Social Partnerships and Responsible Business

A Research Handbook

M. May Seitanidi, Andrew Crane, M. May Seitanidi, Andrew Crane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317962915
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Cross-sector partnerships are widely hailed as a critical means for addressing a wide array of social challenges such as climate change, poverty, education, corruption, and health. Amid all the positive rhetoric of cross-sector partnerships though, critical voices point to the limited success of various initiatives in delivering genuine social change and in providing for real citizen participation. This collection critically examines the motivations for, processes within, and expected and actual outcomes of cross-sector partnerships.

In opening up new theoretical, methodological, and practical perspectives on cross-sector social interactions, this book reimagines partnerships in order to explore the potential to contribute to the social good. A multi-disciplinary perspective on partnerships adds serious value to the debate in a range of fields including management, politics, public management, sociology, development studies, and international relations. Contributors to the volume reflect many of these diverse perspectives, enabling the book to provide an account of partnerships that is theoretically rich and methodologically varied.

With critical contributions from leading academics such as Barbara Gray, Ans Kolk, John Selsky, and Sandra Waddock, this book is a comprehensive resource which will increase understanding of this vital issue.

1

Social Partnerships and Responsible Business

What, why and how?

Andrew Crane and M. May Seitanidi

Introduction

Social partnerships – or the joining together of organizations from different sectors of society to tackle social problems – have been widely hailed as a critical tool for addressing an array of serious challenges facing society. Having first emerged in the guise of public private partnerships (PPPs), initially through the involvement of the private sector in local economic development and urban renewal in the 1980s (Wettenhall, 2003), social partnerships have since become both more encompassing in terms of sectors and issues involved, and more expansive in terms of their global reach. Today, social partnerships cross public, non-profit and private sectors in a range of ways and have been used to tackle everything from climate change and resource conservation to health, education, poverty, local development, and even corruption and organized crime.

The growing attention afforded to social partnerships over the past three decades has culminated in what some commentators have referred to as the emergence of a “partnership society” (Googins and Rochlin, 2002), a “partnership paradigm” (Glasbergen, 2007) or even a “trend with no alternative” (Richter, 2004). Although such proclamations may be premature, there is no denying that social partnerships are no longer viewed as such exotic or iconoclastic arrangements as they once were. Indeed, the trend towards more partnerships across sectors, and more substantial and longer-lasting relationships among such partners, has been widely alluded to in the literature. Although with the exception of PPPs (see for example Rufín and Rivera-Santos, 2012) hard data on the prevalence of social partnerships are actually quite hard to come by, the message from researchers is consistent and persuasive. Almost a decade ago, Selsky and Parker (2005: 2) noted that “the number of [cross-sector social partnerships] has grown very rapidly in recent years” whilst LaFrance and Lehmann (2005: 216) suggested that “corporations have been increasingly pursuing partnerships with public institutions including governments, international organizations and NGOs”. More recently, Seitanidi and Lindgreen (2010: 1) have suggested that “interactions across sectors have intensified in recent years” and Koschmann et al. (2012: 332) have argued that because of their “prevalence and popularity”, social partnerships are “often mandated by funders, expected by local communities, and assumed by policy makers to be the best way of working on social problems.”

Along with this apparent escalation in the practice of social partnerships has come a growing body of academic literature dedicated to analysing them. For instance, a recent review of the business-non-profit partnership literature by Laasonen et al. (2012: 521) reveals a “sharply increasing amount of publications in recent years”. Branzei and Le Ber’s (2014) chapter in this volume also provides convincing evidence of an expanding literature dealing with cross-sector partnerships across different academic fields. From no more than one or two published articles a year at the turn of the century, they report more than 25 a year since 2010.

Given that we are in the midst of a rapidly expanding field of theory and practice, it is timely to take stock of where we are and to bring some sense of coherence to some of the various proliferating strands of thinking, researching and acting. This Research Handbook is by no means intended to be a comprehensive account of our current stock of knowledge on responsible business and social partnerships, but it does represent an important attempt to bring together some of the most important and influential voices in the debate and to set out some important pathways through an increasingly diverse and multifaceted literature.

