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

Many writers advocate interorganizational collaboration as a solution to a range of 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. By examining the stakeholders in the domain and asking who has formal authority, who controls key resources, and who is able to discursively manage legitimacy, researchers are in a stronger position to evaluate both the benefits and costs of these strategies and to differentiate more clearly between strategies that are truly collaborative and strategies that are not. In other words, we hope to demonstrate that collaboration between organizations is not necessarily “good”, conflict is not necessarily “bad”, and surface dynamics are not necessarily an accurate representation of what is going on beneath.