Community-Based Collaboration: Bridging Socio-Ecological Research and Practice

6 Building a Theory of Collaboration

6 Building a Theory of Collaboration William D. Leach This chapter develops a simple theoretical framework to synthesize many of the recurring themes of the preceding four chapters. The purpose of the framework is to help structure our knowledge about community-based collaboratives (CBCs) and to help explain why, in study after study, scholars find that certain factors play critical roles in shaping CBC outcomes. Coming on the heels of the previous chapters, many of the ideas presented here should be familiar by now. What I try to accomplish is to organize the most well-documented and theoretically supported insights on a scaffolding that makes it easier to recall and think through the implications of each lesson learned. By summarizing recent theoretical and empirical research, this chapter seeks to review many of the essential building blocks of successful CBCs, and to trace the roots of their influence back to a small number of fundamental insights into human behavior, culture, psychology, and cognition . Theory is essential for guiding empirical research and placing its findings in the context of previous studies. Without theory, we cannot demonstrate how a study contributes to the accumulation of knowledge in a particular field. However, many stakeholders and professional facilitators view theory with apprehension. Too much of the theoretical literature that academics produce seems to be written for other academics, with little concern for practical applications. Even one connotation of the word—an approximate antonym for “reality”—discourages its acceptance among results-oriented stakeholders: “That idea might work in theory, but not on the ground.” Still, stakeholders and facilitators usually invoke an often unspoken sort of working theory whenever they make decisions about how to design a collaborative process. Chris Argyris and Donald Schon (1974) coined the phrase “theories of action” to describe the type of reasoning that forms Building a Theory of Collaboration 147 “the conceptual basis on which we act and choose between particular courses of action” (Macfarlane and Mayer 2005a, 15, 2005b, 261). When facilitators explain why they recommend a specific approach in a particular situation, either they are applying a mental model of an ideal situation type, or they are making assumptions about causes and effects, or they are making other assumptions about the fundamental nature of the stakeholders and the circumstances they face. Theory is what allows us to respond effectively and efficiently to new circumstances by relating them to what has worked in similar situations encountered previously. Thus, theory is at once essential and elusive. By anchoring this chapter in a rudimentary theoretical framework, I hope to provide a useful structure for organizing the huge quantity of information that makes up the current state-of-the-art knowledge of how CBCs function. Although each conclusion presented in the chapter is well documented, we still have much to learn about the dynamics of collaboration for environmental change. Scholars may wish to approach the framework as a road map for deriving hypotheses to test in future research. To organize the material, I have devised a convention called a theoroid. Each theoroid consists of a single postulate about human nature and one broadly stated implication about how stakeholders should act or how they should structure CBCs for optimum effectiveness. The premise of this practical approach to building a theory of collaboration is that people—scholars and stakeholders alike—generally do not carry around entire social science theories in their heads. However, they do regularly remember and employ subsets of theories, something like the theoroids introduced here. For example, if you ask professional facilitators to explain how they handled a specific situation, their answer will often include a basic assumption about human behavior plus a practical implication of this assumption. Researcher: Why did you decide to stop the discussion when Jim told the joke about the governor? Doesn’t a little humor lighten the mood and get everyone to relax? Facilitator: Jim told a joke that poked fun at our governor, who’s a Democrat . We have a ground rule that says humor is welcome, but never at the expense of another person. The joke probably offended some of the Democrats in the room. I admit, the joke was funny, but if I hadn’t noted the ground rule violation, they might have questioned my impartiality and lost trust in me. This facilitator has identified a basic assumption or postulate (people will not trust the facilitator if they do not believe she is impartial) and its practical [18.191.234.191] Project MUSE (2024-04...