The Evolution of Dyadic Interorganizational Relationships in a Network of Publicly Funded Nonprofit Agencies

Abstract

This article addresses a gap in the extant literature on networks by assessing how interorganizational relationships evolve in a public sector network setting. The context for the research was a network of publicly funded health and human service agencies involved in service delivery to people with serious mental illness. Longitudinal data were collected from a single community. The analysis suggests that public and nonprofit sector relationships evolve differently than private sector partnerships, providing an alternative perspective to the prevailing view in organization theory. Policy makers have increasingly selected network forms of governance as a mechanism to provide health and human services to their constituents (Agranoff 1991; Bardach 1998; O'Toole 1997). Networks are thought to assist service providers in coordinating professional activities, resulting in enhanced services to clients. Although network forms of governance are a common mechanism used by state and local governments to accomplish coordination among their service providers, knowledge about the process of creating, maintaining, or growing linkages within a network is still just emerging. In particular, the question of how network relationships change over time remains largely unanswered. As policy makers continue to encourage the formation of service provision networks among private and nonprofit organizations, it is important to understand how networks work. The most extensive body of literature on interorganizational relationships and networks has been in organization theory. Unfortunately, the preponderance of this literature has focused on private sector settings. Although it is likely that some, and even many, findings in the private sector literature are transferable to the public sector, we do not

Networks in Public Administration: Current scholarship in review

“…The Provan and Milward school emphasizes the use of collaborative management practices necessary for the overall network performance as measured by efficiency (Huang and Provan, 2007;Isett and Provan, 2005;Provan et al, 2002Provan et al, , 2007. It also highlights the need for hybrid forms of organizing and collaborating that emerged between hierarchy and market relationships: the collaborative network (Powell, 1990).…”

Philanthropic Foundation Strategies to Advance Systems Reform: Perceptions from Frontline Change Implementers

“…In the public and nonprofit sectors, examples of systems include a school district and a human service delivery network (Foster-Fishman, Nowell, and Yang 2007;Supovitz and Taylor 2005). In most cases, systems change requires change in policies and practices in an inter-organizational context; that is, multiple organizations must implement individual organizational change in a way that ensures alignment with desired broader, macro-level change efforts (Isett and Provan 2005;Fernandez and Rainey 2006).…”

Networks : structure and action : steering in and steering by policy networks

“…Others have utilised social network analysis to describe the relationships between a pair of organisations rather than a complete policy network (e.g. Brass, Galaskiewicz, Greve, & Tsai, 2004;Isett & Provan, 2005;Kenis & Knoke, 2002). Despite these differences, the research approaches within the third cycle literature do have one common point of departure.…”

“…An example of a dyadic study focusing on relationships dynamic aspects over time is presented by Isett and Provan (2005 The third cycle literature has so far made a number of major contributions to the advancement of policy network analysis. The introduction of social network analysis as a tool to characterise policy network structures offers an opportunity to resolve one of the most persisting conceptual caveats of previous policy network approaches.…”

“…These emerging theories of network dynamics are based on the properties of the relationships between pairs of actors (e.g. Isett & Provan, 2005;Kenis & Knoke, 2002).…”