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Recommended Readings

  • Recommended Reading

    Ethnic Conflict & Civic Life

    Varshney, A.

    This timely book, updated for the paperback edition, examines how civic ties between Hindus and Muslims in different Indian cities serve to contain, or even prevent, ethnic violence. It is of interest not only to South Asian scholars and policymakers but also to those studying multiethnic societies in other areas of the world.

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  • Recommended Reading

    Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown

    Safford, S.

    In this book, Sean Safford compares the recent history of Allentown, Pennsylvania, with that of Youngstown, Ohio. Allentown has seen a noticeable rebound over the course of the past twenty years. Facing a collapse of its steel-making firms, its economy has reinvented itself by transforming existing companies, building an entrepreneurial sector, and attracting inward investment.

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  • Recommended Reading

    Do networks really work? A framework for evaluating public‐sector organizational networks

    Provan, K. G. & Milward, H. B.

    Although cooperative, interorganizational networks have become a common mechanism for delivery of public services, evaluating their effectiveness is extremely complex and has generally been neglected. To help resolve this problem, we discuss the evaluation of networks of community‐based, mostly publicly funded health, human service, and public welfare organizations. Consistent with pressures to perform effectively from a broad range of key stakeholders, we argue that networks must be evaluated at three levels of analysis: community, network, and organization/participant levels.

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  • Recommended Reading

    Modes of Network Governance: Structure, Management, and Effectiveness

    Provan, K. G. & Kenis, P.

    This article examines the governance of organizational networks and the impact of governance on network effectiveness. Three basic models, or forms, of network governance are developed focusing on their distinct structural properties. Propositions are formulated examining conditions for the effectiveness of each form. The tensions inherent in each form are then discussed, followed by the role that management may play in addressing these tensions. Finally, the evolution of governance is explored.

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  • Recommended Reading

    Entrepreneurial strategies for managing interagency collaboration

    Page, S.

    Public administration increasingly entails interagency collaboration, contracting, and other interorganizational arrangements. These loosely coupled alternatives to unified hierarchy alter the nature of managerial work. This article explores how the entrepreneurial strategies that managers find useful in hierarchical agencies apply in collaborative settings where formal authority is lacking and sustaining cooperation among partners is critical for performance.

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  • Recommended Reading

    Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action

    Ostrom, E.

    The governance of natural resources used by many individuals in common is an issue of increasing concern to policy analysts. Both state control and privatization of resources have been advocated, but neither the state nor the market have been uniformly successful in solving common pool resource problems. After critiquing the foundations of policy analysis as applied to natural resources, Elinor Ostrom here provides a unique body of empirical data to explore conditions under which common pool resource problems have been satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily solved. Dr.

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  • Recommended Reading

    Collaboration across boundaries: Insights and Tips from Federal Senior Executive

    O’Leary, R. & Gerard, C.

    This report provides valuable insights into how federal senior executives view collaboration. Based on survey responses from over 300 members of the federal Senior Executive Service, O’Leary and Gerard found that nearly all those surveyed report using collaboration as a management strategy. Survey respondents clearly recognize that the job of senior executives today involves collaboration within their agency, their department, and the federal government, as well as with key external partners and stakeholders.

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  • Recommended Reading

    A manager’s guide to resolving conflicts in collaborative networks

    O’Leary, R. & Bingham, L. B.

    Collaboration continues to grow in importance, and public managers are increasingly using collaborative networks as a tool to accomplish public outcomes. Previous IBM Center reports on collaboration include “Leveraging Networks: A Guide for Public Managers Working Across Organizations” by Robert Agranoff, which describes the critical success factors for using networks to achieve important results. Another report, “A Manager’s Guide to Choosing and Using Collaborative Networks” by H. Brinton Milward and Keith G.

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  • Recommended Reading

  • Recommended Reading

    Leading Across Boundaries: Creating Collaborative Agencies in a Networked World

    Linden, R. M.

    Linden illustrates the importance of collaboration, but drives further into issues of networks to teach us valuable lessons about core interests, trust, leadership, and success. This book is a resource for practitioners who seek to produce more value from effective collaboration.

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  • Recommended Reading

    Weaving Complexity and Business: Engaging the Soul at Work

    Lewin, R. & Regine, B.

