Abstract
Interorganizational collaborations can help address societal challenges, yet often present contradictory demands to the actors involved, which can place constraints on the collaboration or even lead to its premature failure. We investigate how and why pathways to failure emerge or can be prevented by drawing on paradox theory with a practice perspective. In a multiple case study of four interorganizational collaborations aimed at developing livable cities, we analyze how actors navigate the business–society paradox and deal with emerging vicious cycles that can paralyze the collaboration. We show how vicious cycles emerge, become perpetuated, and can be mitigated. Interconnected practices that favor either a business- or societal-dominant orientation can lead to so-called slipping points. As practices are perpetuated, a tipping point is reached that makes the latent paradoxical tensions salient and leads to collaboration fracture. Our findings show that such fractures can act as a wake-up call rather than a complete breakdown: they can enable actors to mitigate tensions and explore new opportunities for paradox navigation. Our study provides insights for research on paradox theory and interorganizational collaborations.
Introduction
Societal challenges such as natural disasters (Jarzabkowski et al., 2022), poverty (Sharma and Bansal, 2017), and urban crises (Mora et al., 2023) exhibit a complexity that organizations cannot address singlehandedly (Ferraro et al., 2015; George et al., 2024). Therefore, actors seek collaborations across organizational boundaries to develop innovative solutions to address these challenges (Huxham and Vangen, 2000; Jarzabkowski et al., 2022). Yet bringing together heterogeneous actors poses unique challenges (Jarzabkowski et al., 2022) that may lead to failure (Le Ber and Branzei, 2010; Zuzul, 2019). This is concerning, as collaborations are crucial for tackling complex societal problems (George et al., 2024). Interorganizational collaborations face challenges in terms of complex governance arrangements (Couture et al., 2023), the need to align interests of a potentially large number of diverse actors (Grimm and Reinecke, 2024; Jarzabkowski et al., 2022), and the necessity to simultaneously compete and collaborate (Stadtler and Van Wassenhove, 2016). Interorganizational collaborations addressing societal challenges are prone to paradoxical tensions of addressing societal issues while remaining commercially viable (Sharma and Bansal, 2017; Smith et al., 2013). Paradoxical tensions involve “contradictory yet interdependent elements that appear simultaneously and persist over time” (Smith and Lewis, 2011: 386). Prior work highlights the complexity of navigating the business–society paradox (Pamphile, 2022; Smith and Besharov, 2019), showing how business objectives often overshadow societal objectives, resulting in systemic imbalance (Hahn et al., 2016; Selsky and Parker, 2005). Navigating this paradox amid the added complexity of interorganizational collaborations becomes increasingly important to prevent collaborative failure (Sharma and Bansal, 2017).
To understand how interorganizational collaborations may get stuck in recurring challenges as they navigate the business–society paradox, we must first understand how to deal with paradoxes. Not properly navigating paradoxes can trigger vicious cycles of unproductive exchanges between actors (Schad et al., 2016; Tsoukas and Cunha, 2017). Vicious cycles are amplifying loops in which tensions between paradoxical poles are perpetuated or exacerbated, mostly by defensive or simplistic responses to paradox (Smith and Lewis, 2011), which make a bad situation increasingly worse (Tsoukas and Cunha, 2017). In the context of interorganizational collaborations, actors are often unable to collectively make sense of and deal with the issues at hand (Couture et al., 2023), and therefore subsequent emerging vicious cycles carry the risk of not achieving the desired impact (Couture et al., 2023) or even cause the collaboration to fail (Grimm and Reinecke, 2024; Zuzul, 2019).
