| Summary: |
Our concern in this book is with the formidable task of dissecting
the extent and nature of the process whereby public
and nonpublic organizations work together. The era of
the manager’s cross-boundary interdependency challenge has
arrived, as has the world of working in the network of organizations.
Public functions are no longer the exclusive domain of governments.
Many seemingly private domains, such as those of
business creation, are at the core of public-sector developmental
functions. The term ‘‘intergovernmental’’ has new meaning
beyond federal–state, state–local, and interlocal connotations, to
include quasi-governmental and myriad contractual, regulatory,
subventional, reciprocal, and other interactive relationships with
organizations outside the public sector. More needs to be known
about the core nature of collaborative management, the kinds of
collaborative activities that exist, and what can be discovered about
the processes of managing collaboration.
This study attempts to go beyond the arguments about the
importance of interorganizational management by breaking it
down into its parts and sequences as well as to make suggestions
regarding how to manage the process. As such, the book can be
used as a research source by scholars, as well as a supplemental
text in many different areas, such as courses in intergovernmental
relations, managing networks, urban management, economic
development, and general public management.
Researching at the boundaries of governments and other organizations,
career-long endeavors for the authors, requires a very
high level of tolerance for ambiguity. Some say it is a gift and others
say it is acquired; we don’t know, but we do know it is not for
everyone. Being able to think, talk, and write outside the hierarchy,
about transactions between formal entities, may be equivalent to
social psychologists looking at interpersonal interactions. The
study of boundaries is sometimes avoided because of a lack of concreteness.
Clearly, in politics and administration, boundaries are harder to study than those within an organization. But their accelerating
prominence means that they cannot be put aside as foci of
study.
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