Social Innovation, Co-operation, and Competition: Inter-organizational Relations for Social Enterprises in the Delivery of Public Services

Abstract

Social innovation is seen as a way of developing new approaches to addressing social problems (Phills et al., 2008; Murray et al., 2010). As with innovation in other contexts, collaborative relations are often a factor in successful cases of social innovation, although little is known about how co-operation is built up and maintained. This chapter sets out an argument for understanding how these inter-organizational relationships operate. This is necessary in order to go beyond the empty rhetoric of terms such as ‘partnership’, ‘collaboration’ and ‘co-operation’, and understand how these complex forms of organizing are built and maintained (Hastings, 1996; Atkinson, 1999). There has been much discussion of the need for collaboration (OTS, 2009) and co-operation between organizations is given as a core value of some forms of social enterprises such as co-operatives (Spear, 2000), but very little work has been carried out on understanding the process of building these relationships.

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