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“Despite a large body of scholarship elucidating mechanisms for aligning participant behaviors with public service goals in boundary-spanning collaborations, the most challenging of these collaborations — those with potential for lacking both common goals and common resources — have received relatively little attention from public management scholars. This study investigates approaches to structure and authority by managers of this sort of collaboration, specifically by the managers of cooperative research centers involving government, industry, and university actors. The findings suggest external approaches to structure and authority when such controls are perceived by managers as valuable for eliciting participant contributions, yet difficult to develop internally, and internal approaches when such controls are perceived as valuable for eliciting contributions, yet unattainable externally. The findings have implications for public management research and theory and, more broadly, for research and theory on organizations and networks. Whereas the conceptualization of structure and authority as resources is not new, here these are conceptualized as explicit rather than tacit, and therefore, in theory, as potentially transferrable across organizational boundaries rather than as a source of competitive advantage. The article concludes with propositions to test in future research.”