Facilitating Collaboration in Public Management (Research in Management Consulting)

Education, Research, Health, Social Security and other 'public goods' are organized by a mix of organizations, partly publicly-funded, partly private enterprises, partly public-private partnerships. The quality of the services relies greatly on the coordination and collaboration of these specialized organizations. How can cooperative relationships be built that guarantee trustful communication, binding decisions, and productive team-work? How can collaboration and competition be balanced? What are the differences between loose-coupled networks and tightly built collaborations and which type is the best solution for which tasks? How can mergers be managed as result of such collaboration? How must organizations prepare themselves and their internal structures to engage in trans-organizational collaboration? This volume investigates the potential and challenges inherent in collaborative ventures. It is based on the authors’ rich experiences derived from consulting engagements and research projects in publicly-funded service organizations, non-profit organizations, public-private partnerships, and for-profit enterprises. The focus is on the role that management consultants can play in facilitating such collaborative ventures. Especially within the European context, this particular organizational form is becoming an increasingly common and powerful type of organizational system, and, as such, interventions that can ease and expedite their performance demand our attention and scholarship. As the authors skillfully document and illustrate, cooperative relationships and networks function according to their own underlying logic, which is typically grounded in a spirit of collaboration and negotiation. As they argue, the resulting dynamic reflects a different perspective on building interpersonal, intergroup, and Interorganizational relationships, one that is removed from historic attempts at coordination through tight hierarchical control, which, as they underscore, is often