Here and now: Reconsidering context in cross-sector collaboration

This dissertation offers a dynamic view of why cross-sector collaboration is sometimes disappointing for the parties involved. Instead of presuming that the context for the collaboration is static and separate from the collaboration process itself, this dissertation reconsiders context as emerging in the moment and through the relational work of participants. Focusing on what matters to participants, three empirical studies examined their struggles and how context emerges through their interactional dynamics, their feelings about the project and partners, and their relational activities and tools. Two different cases were studied: a business-nonprofit partnership and a transdisciplinary collaboration. Methodologies include: conversation analysis, interpretive analysis, and collaborative auto-ethnography. The dissertation demonstrates how collaboration struggles and tensions are not necessarily determined by external context but through the relational work that brings collaboration to life. The three studies reveal this work to be (1) the navigating of rights and obligations related to knowledge, emotion, and power, (2) the aligning and bordering between self, others, and the project, and (3) inclusively broad sharing, participatory concretizing, and collective suspending of sense. Understanding these relational roles that participants play is necessary to understand how challenges can emerge and give participants the experience of being ‘stuck’ as they collaborate.