Why do Some Boundary Organizations Result in New Ideas and Practices and Others only Meet Resistance?: Examples From Juvenile Justice

This study compares two federal grants, both from the same agency and both utilizing a national “boundary organization,” to assess how and why one was better able than the other to integrate divergent perspectives and produce new approaches to juvenile justice in multiple local jurisdictions. Results confirm the utility of boundary organizations but also show that not all organizations that bring together divergent perspectives necessarily result in anything new or better. Four factors stand out: (a) a different philosophy of evaluation research, (b) the grass-roots emergence of an inclusive rationale for the program that was orthogonal to the traditional “treatment versus punishment” ideology, (c) management strategies and agenda-setting arrangements at meetings that facilitated horizontal, upward, and downward information exchange, and (d) a different approach to knowledge and knowledge production that emphasized user-defined knowledge needs and diverse research methods. The case studies provide a wide ...