    Weaving Complexity and Business brings business people a new way of thinking about and working in the new economy, one that draws on the new science of complexity, which recognizes that business organizations are complex adaptive systems, in which people are crucial but unpredictable factors in their development. It offers managers and companies a deeper understanding of the organizational dynamics of today’s fast-paced/changing business environment both within companies and among them.

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  • Recommended Reading

    Governance network performance: A complex adaptive systems approach

    Koliba, C.

    If we are to assess the performance of networks within a public administration and policy context, we must regard them as tangible, observable structures comprised of nodes (or agents) and ties that formally or informally, tightly or loosely, couple two or more nodes together. The kind of “network logic” that accompanies the study of networks bears a significant impact on our understandings of network performance.

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  • Recommended Reading

    Consensus Building and Complex Adaptive Systems

    Innes, Judith E. & Booher, D. E.

    Consensus building and other forms of collaborative planning are increasingly used for dealing with social and political fragmentation, shared power, and conflicting values. The authors contend that to evaluate this emergent set of practices, a new framework is required modeled on a view of self-organizing, complex adaptive systems rather than on a mechanical Newtonian world. Consensus building processes are not only about producing agreements and plans but also about experimentation, learning, change, and building shared meaning.

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  • Recommended Reading

    Theorizing collaboration practice

    Huxham, C.

    This article provides an overview of the theory of collaborative advantage. This is a practice-oriented theory concerned with enhancing practical understanding of the management issues involved in joint working across organizations. Two contrasting concepts are central to it: collaborative advantage which is concerned with the potential for synergy from working collaboratively; and, collaborative inertia which relates to the often disappointing output in reality.

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  • Recommended Reading

    An Integrative Framework for Collaborative Governance

    Emerson, K., Nabatchi, T. & Balogh, S.

    Collaborative governance draws from diverse realms of practice and research in public administration. This article synthesizes and extends a suite of conceptual frameworks, research findings, and practice-based knowledge into an integrative framework for collaborative governance. The framework specifies a set of nested dimensions that encompass a larger system context, a collaborative governance regime, and its internal collaborative dynamics and actions that can generate impacts and adaptations across the systems.

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  • Recommended Reading

    Public participation in environmental assessment and decision making

    Dietz, T. & Stern, P. C.

    Federal agencies have taken steps to include the public in a wide range of environmental decisions. Although some form of public participation is often required by law, agencies usually have broad discretion about the extent of that involvement. Approaches vary widely, from holding public information-gathering meetings to forming advisory groups to actively including citizens in making and implementing decisions. Proponents of public participation argue that those who must live with the outcome of an environmental decision should have some influence on it.

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  • Recommended Reading

    A Practical Guide to Collaborative Governance

    Carlson, C.

    The Practical Guide was developed and written by Chris Carlson, founding director of the Policy Consensus Initiative (now Kitchen Table Democracy) and a leading authority on consensus building, and by Jim Arthur, a long-time facilitator and consultant in the use of dispute resolution to address policy conflicts. The Practical Guide to Consensus will help officials and agencies design the most appropriate, and effective, uses of consensus processes, with "Before, During, and After" instructions on how to:

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  • Recommended Reading

    Big Ideas in Collaborative Public Management

    Bingham, L. B. & O’Leary, R.

    The world of public management is changing dramatically, fueled by technological innovations such as the Internet, globalism that permits us to outsource functions anywhere in the world, new ideas from network theory, and more. Public managers no longer are unitary leaders of unitary organizations - instead, they often find themselves convening, negotiating, mediating, and collaborating across borders. "Big Ideas in Collaborative Public Management" brings together a rich variety of big picture perspectives on collaborative public management.

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  • Recommended Reading

    Developmental Dynamics: Interagency Collaboration as an Emergent Phenomenon

    Bardach, E

    Developmental dynamics are everywhere, from legislative coalition formation to the evolution of interorganizational cooperation to intraorganizational renewal. It is extremely hard to analyze such developmental processes.

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  • Recommended Reading

    Collaborating to Manage: A Primer for the Public Sector

    Agranoff, R

    Collaborating to Manage captures the basic ideas and approaches to public management in an era where government must partner with external organizations as well as other agencies to work together to solve difficult public problems.

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