The Evolution of Dyadic Interorganizational Relationships in a Network of Publicly Funded Nonprofit Agencies

This article addresses a gap in the extant literature on networks by assessing how interorganizational relationships evolve in a public sector network setting. The context for the research was a network of publicly funded health and human service agencies involved in service delivery to people with serious mental illness. Longitudinal data were collected from a single community. The analysis suggests that public and nonprofit sector relationships evolve differently than private sector partnerships, providing an alternative perspective to the prevailing view in organization theory. Policy makers have increasingly selected network forms of governance as a mechanism to provide health and human services to their constituents (Agranoff 1991; Bardach 1998; O’Toole 1997). Networks are thought to assist service providers in coordinating professional activities, resulting in enhanced services to clients. Although network forms of governance are a common mechanism used by state and local governments to accomplish coordination among their service providers, knowledge about the process of creating, maintaining, or growing linkages within a network is still just emerging. In particular, the question of how network relationships change over time remains largely unanswered. As policy makers continue to encourage the formation of service provision networks among private and nonprofit organizations, it is important to understand how networks work. The most extensive body of literature on interorganizational relationships and networks has been in organization theory. Unfortunately, the preponderance of this literature has focused on private sector settings. Although it is likely that some, and even many, findings in the private sector literature are transferable to the public sector, we do not This research was supported by a grant from the Nonprofit Sector Research Fund of the Aspen Institute (No. 99-NSRF19), Keith G. Provan, P.I. Isett would like to thank the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research for the resources to finish this article. Thanks also go to Brint Milward for his contribution to earlier phases of this research project. Address correspondence to Kimberly Roussin Isett at [email protected]. doi:10.1093/jopart/mui008 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Vol. 15, no. 1 a 2005 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Inc.; all rights reserved. JPART 15:149–165