Strategies of Engagement: Lessons from the Critical Examination of Collaboration and Conflict in an Interorganizational Domain

Abstract

Many writers advocate interorganizational collaboration as a solution to a range organizational and intersectoral problems. Accordingly, they often concentrate on its functional aspects. We argue that collaboration deserves a more critical examination, particularly when the interests of stakeholders conflict and the balance of power between them is unequal. Using examples from a study of the UK refugee system, we argue that collaboration is only one of several possible strategies of engagement used by organizations as they try to manage the interorganizational domain in which they operate. In this paper, we discuss four such strategies: collaboration, compliance, contention and contestation...