No abstract

While multi-stakeholder partnerships are emerging as an increasingly popular approach to address grand challenges, they are not well studied or understood. Such partnerships are rife with difficulties arising from the fact that actors in the partnership have different understandings of the grand challenge based on meaning systems which have distinct and often opposing assumptions, values, and practices. Each partnership actor brings with them their individual values as well as the values and work practices of their home organization's culture, alongside the wider meaning systems present within the sectoral spaces in which each organization is situated-public, private, or nonprofit. Yet, there is little understanding of how actors in multistakeholder partnerships negotiate multi-level meaning systems to reach partnership goals. In this 16-month ethnographic study, we take up a negotiated culture perspective to holistically examine the negotiation of multi-level meaning related to a focal grand challenge in a multi-stakeholder partnership established to end homelessness in Western Canada. Based on our findings, we contribute a process model to explain the ongoing negotiation of multi-level meanings in multi-stakeholder partnerships working to address grand challenges.

This paper adds to literature on engaged scholarship by exploring how previous experience, study expectations, and multiple identities are key factors that shape how management researchers perceive and experience the research-practice divide in sustainable development research. Highlighting ways to navigate tensions in engaged scholarship, the authors identify five major strategies: remembering the purpose of the research, emphasizing relationships, engaging in self-learning, practicing reflexivity, and framing emerging results. To do so, the authors draw on findings from three management research projects which sought to use engaged scholarship to address the sustainable development challenges of homelessness, Indigenous approaches to economics and development, and sustainability reporting in higher education. Taking a collaborative auto-ethnographic approach to analyzing their experiences as researchers, the authors demonstrate the potential for future management researchers to utilize a similar methodology to improve engaged scholarship research focused on sustainable development challenges.

How do actors cope when their repeated efforts to bring change seem futile? In this qualitative study, we consider sustainable development initiatives within a U.S. higher education institution where repeated efforts by actors led to nominal change. We focus on understanding how actors sought to enact sustainable development initiatives in the face of an unresponsive context, that is, in a context characterized by pressures to maintain the status quo. We show how actors’ attempts to embed sustainable development practices into the university represent a dynamic process, characterized by periods of persistence and suspension. Our theorizing reveals that actors used three coping mechanisms to maintain focus on their sustainability goals: community building, resourcefulness, and vision. By emphasizing these dimensions of their initiatives, actors’ emotional response is focused on encouragement and hope to persist in a context that is largely unresponsive to sustainable development. Our study contributes to the sustainability literature by explicating how actors develop resilience in their efforts to pursue sustainable development in unresponsive contexts.

Showcasing a sixteen-month ethnographic study of a coalition to end homelessness in Western Canada