Session: Mandated, Encouraged, and Contracted: A Critical Exploration of Power In Cross Sector Partnerships across Service Contexts (Society for Social Work and Research 31st Annual Conference)

This symposium extends existing scholarship by foregrounding an explicit analysis of power within these partnerships. In doing so, the symposium examines how structures of power shape the institutional conditions under which state-private sector partnerships form and are maintained, as well as how such partnerships shift or cement power arrangements between organizations and their constituents. Our symposium uses various interpretive qualitative methods to examine power within these partnerships and their impact on resource distribution, organizational strategies, and client-worker interaction. While documenting the tradeoffs in state-private sector partnerships has long been a focus of organizational studies, we offer research that explores what we term “organizational experiments,” a range of organizational arrangements, strategies, and actions newly taken up or mandated under simultaneously hostile and hollow state conditions.

Each symposium paper will explore an organizational experiment, providing insights into pressing questions of justice in organizational practice, including suppressing client autonomy, protecting client privacy, countering criminalization, and strengthening safety net services. Presenter 1 leverages the extended case method to examine how relationships between a public school district and the private sector attempt to create a stronger, localized safety net. Presenter 2 explores how suburban homeless service providers navigate state-mandated collaboration to address resource scarcity. Presenter 3’s ethnographic work highlights how organizational adaptations to crisis services are shaped by organizational position relative to state entities. Presenter 4 examines the increasing role of for-profit companies in governance through a comparative qualitative case study of child welfare contracting. Our analyses emphasize the implications of these organizational experiments across different service contexts- public education, services for unhoused clients, crisis work, and child welfare. Our emphasis on organizational experiments aims to contribute new insights into how organizations are making meaning of, navigating, and (re)shaping cross-sectoral partnerships.