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

14. Surprising Findings, Paradoxes, and Thoughts on the Future of Collaborative Public Management Research

Chapter 14 Surprising Findings, Paradoxes, and Thoughts on the Future of Collaborative Public Management Research Rosemary O’Leary and Lisa Blomgren Bingham In this chapter, we review a number of surprising findings our contributors have made in their studies of public managers in collaboration. These findings, and the work that supports them, lead us to identify a number of dimensions along which collaboration paradoxically leads to conflict. We briefly review a framework for addressing this conflict in collaborative networks. Then we close with a call for building on the contributions of this book by engaging in assessment and evaluation of the work of collaborative public managers across the policy continuum, from upstream in policy development to midstream in its implementation and downstream in policy enforcement. Within this call, we include evaluating how well collaborative networks manage conflict; this is a core component of collaboration. As the authors of the chapters in this book demonstrate, public managers who work collaboratively find themselves not solely as unitary leaders of unitary organizations. Instead, they often find themselves facilitating and operating in multiorganizational arrangements to solve problems that cannot be solved, or solved easily, by single organizations. Collaborative public management may include participatory governance: the active involvement of citizens in government decision making. The review of the literature in chapter 1 emphasizes that collaborative public management is not new a new phenomenon. In chapter 12, Emerson revisits this point, emphasizing that collaboration as a process is rooted in two competing political traditions: classic liberalism and civic 256 How and Why Public Managers Get Others to Collaborate republicanism. Classic liberalism, Emerson writes, with its emphasis on private interest, views collaboration as a process that aggregates private preferences into collective choices through self-interested bargaining. Organizations enter into collaborative agreements to achieve their own goals, negotiating among competing interests and brokering coalitions among competing value systems, expectations, and self-interested motivations . Conversely, civic republicanism, according to Emerson, with its emphasis on a commitment to something larger than the individual (whether that be a neighborhood or the state), views collaboration as an integrative process that treats differences as the basis for deliberation in order to assist at “mutual understanding, a collective will, trust and sympathy [and the] implementation of shared preferences” (March and Olsen 1989, 126, as quoted by Thomson and Perry 2006, 20). These two competing themes can be found throughout this book and account for some of the schism in how public management scholars study collaboration. The review of the literature in chapter 1 also emphasizes that whatever the motivation behind collaboration, there is no one best way to organize for collaboration and that the most studied factors involved in collaboration include structural and motivational dimensions, the nature of shared goals, the degree of risk or reward, the degree of involvement, the extent of interpersonal trust, shared norms, the quality and amount of shared resources, and the presence of formal agreements. The authors of the chapters in this volume build on these factors and at the same time yield numerous surprising findings. In chapter 8, the first surprising finding by Van Slyke is that public agencies contract with nonprofit agencies in part because of the perceived legitimacy of the nonprofit organization. Tied in with this, approximately 75 percent of the public managers in Van Slyke’s study perceived nonprofit organizations as having higher levels of public trust than their own agencies. Next, public agencies report the perception that nonprofits can better think “out of the box” and have stronger creative capacity. Also, public agencies contract with nonprofit agencies in part because nonprofits are not subject to the same media scrutiny as government, especially as it relates to failure. According to Van Slyke, collaboration between public and nonprofit organizations evolves in tandem with trust. In other words, he hypothesizes that trust is an antecedent to highly collaborative activities. This is echoed by Tschirhart, Amezcua, and Anker in chapter 2; they note that trust among the participants they studied was frequently mentioned as an important requirement for effective collaboration. Surprising Findings, Paradoxes, and Thoughts 257 Tschirhart, Amezcua, and Anker hypothesize that the earliest participants in a resource-sharing arrangement may play critical roles in shaping the membership in the sharing system. These authors suggest that if collaborative managers find themselves struggling to develop or sustain a resource-sharing arrangement, they should consider how much of their difficulty is related to differences of opinion on the...