Programmatic vs Process Outcomes for Systemic Change in Cross Sector Social Partnerships. Evidence from the UK context. 5th International Cross Sector Social Interactions (CSSI) Symposium in Toronto, 17-19 April 2016, Toronto, Canada.

Cross Sector Social Partnerships (CSSP) constitute “social problem solving mechanisms” (Waddock, 1989: 79) that aim to address social issues (Selsky and Parker, 2005) (e.g. education, poverty, health, environment). The collaboration (Gray, 1989; McCann, 1983; Huxham and Macdonald, 1992; Huxham, 1993) and social partnerships literatures (Waddock, 1991; Austin, 2000; Warner and Sulivan, 2004; Selsky and Parker, 2005; Galaskiewicz, and Colman, 2006; Wymer and Samu, 2003) have extensively documented the difficulties in developing partnerships (Teegen et al, 2004; Bryson et al, 2006; Kolk et al, 2008) due to misunderstandings, power imbalances (Berger et. al, 2004; Seitanidi and Ryan, 2007) and occasionally due to the lack of overt functional conflict (Seitanidi, 2010). The literature has identified several factors of what constitutes a successful partnership (Austin, 2000; Googins and Rochlin, 2001; Bryson et al, 2006; Rondinelli & London, 2003; Bouwen & Taillieu, 2004) and suggested stage models that identify key issues that need to be addressed within the different stages of social problem-solving interventions (Mc Cann, 1983; Gray, 1985, Waddock, 1989; Waddell and Brown, 1997; Seitanidi and Crane, 2009). Despite the identification of factors and issues as pre-conditions for successful partnerships the direct study of partnership outcomes is surprisingly a less prominent area of research, particularly within nonprofit-business partnerships (Seitanidi, 2010).