Being Together in Innovative Partnerships

Author(s):

Mathilde Hjerrild Carlsen(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

15. Research Partnerships in Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

15 SES 05, Partnerships and Universities

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-23

13:30-15:00

Room:

K6.16

Chair:

Corinne Covez

Contribution

In 2015 Maria, the main character in the case in this article was appointed manager for a public private partnership project aiming at the development of a new lower and upper secondary school model in a Danish municipality. The project was based on a close collaboration between industrial companies and the municipality. The project was aimed at innovating existing schooling through this partnership organization. Maria had for some years been employed in the public school and municipal administration as a manager and driver for a number of collaborative innovation projects in collaboration with private companies. In the present project Maria had a pivotal role as an initiator and connector, so in the duration of one year as manager for the partnership project Maria build up collaborations with a number of companies using already established contacts and fostering new ones. Through the collaboration process four working groups where established and four prototypes for the new educational programs within the school where developed and tested. This paper analyses the project and the role of Maria in the project. The data was collected in a period from 2015 to 2017. In this period I observed meetings, participated in workshops and other events. My research interest in the project was to get a broad, contextualized understanding of a manager’s practices of connecting, relation building and coordination in the initial phases of a public private innovative partnership with a specific interest in how different ways of ‘being together’ are enacted and supported in the interactions. For this purpose I work within the theoretical field of French pragmatism which constitutes my entry to investigate on a concrete empirical level how objects, humans and conventional forms interact in specific situations to support or pose doubt on various ways of being together (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006 (1991); Thévenot 2001; Thévenot 2002; Thévenot 2011).

At the center of the project in case was the organizational form of a public private partnering. Furthermore the projects made use of a range of collaborative models and formats to support innovative and explorative processes. However it soon became apparent that the management in the project was not merely a question of coordinating explorative interactions organized through collaboration and innovation models. It was also question of enacting very durable personal relations through repetitive interactions with participant, that where established and maintained not only in the frames of this project but also in other settings. Two basically different values of ‘being together’ are present in this project. One puts value on meetings between persons that are new and unknown to each other in order to constructively challenge and enrich each other. The other is based on a value of familiarity, trust and caring, where the relation is established through interactions over time. The latter practice was performed in meeting series in the participants’ home turfs (companies), through getting accustomed to each other, and through a practice of caring and a continuous engagement in during relations that was manifest also in Maria’s warm, caring and calm body language.

The important point is that although these very different ways of being together are both present in the project, it is clear that they are not enacted and supported in the same way - one is strongly supported by collaboration forms and innovation models while the other is primarily enacted and supported by the human agents in the project. This difference has implications, among others for the visibility of these different aspects of innovative partnership projects and further for political and administrative decision making in relation to projects of this kind.

Method

Innovative public private partnerships and various collaborations seem to be an unavoidable imperative in the European public school today (Carlsen 2015; Davies and Hentschke 2006; Dhillon 2007; Glatter 2003; Lumby and Morrison 2006; Watson and Drew 2016). This apply also more generally in the public sector, and the massive political interest in innovation and in partnerships in the public sector has been mirrored also in social research (Osborne 2010). Research has been conducted on the management of innovative processes in education, which has also been the object of scholarly interest I recent years (Carlsen 2015; Perillo 2007; Pors 2011; Stoll and Temperley 2009) as well as managing cross-sector collaborations in general (Forrer, Kee, and Boyer 2014). Critical social research has also in Denmark engaged in the implications of the seemingly insatiable political demand for innovation and flexible organizational structures of partnerships (Agger and Tortzen 2015; Andersen 2008; Carlsen and Vaaben 2016; Højlund 2014; Pors 2011), where the partners’ relations seems to be so fluid that they are reduced to nothing but a promise of a promise (Andersen 2008). The analysis is based on two clusters of data. The first and most important dataset consists of observations regarding the specific partnership project starting in 2015 and still going on. These are observations of meetings and workshops in the project. Further interviews were conducted with the manager of the project (Maria) and documents gathered from the project (project documents, meeting agendas, presentations). The second dataset is used in a more generalized comparative manner, where some of the implications from the deeper analysis of dataset one can be broadened out. This second dataset consists of 28 interviews with school managers and teachers in 10 Danish and 4 American schools working with innovation and partnerships. Material was gathered from these schools regarding innovation and partnership activities and models used in the schools. This dataset was gathered in 2011-12. The two datasets thus make it possible to both go deep and also to do comparisons cross different innovative partnering projects in a time span of 5 years. The combination of the materials gathered as well as observations of practice makes it possible to analyze both the use of various collaboration and innovation models as well as human interactions.

