The Paradox In Partnership: The Role of Conflict in Partnership Building

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In light of the blurred nature and conceptual imprecision with regard to the construct of partnership and the fragmented relevant literature, the introductory chapter provides an overview of types of partnerships, impetus for developing them and processes of building partnerships, underscoring their paradoxical nature and conflict dynamics. It constitutes an integrated conceptual map for the analysis of various types of organizational partnerships.

This essay, according to a theoretical framework by Ramsay (1997), considers participation in a specific context. Changes in the context determine cycles of participation with very different outcomes. The essay will first analyze the role of the broader democratic framework in modern society and the role of conflict. The concepts so highlighted will be applied to two Italian case studies, as a way to illustrate Ramsay's hypothesis in two different cycles of participation: the positive cycle from 1968 to 1974, and the negative one in the 1980s. Then the main changes in the socio-economic and political context in Europe will be considered. Based on the lessons learned, an alternative path to participation will be sketched.

Using the examples of China, Armenia and Tajikistan, this text will discuss the challenge of transition from a Communist planned economy to a market economy (or, in the case of China, a socialist market economy). Tripartism and the social dialogue (the formal dialogue between government, business and labor) are democratic tools to make this transition possible. Tripartism can be seen as a political and pragmatic approach to developing new industrial relations based on mutual balanced interests, rather than opposition or cooptation.

I will support this claim with data from evaluations of supported development projects in these three countries. The objectives of these projects were democratization of work life and the support of building a sustainable work life.

Tripartism is a type of partnership, or alliance, in work life. The alliance is designed to promote collaboration between the social partners, nationally and at the work place level. Instead of only envisioning labor relations as a continuous engagement with competitive orientation, power struggles and conflict, it can also be seen as a balancing of power, where each partner gives something in order to gain something. This is its greatest strength and may well be the root of its ability to transcend political, economic, cultural and historical differences, as demonstrated by the cases of the transition economies of China, Armenia and Tajikistan.

There is a growing consensus in recent years that Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) can offer sustainable and effective mechanisms for economic development. The importance of PPPs are even more pronounced in developing economies that are struggling to deal with some of the most challenging infrastructural and service issues. Within this context, the specific area of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) has particular relevance, given its enormous potential for advancing development objectives (termed "ICT4D"). However, this potential is a long way from being fulfilled, with ICT advancements in the developing world lagging far behind OECD and other industrialized countries. Public-Private Partnerships represent a key mechanism that can contribute in addressing this challenge, offering a large menu of possibilities for cultivating ICT4D related efforts to their fullest potential.

Inter-sector cooperation involves challenges and complexities which are accompanied by promising opportunities. How can we make sense of the various types of public and private sector activity in the ICT4D arena? What are the different models that characterize PPPs in ICT4D and what key opportunities and challenges do they present? Finally, how can we resolve the misunderstandings inherent in ICD4D PPP efforts? This paper addresses these questions by reviewing PPPs on a general level and proposing a conceptual model for understanding the various modalities of PPPs in ICT4D. The model is applied to a case study presented from a private sector perspective, shedding new light on the intricacies of such PPPs and their potential for accelerating socio-economic progress in the developing world.

Public decisions are often inter-organizational by nature. Inter-organizational decision processes are necessary in the planning and environmental domains in the United States at different levels (national, interstate, regional, local) around public decisions and initiatives. The coming together of very different public and private actors around specific problems is due to overlapping jurisdictions and mandates and to the interested parties’ realization that no unilateral action can either promote desired outcomes or prevent unwanted ones.

This chapter begins with a description of the kinds of collaborative processes seen in the American public decision arena, and of how they function. It will discuss some criteria used to evaluate collaborative processes and assess the success of their outcomes. It will then use an example of a public-private collaborative process in Northeast Ohio to explore a double paradox that appears to characterize such efforts. It seems that, contrary to what we might expect, even successful collaborative projects tend to be unsustainable. Moreover, institutionalization of their management – one strategy that can help sustain them – can become a liability instead of securing long-term survival.

Scholars studying organizations have been concerned about the relevance and the potential for applying knowledge produced by academics to management practice. The fact that academics and practitioners travel to divergent paths seems to pose the major barrier in the generation of applicable knowledge.

In an attempt to explore possible ways of circumventing this impediment, we propose partnerships between academics and practitioners as a vehicle for generating usable knowledge. The objective of the current chapter is to clarify the role of partnerships in developing applicable knowledge, while focusing on the socio-psychological and political dimensions underlying relationships between academics and practitioners.

We discuss the partnership format as a mechanism to promote the generation of usable knowledge, while examining the processes whereby such a partnership can be developed. We stress that the emergence of conflicts between academics and practitioners is one of the central elements in collaborative relationships, and that these discords must be dealt with in order to build a cooperatively oriented and sustainable partnership. We also discuss the issues of trust, power, and control which surface in the process of implementing partnership, signaling the gap between the idealized conception of partnership as a desirable arrangement on the one hand, and its reality on the other. We then present illustrations from two case studies showing the strengths and limitations in developing partnerships between academics and practitioners. Finally, we critically evaluate partnership as a potential vehicle for generating usable knowledge.

This paper presents a strategy for building intercultural partnerships through "negotiating reality." Negotiating reality sees conflict as an integral part of cross-cultural partnership build, but it distinguishes itself from "adaptation” strategies which assume that one party can understand and adjust their thinking and behavior to that of the other. Adaptation strategies are usually based on simplistic, stereotypical models of culture that may be valid in the context of short-term formal interactions, but not in the building of complex, long-term interactions. Negotiating reality, on the other hand, takes into account the cultural complexity of individuals and the contexts in which partnership building takes place. It encourages all parties to critically and openly reflect on how they perceive situations, the nature of the interaction, and what they believe should be done. In the process of negotiating reality parties make their own thinking explicit while at the same time inquiring into the thinking of others. The paper presents a case study, involving the authors of this paper, which illustrates a partnership between Jewish researchers and leaders of a Palestinian Arabs NGO that went wrong. Through negotiating reality, the partners were able to see the different ways they viewed each other and their partnership. They were also able to see how their actions were conditioned by the political and social context so that, despite good intentions, they reinforced dynamics and stereotypes they wished to change. Ironically, confronting the real differences established trust and improved the relationship.

The central argument we proposed in the introductory chapter and demonstrated throughout the various book chapters, maintains that partnerships are dialectic entities. On the one hand these arrangements are established in order to enable cooperation among the partners. Yet, each of the partners is motivated to promote and emphasize his or her own interests, at times at the expense of the other partners. We present a conceptual framework designed to synthesize the findings and insights of the preceding chapters. It focuses on factors promoting versus impeding the success of partnerships, in particular their capabilities to cope with the dialectic nature of these alliances. We address the following two questions: What factors influence the characteristics and intensity of the paradox? How can the partners cope with the duality?

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