While previous research has discussed the drivers of vicious cycles (Es-Sajjade et al., 2021) and how decision dysfunctions contribute to these cycles (Ungureanu et al., 2019), how vicious cycles emerge and can be mitigated through interorganizational collaborations is unclear. In particular, research has not investigated how individuals make sense of or act on tensions to shape collaboration. To address this gap, we adopt the practice perspective on navigating paradox (Jarzabkowski and Lê, 2017; Lê and Bednarek, 2017). Studies using this perspective indicate that different practices are required to move from vicious cycles to virtuous cycles in individual or organizational settings (e.g. Pradies et al., 2021) or show how different practices may foster the emergence of vicious cycles in collaborations, hindering their development (Ungureanu et al., 2019). Yet practice theory underscores the importance of considering relationality and interdependence in understanding social phenomena (Lê and Bednarek, 2017). To better understand how pathways to failure emerge or can be prevented, we set out to investigate how practices contribute to the emergence of vicious cycles and how actors (collectively) respond to these. Depending on their choice of practices, their response may escalate vicious cycles (leading to failure) or alternatively may enable virtuous ones (avoiding failure). Thus, our research question is: How do different practices contribute to the emergence and mitigation of vicious cycles when navigating the business–society paradox in interorganizational collaboration?
To answer this question, we conduct an inductive multiple case study with two longitudinal and two retrospective cases of interorganizational collaborations. These collaborations focused on solving societal issues (e.g. congestion, pollution) by fostering livable cities, particularly by organizing sustainable last-mile deliveries of goods and services to clients in city centers. The aim was to address these societal issues by means of a business model that would be economically viable and sustainable for all actors in the collaboration, which led to contracting demands and sparked tensions. Our findings indicate that actors begin collaborating by enacting practices in line with their collective orientation, unaware that they implicitly favor one set of objectives. Such a single-minded focus can fuel a vicious cycle over time. We introduce two core concepts to explain this phenomenon: slipping points, or gradual movements toward amplifying vicious cycles, and tipping points, or instances when tensions become salient and require rethinking of the collaboration. While slipping and tipping points can lead to collaborative collapse, our study also demonstrates that they can also prompt actors to develop new ways of navigating tensions and reshape their collaborative efforts.
Our research offers three main contributions. First, we contribute to the literature on interorganizational collaboration by providing a processual account of how collaborations can fail over time. By building on the business–society paradox, we show empirically how vicious cycles emerge through practices that exacerbate initial one-sided orientations. Second, we combine paradox theory with a practice perspective to show how interconnected practices can contribute to the emergence and mitigation of vicious cycles. By introducing two concepts—slipping and tipping points—we explain how different practices can induce slipping points that exacerbate and escalate a vicious cycle and how tipping points can instigate a rupture that enables actors to mitigate the vicious cycle. Third, we provide guidance on how to mitigate vicious cycles. We show how mitigation is a multifaceted and iterative process in which prior practices as well as the nature of the tipping point influence actors’ ability to navigate tensions and may lead to different outcomes. Building on our findings, we theorize how escalation of vicious cycles can turn into a fruitful opportunity for recalibration if there is sufficient shared commitment among the actors to work through tensions and develop new practices.
Theoretical background
Business–society paradox in interorganizational collaborations
More than two decades of research on interorganizational collaborations has demonstrated their effectiveness in addressing societal challenges by combining resources and expertise (Ferraro et al., 2015; Huxham and Vangen, 2000; Jarzabkowski et al., 2022). Yet evidence shows that such collaborations are challenging to initiate and maintain, as the need to collaborate across boundaries adds complexity to achieving intended objectives (Le Ber and Branzei, 2010; Sharma and Bansal, 2017). Aligning different goals and perspectives can be difficult (Ashforth and Reingen, 2014; Smith and Besharov, 2019) and attempts to bridge these differences can backfire and lead to divisive conflicts that derail collaboration (Le Ber and Branzei, 2010; Zuzul, 2019). These challenges grow more complex when organizations pursue both business and societal goals (Manzhynski and Figge, 2020), which may require repeated efforts to navigate relational and content differences to prevent collaborations from collapsing (Grimm and Reinecke, 2024). Many collaborations therefore still fail before they make their intended impact for societal good (Sharma and Bansal, 2017; Zuzul, 2019).
