Cross-Sector Partnerships: Towards Strengthening their Social Effectiveness – Cross-PASSE

Cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) have emerged as an important means to address pressing societal challenges: Based on the collaboration across business, public, and civil society sectors, CSPs are expected to enable greater social effectiveness (i.e. addressing the social challenge and fostering positive societal impact) than unilateral or intra-sector actions. While previous studies in management research have examined the challenge of aligning diverse partner interests and ways of working in CSPs, insights into their social effectiveness remain surprisingly scarce. Initial evidence however suggests that CSPs do not necessarily live up to their potential, such as by failing to deliver on their targeted goals or by provoking beneficiary dependence. Consequently, this project is organized around two key aims. First, it aims to systematically explore the social impact of CSPs. It will do this by uncovering underlying mechanisms and extent deficits in CSPs’ social effectiveness through a comprehensive, interdisciplinary literature review. Second, this project aims to push extant research frontiers by scrutinizing opportunities to strengthen CSPs’ social effectiveness and elucidate the theoretical and managerial implications on the basis of a comparative, multiple case study design. The empirical approach thereby focuses on two, so far insufficiently analyzed levers to strengthen CSPs’ social effectiveness: companies’ evolutions from business-centric to society-centric approaches in their CSP engagement and the importance of investigating CSP closure dynamics and strategies through which social effects are sustained or eventually undermined. By integrating these insights into multi-level process frameworks, this project establishes much-needed connections between the discourse on CSP management and research insights into the addressing of societal grand challenges. From a societal perspective the project insights will help managers anticipate the challenges of and opportunities for strengthening CSPs’ social impact and, as a result, use this type of sector-spanning collaboration more effectively. Overall, advancing the CSP discourse and encouraging a more comprehensive view on these partnerships’ social effectiveness is critical at a time where the international community strongly advocates CSPs as a pivotal tool for achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.