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We look forward receiving your papers on Collaborative Societal Governance. Full Call for Papers available from:

Almost 20 years ago Austin (2000: 88) framed the importance of social partnerships by asking: 'How society is better off because of their [partners'] joining resources and efforts' denoting the significance of the social character of partnerships. However, the expectation of partnerships to deliver a 'win-win' relationship prioritising the benefits for the partners involved directly in the relationship, rather than society as a 'silent' stakeholder, marked a shift towards an instrumental approach of partnering in practice and in theory (Selsky and Parker, 2005; Glasbergen, 2007). This shift saw an increase in the value of the relationship for the organisations involved directly in the partnership while downplaying the social character of partnerships (Seitanidi, 2010). Hence, the social partnership literature did not address key questions on the contribution of the institution of social partnership within society i.e. how cross-sector collaboration demonstrates, rather than assumes, societal betterment as a result of cross-sector social partnerships (CSSPs) (Austin and Seitanidi, 2012a). A similar drift was marked by Walsh et al (2013) demonstrating the lack of attention of management research to social welfare issues as a result of prioritising the study of economic objectives. The parallel shortcomings in management and social partnerships literatures mark the limiting range of intellectual enquiry in theory (van Tulder et al. 2016) around societal welfare as a result of collaborative efforts. Furthermore, both the persistent nature of social problems that remain at large without solutions (Jones et al, 2016), and the lack of systematic evidence regarding the positive partnership outcomes (Bryson, 2017; Marques, 2017) require urgent attention for advancing theoretical insights that will inform practice.

 

The prioritisation of social welfare as a key defining outcome of the associational domain of CSSPs across all constellations (public-private or PPP; public-nonprofit; nonproft-business; and pubic-nonprofit-business or tri-partite and multi-party collaborations) requires paying attention to the way that CSSPs are governed when contributing to the social good. As Crane remarked research in CSSPs has thus far paid more attention to the governance of partnerships (Zadek, 2006; Vurro et al., 2010; Pinkse and Kolk, 2009; Rivera-Santos, 2010; Cornelious and Wallace, 2010; Moratis, 2016; Rasche et al. 2016; Shilbury et al., 2016) rather than their contribution to the societal governance or how "how societal goals are set, what mechanisms are put in place to achieve them, and how these are monitored and enforced" (Crane, 2010: 17).  This call for papers aims to stimulate research that connects partnership governance with partnership social welfare outcomes. Jones et al (2016: 12) define social welfare "in terms of well-being of a society as a whole, encompassing economic, social, physical and spiritual health". In CSSPs, social welfare aligns with the partnership's external value creation in Austin and Seitanidi (2012b; Austin and Seitanidi, 2014) across all nested levels of analysis (macro-individuals, macro-organisational, macro-societal and macro-system) likely to be produced by integrative and transformational partnerships. In the review of Selsky and Parker (2005) it corresponds with the social issues and societal sector platforms across all partnership arenas and in Gray and Stites review (2013) with the categories of 'community and environment'.

 

