3rd International Symposium on Cross Sector Social Interactions

 

Cross sector partnerships are one of the most exciting areas to be engaged in for researchers as well as practitioners since partnerships that bridge different sectors (public, profit, nonprofit) are thriving around the world (Austin, 2000; Galaskiewicz and Coleman, 2006; Bendell et al., 2010). Austin (2000) labels these alliances as the collaborative paradigm of the 21^stcentury. Cross sector social partnerships are employed as collaborative strategies to address complex social problems (Waddock, 1989;) as well as to more effectively achieve organisational objectives (Dahan et al., 2010; Porter and Kramer, 2011). Firms, for instance, may search for a longer term competitive advantage through a portfolio of partnerships with non-market actors. Research of The Partnerships Resource Centre (PrC, 2011) shows that the largest firms in the world have on average entered into around 18 cross sector partnerships for a variety of reasons such as market entry, issue resolution, leadership development and HRM, product development. Increasingly, cross sector partnerships are linked to the core business of firms, and away from mere acts of philanthropy.

Governments too have long been seeking innovative ways of producing public goods in collaboration with firms (Clarke and Fuller, 2010). International organisations such as the United Nations and the World Bank have also defined public-private partnerships as means of addressing global public goods like environment or poverty alleviation (Glasbergen et al., 2007). Thousands of international “PPPs” have been initiated in the past decade (e.g.Chettiparamb, 2007; Dixon et al., 2004; Sullivan and Skeltcher 2002).In addition, civil society organisations are also slowly moving away from a confrontational approach towards firms and governments to a more collaborative approach in order to develop novel solutions to old problems, thereby increasing the efficiency of their activities (e.g. Austin, 2000; Le Ber and Branzei, 2009; Seitanidi and Crane, 2009; Stafford and Hartman, 2001; van Huijstee and Glasbergen, 2010; Wymer and Samu, 2003).    

In all instances, however, research has shown that most of these partnerships have hardly been planned (Jamali and Keshishian, 2009; Seitanidi et al, 2010), while their impact has to date been only modestly evaluated (Margolis and Walsh, 2003). This is due to the lack of available resources, adequate research interest, and the lack of interdisciplinary collaborations that are required for assessing this intrinsically interdisciplinary area. Another contributing factor is the great analytical and methodological difficulty involved in assessing the impact and effectiveness of these partnerships as they require often complex methodologies, multi-level tools and longitudinal research designs that are not easy to develop, implement and elaborate. As cross sector social interactions intensify we believe the need for effective and legitimate impact assessment will increase rapidly.  Luckily, an increasing number of scholars are taking up the challenge and are currently working on this highly relevant topic from a wide variety of directions.

The 3rd International Symposium on Cross Sector Social Interactions (CSSI) takes stock of these issues and tries to stimulate scholars and practitioners to develop not only knowledge and concepts, but also tools and methods.  Following the two previous successful CSSI symposia, the 3^rdInternational Symposium on CSSI  is moving forward by taking up one of the most important challenges of contemporary partnership research: how to approach the ‘impact’ question. The symposium intends to bring together researchers as well as practitioners from a variety of areas. It expands the programme structure of the previous CSSI symposia by adding an extra day in order to allow for interactive sessions consisting of presentations by scholars, practitioners and PhD students. The symposium will aim to support efforts of institutionalising this area of research and further contributing to the creation a well-functioning international community of scholars and practitioners.