The Collaborative Public Manager: New Ideas for the Twenty-First Century

11. Collaborative Approaches to Public Organization Start-Ups

Collaborative Approaches to Public Organization Start-Ups 197 Chapter 11 Collaborative Approaches to Public Organization Start-Ups Robert Alexander and Rosemary O’Leary On February 11, 1998, Congress passed PL 105-156, the Environmental Policy and Conflict Resolution Act, creating the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution (USIECR), a new federal organization housed in the Morris K. Udall Foundation and mandated to assist federal agencies involved in environmental conflicts.1 Though the emergence of a new program in the federal government is nothing new, the USIECR faced a statutory requirement not seen in many other organizations: to work closely with regionally based professionals in delivering its services. Kirk Emerson, then a member of the research faculty at the University of Arizona’s Udall Center, was tapped as the first USIECR director. Emerson, with the leadership team of the Udall Foundation, immediately faced many questions. How do you start up a new public organization? How, on such a limited budget, do you fulfill this geographic requirement? How does such a mandate play into all other internal and external forces affecting organizational evolution in these formative years? This chapter puts the reader in the shoes of Emerson and the leadership team to enable the reader to understand how one public organization successfully became institutionalized as a collaborative organization, while working under many constraints. Fortunately, we were able to track the leadership team members as they “grew” with the USIECR from birth to adolescence. We were given wide access to Udall Foundation board representatives, USIECR staff members, congressional personnel, and USIECR advisers, who were involved with the creation of the agency from the very beginning. We were 198 How and Why Public Managers Get Others to Collaborate given wide access to meetings, archival data, and agency communications. But most important, we were given wide access to the leadership team. First, we review the literature on the birth and evolution of organizations , the institutional nature of the public-sector organizational environment , and strategic management. Next, we present the propositions that guided the research and explain the methodology. Third, we present the results of initial analysis, focusing on both the external and internal factors that influenced the evolution of the USIECR. Finally, we close with lessons learned for public management, paying particular attention to collaborative strategy in the public sector. THE BIRTH AND EARLY EVOLUTION OF AN ORGANIZATION Most theories on organizational emergence largely center on private-sector organizations and examine cost-minimizing, profit-maximizing entrepreneurial arrangements in resource-competitive environments (Aldrich 2001; Aldrich and Martinez 2001; Zucker 1989). Organizational birth occurs within an existing population of organizations that is dense (Hannan and Freeman 1977) and where the resource environment is rich and conducive to innovation and competition (Carroll 1984). The period immediately after the initial emergence of an organization is a time of rapid evolution of boundary setting and the development of routines and norms (Aldrich 2001). These early processes are highly subject to forces present in the organizational environment, such as stakeholder demands, resource availability, and legal requirements (Scott 2003). How embedded the organization is in a competitive market environment also has an impact (Aldrich 2001). The role of key stakeholders changes over time depending upon the stage of organizational life cycle, along with the level of dependency of the organization on others (Jawahar and McLaughlin 2001). Legitimacy is seen as an essential factor in driving these evolutionary processes, the lack of which creates a “liability of newness” against the organization in its search to obtain the resources necessary for survival (Stinchcombe 1965). External forces are not alone, however, in influencing the direction of young organizations. Individual entrepreneurs and leaders interact with the organizational environment to shape the emergence and adoption of norms (Aldrich and Martinez 2001; Boin and Christensen 2004; Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). A direct application of these theories to public organizations may only produce partial explanations due to differences in the public-sector organizational environment. First, birth processes in the public sector are distinct from those in the private sector. Rather than entrepreneurial Collaborative Approaches to Public Organization Start-Ups 199 emergence in a resource-competitive environment, the creation mechanism for a public agency occurs through political processes. After emergence, public-sector organizations differ in composition and arrangement of their institutional, resource, and stakeholder environments (Frumkin and Galaskiewicz 2004). Stakeholders include elected officials, service clients, and the general public. Performance measures extend beyond the financial bottom line...