Organizing for Sustainability: Why Networks and Partnerships?

Abstract Purpose This chapter introduces the volume’s theme by considering how the forces of globalization and complexity are leading organizations to reshape and redesign themselves, how meeting the challenges of sustainable effectiveness and shared value require multiorganization networks and partnerships, and how networks and partnerships develop, function, and can produce both private benefits and public goods. Design/methodology/approach We apply findings from social and political evolution frameworks, partnership and collaboration research, and design for sustainability concepts to induce the likely conditions required for sustainable effectiveness from a network perspective. Findings Successful partnerships and collaborations in service of sustainable effectiveness will require individual organizations to change their objective function and build new and varied internal and external capabilities. Originality/value The chapter sets the stage for the volume’s contributions.

[1]  D. Korten.  When Corporations Rule the World , 1995 .

[2]  J. Nelson.  Building partnerships : cooperation between the United Nations system and the private sector , 2002 .

[3]  Peter R. Monge,et al.  Emergence of Communication Networks , 1999 .

[4]  B. Googins,et al.  Creating the Partnership Society: Understanding the Rhetoric and Reality of Cross‐Sectoral Partnerships , 2000 .

[5]  D. Korten,et al.  The great turning : from empire to Earth community , 2006 .

[6]  B. Hillebrand,et al.  The relationship between internal and external cooperation: literature review and propositions , 2003 .

[7]  C. Huxham,et al.  Identity Construction and Trust Building in Developing International Collaborations , 2009 .

[8]  Stephen J. Carson,et al.  Uncertainty, Opportunism and Governance: The Effects of Volatility and Ambiguity on Formal and Relational Contracting , 2006 .

[9]  Marshall W. van Alstyne,et al.  The State of Network Organization: A Survey in Three Frameworks , 1997, J. Organ. Comput. Electron. Commer..

[10]  John Elkington,et al.  Partnerships from cannibals with forks: The triple bottom line of 21st‐century business , 1998 .

[11]  Adam Werbach.  Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto , 2009 .

[12]  S. Borgatti,et al.  The Network Paradigm in Organizational Research: A Review and Typology , 2003 .

[13]  Simone de Colle,et al.  Stakeholder Theory: The State of the Art , 2010 .

[14]  Susan Albers Mohrman,et al.  Reconfiguring the Ecosystem for Sustainable Healthcare: Integrating Outside-In and Inside-Out Perspectives , 2014 .

[15]  Daniel J. Brass,et al.  Taking Stock of Networks and Organizations: A Multilevel Perspective , 2004 .

[16]  F. Scherer,et al.  Industrial Market Structure and Economic Performance. , 1971 .

[17]  Jagdish N. Bhagwati,et al.  In Defense of Globalization , 2005 .

[18]  C. Huxham.  Creating Collaborative Advantage , 1997 .

[19]  Massimo Scanziani,et al.  Competing on the edge , 2002, Trends in Neurosciences.

[20]  Philip H. Mirvis,et al.  Stages of Corporate Citizenship , 2006, IEEE Engineering Management Review.

[21]  Michael D. Pfarrer,et al.  A Communicative Framework of Value in Cross-Sector Partnerships , 2012 .

[22]  E. Lawler,et al.  Designing organizations for sustainable effectiveness : A new paradigm for organizations and academic researchers , 2014 .

[23]  David L. Cooperrider,et al.  Organizational dimensions of global change : no limits to cooperation , 2001 .

[24]  Silvia Prins,et al.  From Competition to Collaboration: Critical Challenges and Dynamics in Multiparty Collaboration , 2010 .

[25]  A. Crane,et al.  What is Stakeholder Democracy? Perspectives and Issues , 2005 .

[26]  D. Harvey.  A Brief History of Neoliberalism , 2020, The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles.

[27]  Chris Huxham,et al.  Managing to Collaborate: The Theory and Practice of Collaborative Advantage , 2005 .

[28]  P. Hawken.  Blessed unrest: How the largest movement in the world came into being and why no one saw it coming. , 2007 .

[29]  L. Brown.  Global Accountabilities: Multiparty social action and mutual accountability , 2007 .

[30]  Brian F. Nattrass,et al.  The natural step for business : wealth, ecology, and the evolutionary corporation , 1999 .

[31]  C. Huxham,et al.  Ambiguity, Complexity and Dynamics in the Membership of Collaboration , 2000 .

[32]  Joseph E. Stiglitz,et al.  The Price of Inequality , 2013 .

[33]  Matt Eyring,et al.  Nuevos modelos de negocios en los mercados emergentes , 2011 .

[34]  T. Friedman.  The Lexus and the Olive Tree , 1999 .

[35]  Christopher G. Worley,et al.  BUILT TO CHANGE ORGANIZATIONS AND RESPONSIBLE PROGRESS: TWIN PILLARS OF SUSTAINABLE SUCCESS , 2010 .

[36]  B. Gray.  Conditions Facilitating Interorganizational Collaboration , 1985 .

[37]  M. Tushman,et al.  Meta‐organization design: Rethinking design in interorganizational and community contexts , 2012 .

