Cross-sector partnerships: Mapping the field and advancing an institutional approach

Abstract

Cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) addressing economic, social, and environmental issues continue to be a vibrant topic in management research and beyond. However, compared to the exogenous factors that drive collaborative advantage through structures and governance, the endogenous problems of collaborating across different institutional logics, residing at the micro-level of interactions among partners from the business, government, and nonprofit sectors, have received scant attention. The preoccupation with success factors often leads to a bias toward the problem-solving capacities of CSPs at the neglect of the considerable barriers to successful collaboration across sectors. This study addresses this shortcoming and extracts an institutional approach of CSPs from an integrative review of the literature combining bibliometric methods with qualitative reviewing. A bibliometric map shows how the literature is divided into several clusters, each addressing a specific type of CSP but not engaging much in exchange with other clusters. Zooming in on the clusters provides a more nuanced picture of how institutional theory has hitherto been applied to CSPs. We build on these pieces of the puzzle and assemble them into a preliminary framework that accounts for inter-institutional conflicts in CSPs and actor-level responses to these conflicts. Our framework introduces a new analytical platform that facilitates multi-level research, bringing the micro-level of individual actors back in and connecting it with institutional frames at the macro-level.