Expected Outcomes

My main point in the paper is that the two different ways of being together and relating to each other in innovative partnership projects are not at all supported in the same way. The main difference lies in the role that ‘forms’ such as models versus human agents play in the interactions. While the innovative exploring way of being together in collaborative projects is heavily supported by a wide range of collaboration models and innovation models, the establishment of stable familiar relations is not supported by any model. It is basically dependent on the persons involved, and it is in the present case heavily dependent on the practice of the project manager. Furthermore this kind of engaging with each other is not qualified for verbalization. In contrast the non-committing explorative way of relating to each other is easily verbalized in the language of innovation and partnerships. To conclude I argue that this has two implications: First that the significance of continuous and familiar relations and the managerial task to establish and maintain these becomes invisible in these kind of projects. Second that because of this invisibility, third party political and administrative decision makers are in danger to overlook the significance of this kind of practice in their decision-making. There is a risk that political decision makers reduce the relations established in innovative partnership projects to a non-committing explorative relation.

References

References Agger, Annika and Anne Tortzen. 2015. Forskningsreview om samskabelse.University College Lillebælt. Andersen, Niels Å. 2008. Partnerships: Machines of possibility. Bristol: Policy Press. Boltanski, Luc and Laurent Thévenot. 2006 (1991). On Justification. Economies of Worth. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Carlsen, Mathilde H. 2015. "Ledelse af innovation i skolen." Pp. 339-355 in At lede efter læring: Ledelse og organisationer i den reformerede skole, edited by H. Bjerg and N. Vaaben. Frederiksberg: Samfundslitteratur. Carlsen, Mathilde H. and Nana Vaaben. 2016. "Grænseløse organisationer: Fra co-creation to co-stabilization." Social Kritik 28(146):24-31. Davies, Brent and Guilbert Hentschke. 2006. "Public-private partnerships in education: insights from the field." School Leadership & Management 26(3):205-226. Dhillon, Jaswinder K. 2007. "The rhetoric and reality of partnerhsip working." Journal of further and Higher Education 29(3):211-219. Forrer, John J., James Kee and Eric Boyer. 2014. Governing Cross-Sector Collaboration. San Fransisco: Jossey-Bass. Glatter, Ron. 2003. "Collaboration, collaboration, collaboration. The origins and implications of a policy." Management in Education 17(4). Højlund, Holger. 2014. "Det værdibaserede partnerskab. Et dansk samarbejdsprojekt om lokal sundhedsfremme." Nordisk Administrativt Tidsskrift 1(91. årgang):27-43. Lumby, Jacky and Marlene Morrison. 2006. "Partnerhip, conflict and gaming." Journal of Education Policy 21(3):323-341. Osborne, Stephen P., ed. 2010. The New Public Governance? Emerging perspectives on the thepry and practice of public governance. Oxon and New York: Routledge. Perillo, Suzanne. 2007. "Tension as an enabling characteristic of innovating in schools." International Journal of Educational Management 21:621-633. Pors, Justine G. 2011. "Noisy Management : A History of Danish School Governing from 1970-2010." Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg. Stoll, Louise and Julie Temperley. 2009. "Creative leadership: a challenge of our times." School Leadership & Management: Formerly School Organisation 1:65-78. Thévenot, Laurent. 2011. "Power and oppression from the perspective of the sociology of engagements: a comparison with Bourdieu's and Dewey's critical approaches to practical activitites." Irish Journal of Sociology 19(1):35-67. ------. 2002. "Conventions of co-ordinaton and the framing of uncertainty."in Intersubjektivity in Economics, edited by E. Fullbrook. London: Routledge. ------. 2001. "Pragmatic regimes governing the engagement with the world."in The Practice Turn in Comtemporary Theory, edited by T.R. Schatzki, K.K. Cetina and E.v. Savigny. London and New York: Routledge. Watson, Cate and Valerie Drew. 2016. "Enacting educational partnership: collective identity, decisionmaking (and the importance of muffin chat)." School Leadership & Management.

Author Information

Mathilde Hjerrild Carlsen (presenting / submitting)

University College Copenhagen

Management and Organizational Learning

Frederiksberg

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