[38]  B. Googins,et al.  Beyond Good Company: Next Generation Corporate Citizenship , 2008 .

[39]  Amy L. Chua.  World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability , 2003 .

[40]  Barbara Gray,et al.  Collaborating: Finding Common Ground for Multiparty Problems , 1989 .

[41]  C. Oliver.  Determinants of Interorganizational Relationships: Integration and Future Directions , 1990 .

[42]  R. Freeman.  The Politics of Stakeholder Theory: Some Future Directions , 1994, Business Ethics Quarterly.

[43]  M. Weisbord.  Discovering Common Ground: How Future Search Conferences Bring People Together to Achieve Breakthrough Innovation, Empowerment, Shared Vision and Collaborative Action , 1995 .

[44]  E. Lawler.  Built to Change: How to Achieve Sustained Organizational Effectiveness , 2006 .

[45]  J. Gregory Dees,et al.  Sector-bending: Blurring lines between nonprofit and for-profit , 2003 .

[46]  R. Freeman.  Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach , 2010 .

[47]  R. Gulati,et al.  Where Do Interorganizational Networks Come From?1 , 1999, American Journal of Sociology.

[48]  Amory B. Lovins,et al.  Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution , 1999 .

[49]  John R. Ehrenfeld.  Sustainability by Design: A Subversive Strategy for Transforming Our Consumer Culture , 2008 .

[50]  D. Hess.  Localist Movements in a Global Economy: Sustainability, Justice, and Urban Development in the United States , 2009 .

[51]  Adrian J. Slywotzky,et al.  Adaptive Enterprise: Creating and Leading Sense-And-Respond Organizations , 1999 .

[52]  C. Huxham,et al.  Nurturing Collaborative Relations , 2003 .

[53]  G. Lynn,et al.  Marketing and Discontinuous Innovation: The Probe and Learn Process , 1996 .

[54]  Xiao-ping Chen,et al.  Achieving Cooperation in Multiparty Alliances: a Social Dilemma Approach to Partnership Management , 2003 .

[55]  W. Diebold,et al.  The Second Industrial Divide , 1985 .

[56]  Steve Waddell.  Global Action Networks , 2003 .

[57]  Eric Trist,et al.  Referent Organizations and the Development of Inter-Organizational Domains , 1983 .

[58]  D. Teece,et al.  DYNAMIC CAPABILITIES AND STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT , 1997 .

[59]  C. Oliver,et al.  Organizations Working Together , 1992 .

[60]  Steve Waddell.  Societal Learning and Change: How Governments, Business and Civil Society are Creating Solutions to Complex Multi-Stakeholder Problems , 2005 .

[61]  Ray Bert,et al.  Book Review: \IThe World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century\N by Thomas L. Friedman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005 , 2006 .

[62]  Charles William Eliot,et al.  The Harvard classics , 2008 .

[63]  Anne Parmigiani,et al.  Clearing a Path Through the Forest: A Meta-Review of Interorganizational Relationships , 2011 .

[64]  J. Peloza,et al.  The Role of Collaboration in Achieving Corporate Social Responsibility Objectives , 2009 .

[65]  Wayne Visser,et al.  The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business , 2010 .

[66]  K. Provan,et al.  Interorganizational Networks at the Network Level: A Review of the Empirical Literature on Whole Networks , 2007 .

[67]  Jay R. Galbraith.  Designing Organizations: An Executive Guide to Strategy, Structure, and Process , 2001 .

[68]  Robert Costanza,et al.  Overcoming systemic roadblocks to sustainability: The evolutionary redesign of worldviews, institutions, and technologies , 2009, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[69]  C. Handy.  The age of unreason , 1989 .

[70]  Christopher G. Worley,et al.  Building a collaboration capability for sustainability: How Gap Inc. is creating and leveraging a strategic asset , 2010 .

[71]  James E. Austin,et al.  Collaborative Value Creation , 2012 .

[72]  M. Tushman,et al.  Ambidextrous Organizations: Managing Evolutionary and Revolutionary Change , 1996 .

[73]  Barbara Gray,et al.  Political Limits to Interorganizational Consensus and Change , 1986 .

[74]  H. Volberda.  Building the Flexible Firm , 1999 .

[75]  M. Seitanidi,et al.  Collaborative Value Creation , 2012 .

[76]  Chris Huxham,et al.  Doing things collaboratively: Realizing the advantage or succumbing to inertia? , 2004 .

[77]  Jay R. Galbraith.  Designing the Customer-Centric Organization: A Guide to Strategy, Structure, and Process , 2005 .

[78]  Ezequiel Reficco,et al.  Social Entrepreneurship: It's for Corporations, Too , 2006 .

[79]  Barbara Gray,et al.  Stakeholder Collaboration: Implications for Stakeholder Theory and Practice , 2010 .

[80]  Ida E. Berger,et al.  Social Alliances: Company/Nonprofit Collaboration , 2004 .

[81]  J. Moon,et al.  'Implicit' and 'Explicit' CSR: A Conceptual Framework for a Comparative Understanding of Corporate Social Responsibility , 2008 .