Cross‐sector partnerships: Mapping the field and advancing an institutional approach

Abstract

Cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) addressing economic, social, and environmental issues continue to be a vibrant topic in management research and beyond. However, compared to the exogenous factors that drive collaborative advantage through structures and governance, the endogenous problems of collaborating across different institutional logics, residing at the micro-level of interactions among partners from the business, government, and nonprofit sectors, have received scant attention. The preoccupation with success factors often leads to a bias toward the problem-solving capacities of CSPs at the neglect of the considerable barriers to successful collaboration across sectors. This study addresses this shortcoming and extracts an institutional approach of CSPs from an integrative review of the literature combining bibliometric methods with qualitative reviewing. A bibliometric map shows how the literature is divided into several clusters, each addressing a specific type of CSP but not engaging much in exchange with other clusters. Zooming in on the clusters provides a more nuanced picture of how institutional theory has hitherto been applied to CSPs. We build on these pieces of the puzzle and assemble them into a preliminary framework that accounts for inter-institutional conflicts in CSPs and actor-level responses to these conflicts. Our framework introduces a new analytical platform that facilitates multi-level research, bringing the micro-level of individual actors back in and connecting it with institutional frames at the macro-level.

Alliance management capabilities in sustainability‐oriented collaboration: Problematization and new research directions

“…The vast majority of the sustainability‐oriented collaboration articles (87%) focused on the mechanisms or routines deployed by actors involved in collaboration, or by the partnership itself, to achieve the goals of the collaboration. Moreover, compared to mainstream AMC studies, research on management capabilities for sustainability‐oriented collaboration incorporates a larger set of theories, including stakeholder theory (Dentoni et al., 2016), behavioural theory (Feilhauer & Hahn, 2021), paradox theory (Henry et al., 2022), resource dependence (den Hond et al., 2015), institutional theory (Vogel et al., 2022) and narrative theory (Koschmann et al., 2012). Such theories are referred to by authors to complement those commonly used by mainstream AMC studies or to substitute them, when the specificities of sustainability‐oriented collaboration are very pronounced in terms of goal multiplicity, heterogeneity of the partners involved and limited predictability.…”

“…The process followed to identify the publications is outlined in Figure 1. First, we relied on existing literature reviews on sustainability-oriented collaboration, corporate sustainability and AMC to generate a comprehensive list of keywords to search relevant articles from high-impact journals (Mura et al, 2018;Niesten & Jolink, 2020;Schaltegger et al, 2022;Vogel et al, 2022). As the literature on sustainability-oriented collaboration is still emerging, we did not restrict our search to specific subject categories or pre-defined time frames.…”

Finding the “Sweet Spot”: The Politics of Alignment in Cross-Sector Partnerships for Refugees

“…The concept of alignment is widely applied in CSP literature to analyze the merging of partners’ interests (Stadtler, 2011), organizational cultures (Gray & Stites, 2013), institutional logics (Vogel et al, 2022), values and objectives (Ber & Branzei, 2010a), shared value creation processes (Austin & Seitanidi, 2012a, 2012b; Ber & Branzei, 2010b; Murphy et al, 2015), purpose definitions (Cloutier & Langley, 2017; Eden & Huxham, 2001), goals and solutions (Stadtler & Karakulak, 2022), and power asymmetries (Berger et al, 2004; Dewulf & Elbers, 2018). Although scholars argue that no type of cross-sector collaboration is better than others, it is a common notion in the literature that CSPs closer to the integrative end of the collaboration continuum will have more impact and yield higher levels of shared value (Austin, 2000, p. 79; Thomas & Fritz, 2006, p. 122).…”

“…In highlighting the politics of alignment, the article contributes to two emerging debates within the business and society literature. First, the article engages with a critical stream of literature that seeks to uncover the operation, practices, and political implications of CSPs, for example, by questioning how and for whom CSPs create value (Ber & Branzei, 2010b; Vogel et al, 2022, p. 17). The findings in this article provide novel empirical evidence of the practices and politics through which partnership alignment comes about.…”

Institutional Hegemony of a Logic Within a Cross-Sector Partnership

“…Partners in CSPs need to combine distinct institutional logics (Thornton et al, 2012; Vogel et al, 2022) applied in business, civil society, and government, as divergent guidelines condition the partners’ objectives and their actions and evaluations for governance. Consequently, the partners need to accommodate the tensions (Ahmadsimab & Chowdhury, 2021; Ashraf et al, 2017; Gillett et al, 2019) and dynamics (Hesse et al, 2019) emerging from such different institutional logics.…”