In this introductory chapter, our aim is to examine the field of social partnerships and responsible business in terms of three key questions:

1. What are social partnerships and responsible business?
2. Why do we need to provide a new perspective on social partnerships and responsible business?
3. How can we best understand and characterize this emerging field?

What are social partnerships and responsible business?

There are many phenomena that might or might not be regarded as social partnerships. Much depends on how we define them and where we set the parameters for inclusion and exclusion. At the outset of this chapter we briefly referred to social partnerships as “the joining together of organizations from different sectors of society to tackle social problems”. Although this works as a useful summary, it is not precise enough to define the phenomenon with any degree of certainty. What do we mean by “joining together”? Which “different sectors” are we talking about? And what constitutes a “social problem”?

This definitional problem is compounded by the diversity of terminology that is used to refer to a set of overlapping phenomena. Whilst in this book, we primarily refer to social partnerships and cross-sector social partnerships (which we use interchangeably), others refer to “multi-stakeholder” partnerships or relationships (Everett and Jamal, 2004; Pinkse and Kolk, 2012), “cross-sector collaborations” (Bryson et al., 2006), “cross-sector social interactions” (Seitanidi and Lindgreen, 2010), “social alliances” (Berger et al., 2004) or other such variants. Some authors also prefer to examine a sub-set of the phenomenon such as business-non-profit partnerships, or public-private partnerships rather than the whole gamut of cross-sectoral relations.

Extant research on social partnerships has sought to clarify some of these ambiguities. Looking first to the question of what “joining together” means, Austin’s (2000) elaboration of the collaboration continuum suggests that we can conceive of interaction as stretching from simple one-way financial or philanthropic support, through to two-way transactional relationships around specific activities, all the way up to integrative strategic alliances and, more recently, to transformational collaborations (Austin and Seitanidi, 2012a and Austin and Seitanidi, 2012b). In this book, we are concerned specifically with the latter two stages of Austin’s continuum. This is because the defining characteristic of social partnerships are that they require “involvement in the planning and implementation of activities by two or more organizations”, “joint-problem solving of participants” and “a resource commitment from all partners” (Waddock, 1991: 483). That is, social partnerships are defined here according to the level of engagement of the participants. Not all relationships across sectors are social partnerships – i.e. they are a specific form of relationship involving a relatively high level of engagement for a considerable amount of time.

The question of which sectors we are referring to under the rubric of social partnerships is also worthy of elaboration. In general, there are four types of cross-sectoral social partnerships – business-non-profit, business-government (also called public-private partnerships), government-non-profit, and tri-partite partnerships that cross all three sectors. As shown in Figure 1.1, we are only concerned in this book with three of these four types, namely partnerships involving business. One reason for this is that our own disciplinary expertise is located in the realm of business and management, and so the partnerships between companies and other social actors is our customary point of departure. Similarly, as Branzei and Le Ber (2014) note in their analysis of the literature in Chapter 12, the business and management field has been the primary source of published research on cross-sector partnerships in recent years. It is also notable that business is itself becoming an increasingly dominant social institution, involved not just in economic activities, but in much broader social, environmental and political affairs. Hence, relationships between businesses and other social actors have taken on a wider significance, including a shift towards greater attention to corporate social responsibility and making a difference (Waddock, 2010) and a “hollowing out” of the state (Skelcher, 2000) with greater private sector involvement in broader societal governance (Cashore, 2002; Matten and Crane, 2005; Pattberg, 2005; Ronit, 2001).

This also explains why, as our title indicates, it is partnerships in the area of responsible business that form the principal focus for this book. Businesses can sometimes participate in cross-sector partnerships without any real need to engage with any notion of responsibility. This would be the case, for example, in private finance initiatives (PFI) whereby companies provide finance for public sector infrastructure projects, typically through debt and/or equity, and then may also provide operational services under contract, but would not typically be involved in decisions regarding the social impact or outcomes of the project. However, the involvement of business in social partnerships is more commonly associated with an explicit attention to the social role and responsibilities of companies.

Figure 1.1 Types of social partnerships

Adapted from Seitanidi and Crane, 2009

One approach here is to view partnerships as a means of implementing social responsibility strategies (Husted, 2003; Seitanidi and Crane, 2009; Walters and Anagnostopoulos, 2012). I ndeed, partnerships have become a well-established feature of the theory and practice of CSR, such that many CSR textbooks and handbooks will include a chapter or sections on partnerships (e.g. Crane, et al., 2013; Haynes et al., 2013; Kotler and Lee, 2008) whilst companies reporting on their social performance will almost always report on at least some of their cross-sector partnerships.

