Collaborating For Our Future : Multistakeholder Partnerships For Solving Complex Problems Hardcover

Barbara Gray

Organizations turn to multistakeholder partnerships (MSPs) to meet challenges that they cannot handle alone. By tapping the resources of diverse stakeholders, MSPs develop the capability to address complex issues and problems, such as health care delivery, poverty, human rights, watershed management, education, sustainability, and innovation. This book provides a comprehensive understanding of MSPs, why they are needed, the challenges partners face in working together and how to design them effectively. Through the process of collaboration partners combine their differing strengths, vantage points and expertise to craft innovative responses to pressing societal concerns. The book offers valuable advice for leaders about how to design and scale up effective partnerships and how to address potential obstacles that partners may face. Drawing on three comprehensive cases and countless shorter examples from around the world, the book offers both practical advice for organization embarking on an MSP as well as a theoretical understanding of how partnerships function. Using an institutional theory lens, it explains how partnerships can effect change in institutional fields by reducing turbulence and negotiating a common set of norms and routines to govern partners' future interactions within the field of concern.

English

Oxford University Press

1 May 2018

272

Barbara Gray is Professor and Smeal Executive Programs Faculty Fellow, Emerita, at the Department of Management and Organization, Smeal College of Business, Pennsylvania State University. Professor Gray has studied multiparty conflict, collaboration, power, and institutional processes within and among organizations over 40 years. She has received two life-time achievement awards for her work which has appeared in prestigious management journals. She is widely known for her earlier book, Collaborating: Finding common ground for multiparty problems. She is a principal mediator in An Olive Branch, and has consulted to public, private and non-governmental organizations worldwide. She earned her Ph.D. at Case Western Reserve University, taught at Penn State for 34 years and has held visiting appointments at Harvard Law School University, Utrecht University and University of Hong Kong. In 2016 she received entrustment as a Lay Zen Buddhist teacher in the Soto tradition. Jill Purdy is a Professor of Management in the Milgard School of Business at the University of Washington Tacoma. She earned her doctorate in Management and Organization from Pennsylvania State University. Her scholarly work focuses on institutional dynamics, collaboration and conflict, and social responsibility. Professor Purdy's research appears in management, public administration, and higher education journals. She has held visiting appointments at Bifroest University in Iceland and Aalto University in Finland. In addition to collaborating with university and community partners in her administrative role, Dr. Purdy consults with business, government and non-profit organizations on strategic planning, governance and managing change.

Jill Purdy

Barbara Gray and Jill Purdy are the two most accomplished scholars writing about collaboration. And, at no time in history have we needed collaborations than now. This book is a must read for anyone who wants to tackle the most important challenges confronting society and the planet. * Dr. Tima Bansal Professor, Director of the Centre on Building Sustainable Value and Executive Director for the Network for Business Sustainability, Ivey Business School, University of Western Ontario * Collaborating for Our Future offers much-needed understanding of the ins and outs of multi-stakeholder collaboration, in an era when such collaborative efforts are proving essential to tackling the numerous grand challenges facing the world. Grounded deeply in both practice and theory, this book showcases Gray and Purdy's extensive knowledge and insight into the nature, potential, and realities of the types of multi-stakeholder initiatives that are emerging around the world to tackle the types of issues raised, for example, by the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. This book will prove an invaluable resource to anyone engaged in such collaborations! * Dr. Sandra Waddock, Galligan Chair of Strategy, Carroll School Scholar of Corporate Responsibility, and Professor of Management, Carroll School of Management, Boston College * Barbara Gray and Jill Purdy have written a superb must-read book for anyone interested in addressing major public problems in a shared-power, no-one-wholly-in-charge world. Their focus on power, conflict, organizational and institutional change, and governance offers a remarkable and highly useful synthesis of decades of work by themselves and others. This book is bound to become an instant classic. * Dr. John Bryson, McKnight Presidential Professor of Planning and Public Affairs, Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota * This beautifully written and important book is essential reading for both scholars and practitioners interested in researching and developing collaborative partnerships. Scholars will encounter the meticulous research and informative cases we have come to associate with Gray's work, as well as extensions to the theoretical models that Gray and colleagues have built over the last 30 years. Practitioners will find in these clearly written chapters many insights and approaches that can help to navigate the challenges of the multistakeholder partnerships so vital to resolve the complex social and ecological issues currently facing us. An exciting addition to the literature on collaborative dynamics. * Dr. Frances Westley, J.W. McConnell chair in social innovation, Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience, University of Waterloo * The world is beset with wicked and complex, multidimensional, multi stakeholder, planetary scale problems that need collaboration and partnering across disciplines, communities, organizations, regions, and across the globe. In Collaborating for our Future, Gray and Purdy offer strong conceptual framing of collaboration, and practical strategies for decision makers. It is essential reading for organizational researchers, policy makers and corporate managers. * Paul Shrivastava, Ph.D. Chief Sustainability Officer, The Pennsylvania State University, & Director, Sustainability Institute Professor, Management and Organization, Smeal College of Business * Barbara Gray and Jill Purdy have written a superb must-read book for anyone interested in addressing major public problems in a shared-power, no-one-wholly-in-charge world. Their focus on power, conflict, organizational and institutional change, and governance offers a remarkable and highly useful synthesis of decades of work by themselves and others. This book is bound to become an instant classic. * Dr. John Bryson, McKnight Presidential Professor of Planning and Public Affairs, Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota * This beautifully written and important book is essential reading for both scholars and practitioners interested in researching and developing collaborative partnerships. Scholars will encounter the meticulous research and informative cases we have come to associate with Gray's work, as well as extensions to the theoretical models that Gray and colleagues have built over the last 30 years. Practitioners will find in these clearly written chapters many insights and approaches that can help to navigate the challenges of the multistakeholder partnerships so vital to resolve the complex social and ecological issues currently facing us. An exciting addition to the literature on collaborative dynamics. * Dr. Frances Westley, J.W. McConnell chair in social innovation, Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience, University of Waterloo * The world is beset with wicked and complex, multidimensional, multi stakeholder, planetary scale problems that need collaboration and partnering across disciplines, communities, organizations, regions, and across the globe. In Collaborating for our Future, Gray and Purdy offer strong conceptual framing of collaboration, and practical strategies for decision makers. It is essential reading for organizational researchers, policy makers and corporate managers. * Paul Shrivastava, Ph.D. Chief Sustainability Officer, The Pennsylvania State University, & Director, Sustainability Institute Professor, Management and Organization, Smeal College of Business *