuration patterns of portfolios that include both cross- and same-sector partnerships. Two longitudinal case studies serve to illustrate the theoretical framework developed for (...) alliance portfolios that include both types of partnerships. Companies that create such portfolios adopt partnership strategies that follow paths also identified in the evolution of portfolios only made up of partnerships with other private firms: i.e., an evolution from adapting to shaping and exploiting strategies. (shrink)

This article examines the factors that influence the propensity of corporations to engage with NGOs. Drawing from resource dependency theory and related theories of social networks and the resource-based view of the firm, the authors develop a series of hypotheses that draw from this conceptual foundation to predict a range of factors that influence firms to collaborate with NGOs. These factors include the level of commitment of the firm to CSR, the strategic fit between the firm’s and the NGO’s resources, (...) the level of trust the firm has in NGOs, the frequency of contact with NGOs, prior level and perception of experience with NGOs, and the level of pressure exerted by NGOs. The authors report on results of a survey of the Top 500 firms in the Netherlands on their interactions with NGOs, finding general support for our hypotheses, and suggest that understanding the motives for firm–NGO interactions can teach us more about firms’ corporate social activities and the way such activities are shaped in the dynamic interplay between firms and their stakeholders. Our findings are relevant for future research on cross-sectoral interactions, for corporations considering future relationships with NGO cohorts, and for broader questions about the role of stakeholders and the role of business in society. (shrink)

Our paper explores the complex place-based relations of cross-sector partnerships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous partners. We draw on a longitudinal in-depth case study of the Bundian Way, an Indigenous-led cross-sector partnership of over 40 organisations. Through practices of listening to history and walking ‘on Country’, the non-Indigenous partners and our team came to appreciate the indivisibility of place and time and bear witness to the intergenerational trauma of colonially imposed divisions. By combining a 45-day place-based ethnography with a 36-month participant (...) observation and repeated interviews with the Advisory Committee members, we explain how non-Indigenous members of the cross-sector partnership came to realise, and reverse, these place-time divisions. We contribute to an ethics of custodianship by first contrasting, and then combining, Indigenous and Western ways of knowing place through time. (shrink)