Collaborative governance has been defined in different ways to reflect the a/ state's transformation (Rhodes, 1997), b/ worldwide changing patterns of governance (Giddens, 2000), c/ the public sectors' capacity and resource deficits (Sullivan and Skelcher, 2002) and d/ the changing roles, responsibilities, structures, power imbalances, leadership, institutional design and collaborative process (Ansell and Gash (2007). However, the term 'collaborative governance' and its current use retains an explicit hierarchical orientation prioritising the role of public agencies as the ultimate initiator and authority in collaborative governance (Innes and Booher, 2005; Ansell and Gash, 2007). This orientation excludes an important type of 'governance without government' (Rosenau and Czempiel, 1992) 'soft' and 'voluntary' regulation, initiated by non-state actors at the domestic and transnational levels referred to as the 'socio-cybernetic approach' (Rhodes, 1996: 658), 'network' and 'post-political' governance (Garsten and Jacobsson, 2007) that stem from societally-based legitimacy (Garsten and Jacobsson, 2007) and addresses social welfare needs by employing consensus-based collaborative efforts. The purpose of this call is to solicit papers that embrace a wider range of collective societal governance, including (but not limited to) cross-sector social interactions that aim explicitly to contribute to the social welfare without being initiated or require the de-facto involvement of public sector organisations. More specifically, CSSPs as governance mechanisms can function either 'above' the state, functioning as forms of international standard setters (Abbott and Snidal, 2008) usually associated with the development of tripartite co-regulation (involving all three sectors), or 'below' the state, contributing to public co-regulation (interactions between private and public agencies) through the development of certification schemes, negotiated agreements and PPPs or delivering co-management (interactions between public and nonprofit agencies) in the case of common pool resources and private co-regulation (interactions between nonprofit and private agencies) that includes certification schemes and nonprofit-business partnerships (Streurer, 2013). These types we mark bold on Figure 1 and we group as 'collaborative societal governance'. Other forms of governance that do not involve cross-sector interactions such as business self-regulation (private sector), civil regulation (nonprofit sector) or hard/soft government regulation (public sector) are excluded from the focus.

 

The aim of the Call is to link types of collaborative societal governance with social welfare outcomes in order to uncover logics, pathways and patterns of governance mechanisms that lead to outcomes and impacts that can inform theory and practice. Furthermore, it aims to prompt analysis on the implications of collaborative societal governance for policy making, social issue solutions and initiation of new types of governance. As such the Call aims to address the disconnect between expectations of partnerships in theory and outcomes observed in practice by linking governance theory to social issues in management research prompting new theorising of the move away from a single sovereign authority replaced by "interdependence among socio-political-administrative actors; shared goals; blurred boundaries between public, private and voluntary sectors; and multiplying and new forms of action, intervention and control" resulting in an interactive socio-political form of governance (Rhodes, 1996: 658). In this new governance terrain of shared public responsibilities (Moon 2002) addressing the 'orchestration deficit' problem (Abbott and Snidal, 2009) responsible for the fragmentation of evidence, 'a major source of concern' (Biermann et al., 2009), can be tackled by producing robust comparable generalisations that will direct valuable resources to social welfare evidence-based governance. The aim of this Call is to open-up collaborative societal governance as a new multi-disciplinary area of research by inviting contributions on the nexus of public administration, social policy, management (nonprofit and voluntary, environmental, resources) and sociology.

 

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• How do organisational actors perceive the fit between the partnership ideals and the governance structures?     

The Call does not favour any special theoretical perspectives or methodological approaches and is open to conceptual as well as empirical contributions.

The Symposium in the NVSQ journal is linked to the 6th biennial International Symposium on Cross-Sector Social Interactions (CSSI 2018). Interested contributors to the CSSI 2018 event should submit an extended abstract before February 28, 2018. The extended abstracts should be 600-1000 words in length and will be a summary of a specific research project or paper, either completed or work-in-progress. The extended abstract should provide a brief overview of the research, including introduction, literature review, research questions, methodology, findings, conclusions, and selected references. All contributions will be peer-reviewed.

 

Submissions should be in Word, using 12pt font with double line spacing and 1" margins. Please include a title page (not included in word count). All submissions should be made through the CSSI 2018 Symposium website: www.cssi2018.com . The submission system will open early February, 2018.

 

Full papers submitted to CSSI 2018 Symposium will be eligible for the Routledge Best Paper Award in Social Partnership, comprising a certificate to the recipient and a voucher for £100 books published by Taylor & Francis Group. To be eligible for the best paper award, authors will need to submit a full paper based on their abstract by May 30, 2018.

 

The deadline for submissions to the symposium in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (NVSQ) is October 1, 2018. The symposium in NVSQ will also consider papers that have not been presented at the CSSI 2018 Symposium but are addressing the theme of the CfPs. All submissions will be subject to double-blind peer review.

   

 

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