An alternative perspective would view partnerships as a site where new responsibilities emerge (Seitanidi, 2008). That is, engagement in partnerships brings companies into different territory, raises expectations, and exposes them to new risks. As a result, conceptions of companies’ social responsibilities can be reshaped through the practice of partnership. The key point here is that, regardless of approach, our concern is with questions that extend beyond businesses simply fulfilling their contractual obligations in providing finance or building public infrastructure. Rather, we see social partnerships as a site for the expression of responsible business and indeed as a critical lens in which to explore the changing nature and extent of business responsibilities for the social good.

Considerations of the social good bring us to the last of our three initial definitional questions, namely what constitutes a “social problem”. The first point to note here is that we are specifically concerned with partnerships focused on addressing social issues – i.e. they must in some way be identified with “a public policy agenda item” (Waddock, 1991: 482). Additionally, although parties may collaborate to address such a problem for self-interested reasons (e.g. a firm may wish to enhance its brand, a government department may be exploring new sources of revenue or a non-profit may be seeking to attract members), a social partnership also requires the articulation of social goals that extend beyond the self-interested goals of the partners (Austin, 2000; Austin and Seitanidi, 2012a; Austin and Seitanidi, 2012b; Seitanidi, 2010) – such as forest protection, provision of affordable housing or guaranteeing human rights. It is this combination of organizational-level and societal-level outcomes that represents one of the most interesting, but most challenging aspects, in both the theory and practice of social partnerships. Therefore, in this book, our concern is with the multi-level outcomes of social partnerships, but with a strong emphasis on how partnerships contribute to the social good. After all, the common ground of cross-sector collaborative efforts is an “imperative to realise benefits for the wider community rather than for special interests” (Skelcher and Sullivan, 2002: 752).

Why do we need to provide a new perspective on social partnerships and responsible business?

There is already considerable literature on social partnerships and responsible business, as well as some excellent review articles assessing the state of the field (e.g. Austin and Seitanidi, 2012a; Austin and Seitanidi, 2012b; Bovaird, 2004; Kourula and Laasonen, 2010; Laasonen et al., 2012; Selsky and Parker, 2005). So why do we need a major research handbook such as this now, and what do we hope to bring that will be unique or unusual?

The most important factor to account for here is that whilst the phenomenon of social partnerships is sufficiently well established that some already speak of a partnership paradigm, there is not a similarly well established scholarly field. In fact, we can characterize social partnerships as essentially a phenomenon without a field. This is because the study of social partnerships has taken place in many different disciplines and sub-areas of academic inquiry, often without a shared set of core ideas, concepts or foundational works. Researchers have explored social partnerships from core disciplines of politics and public policy, international relations, development studies, law, business and management, environmental studies, and third sector studies, among others. Even within these disciplines, there is often considerable fragmentation in the scholarly literature with, for example, alternative perspectives being developed in politics from those interested in global governance and those more concerned with new public management. Similarly in management studies, researchers in marketing, strategy, international business, business ethics, and other sub-fields have all explored social partnerships, often with quite limited interaction across the different silos.

Compounding this issue of fragmentation is the fact that, as yet, there is no journal specifically dedicated to social partnerships research, which means that relevant articles are often to be found in disparate publications. Some recent special issues on the subject in journals such as The Social and Economic Review (see Ó Riain, 2006), the Journal of Business Ethics (see Seitanidi and Lindgreen, 2010) and Science and Public Policy (see Turpin and Fernández-Esquinas, 2011) have provided important focal points for research contributions in different disciplines, but these remain the exceptions. So, to date, there is little sense of a well-defined or unified field. Soci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures
• Tables and boxes
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• How to use this book
• Foreword
• 1. Social partnerships and responsible business: what, why and how?
• Part A: Partnership for the social good? Local, national and global perspectives
• Part B: Management and governance challenges
• Part C: Reimagining social partnerships: theory and methods
• Part D: Reimagining social partnerships: perspectives on practice
• Index