Managing Social Impact Bonds: Intermediary Work and Designing Institutional Infrastructure

Abstract

Collaborations addressing grand challenges seek social impact; whether such social innovations will endure beyond initial enthusiasm is a major issue. Over the last decade, Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) emerged to diffuse globally as a new form of cross sector collaboration to finance solutions for social problems. Crucially, SIBs rely on intermediary organizations to coordinate and govern relations across diverse actors with competing and conflicting interests and values. How an intermediary goes about this work has significant effects on whether the collaboration achieves the desired social impact and whether it endures. In this article, we examine the intermediary work that enables such a cross-sector collaboration by analyzing two of the first completed SIBs in Continental Europe. Our findings identify three main types of interweaving intermediary work of aligning, stitching, and knotting, that are supported by three distinct forms of institutional infrastructure (ideational, operational, and relational respectively) providing a significant contribution to the analysis of cross-sector collaboration by connecting intermediary work to institutional infrastructure.