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“Prior research flags the inherent incompatibilities between for-profit and non-profit partners and cautions that clashing value creation logics and conflicting identities can stall social innovation in cross- sector partnerships. Process narratives of successful versus unsuccessful cross- sector partnerships paint a more optimistic picture, whereby the frequency, intensity, breadth, and depth of interactions may afford frame alignment despite partners’ divergent value creation approaches. However, little is known about how cross- sector partners come to recognize and reconcile their divergent value creation frames in order to co-construct social value. Using longitudinal narratives of four dyads, we show that partners initially contrast their sector-embedded diagnostic frames and then work together to deliberately develop partnership-specific prognostic frames. We extend the literature on framing by developing a four-stage grounded model of frame negotiation, elasticity, plasticity, and fusion which unpacks the relational process of value creation in cross- sector partnerships. Our qualitative analyses further show how partners orchestrate multilevel coordination that helps scaffold and calibrate this relational process of frame fusion.”