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Service innovation or collaborative tradition? Public motives for partnerships with third sector organisations

Caroline Hellström (Lund University School of Economics and Management, Lund, Sweden)

Journal of Accounting & Organizational Change

ISSN: 1832-5912

Article publication date: 10 November 2020

Issue publication date: 4 March 2021

286

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to investigate public partners’ motives for seeking and/or accepting partnerships with third sector organisations.

Design/methodology/approach

The approach is to seek to identify and explain motives from different perspectives; as responses to government failure or voluntary failure, as related to governance structures, and/or as driven by resource dependencies. The empirical material was gathered through semi-structured interviews with public employees in Swedish municipalities. The aim of the interviews was to grasp the public partners’ motives for partnerships with third sector organisations. Each interview started with questions on the presence and forms of partnerships, thus creating a backdrop for the motives, both during the interview and as a map of the partnership landscape.

Findings

The most prominent motives for public engagement in partnerships with third sector organisations are related to democratic values, the need to solve concrete problems, and economic rationality. The motives vary with the type of partnership of which there is considerable variation in scale, content and contribution; the types of partnership vary with different policy fields and services. Different perspectives highlight different motives but none of them excludes other perspectives.

Originality/value

The main contribution of the paper is the empirically based findings of a multi-layered public–third sector partnership landscape where policy fields, forms and complex motives are intertwined.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the EIASM Workshop on the Challenges of Managing the Third sector at the NTNU Business School, Trondheim, in June 2019 and at a seminar at Lund University School of Economics and Management in February 2020. The author is grateful for the helpful comments made by participants at these events.

The author’s gratitude also includes the insightful and constructive suggestions provided by Tomas Hellström and Anna Thomasson, Lund University School of Economics and Management, and by Sabine Kuhlmann, University of Potsdam, as well as by two anonymous referees of this journal.

Citation

Hellström, C. (2021), "Service innovation or collaborative tradition? Public motives for partnerships with third sector organisations", Journal of Accounting & Organizational Change, Vol. 17 No. 1, pp. 71-90. https://doi.org/10.1108/JAOC-09-2020-0133

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited

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