To unpack why such collaborations struggle, we turn to the literature on business–society paradoxes (e.g. Pamphile, 2022; Sharma and Bansal, 2017; Van der Byl et al., 2020), which refer to achieving social goals while also remaining commercially profitable. The need to navigate these contradictory but interrelated demands creates additional complexity in sustaining collaborative efforts (Jarzabkowski et al., 2022; Smith and Lewis, 2011). An emphasis on the business pole implies a predominant focus on economic performance and the application of business case thinking (Hahn et al., 2014), with social interests only integrated if they meet economic objectives (Kramer and Porter, 2011; McWilliams and Siegel, 2011). In contrast, an emphasis on the society pole implies a predominant focus on long-term societal impact (Bansal and DesJardine, 2014), with economic benefits a secondary concern (Rivoli and Waddock, 2011). A collaboration that aims to address a societal challenge is typically confronted with the need to attend to both poles to remain viable.
Navigating the business–society paradox, especially in interorganizational settings, can be difficult for several reasons. First, too much emphasis on individual business objectives may lead to missed opportunities to explore new areas of sustainable solutions for society at large (Hahn et al., 2016; Selsky and Parker, 2005) or result in mission drift, in which actors collectively lose sight of their societal objectives (Ebrahim et al., 2014; Jarzabkowski et al., 2019). Conversely, too much emphasis on social objectives may lead to societal impact in the short run, but the lack of financial support is likely to undermine an initiative’s ambitions in the long run (Bansal and DesJardine, 2014). Second, defensive responses to paradoxes in complex settings, such as overemphasizing one pole, result in vicious cycles in organizing (Smith and Lewis, 2011; Van der Byl et al., 2020), which become particularly salient in interorganizational contexts (Jarzabkowski et al., 2022; Schrage and Rasche, 2022). Sharma and Bansal (2017), for example, find that actors in collaborations that did not actively engage in pursuing both business and societal objectives were less effective in balancing competing demands and less flexible in catering to one another’s needs than actors who addressed and confronted tensions together. In general, more sophisticated responses that shift over time are required in complex settings to navigate paradoxes (Jay, 2013). Finally, collaborative efforts are often influenced by business case thinking or individual interests (Manzhynski and Figge, 2020; Slawinski et al., 2024), which can complicate collaborative efforts and spark defensive responses to navigating societal objectives. As actors pursue diverse and often contradictory objectives, they need to both collaborate to achieve joint objectives and compete to protect their individual objectives (Manzhynski and Figge, 2020; Stadtler and Van Wassenhove, 2016).
A practice perspective on navigating paradox in organizational and interorganizational contexts
Practice theory conceptualizes social phenomena as being constructed by the “mundane,” everyday practices of actors and has been used to help explain how actors navigate paradox in various contexts (Lê and Bednarek, 2017). For example, research has shown how certain practices that promote accepting or embracing tensions (Luscher and Lewis, 2008), or using humor (Jarzabkowski and Lê, 2017), help foster virtuous cycles or amplifying loops of improvement by enabling synergy between the paradoxical poles (Smith and Lewis, 2011). Similarly, defensive or simplistic practices enacted in response to paradoxical tensions such as procrastinating (Ungureanu et al., 2019) can trigger and amplify vicious cycles. Over time, actors may tend to resort to increasingly simplistic responses, leaving them unable to pursue the opposing pole (Sundaramurthy and Lewis, 2003; Tsoukas and Cunha, 2017). Once set in motion, even by the smallest of actions, a vicious cycle will intensify until actors intervene to rectify the imbalance or the system collapses (Masuch, 1985; Tsoukas and Cunha, 2017; Weick, 1979: 72).
Unlike earlier studies on paradox navigation and vicious cycles, which mainly focussed on how vicious cycles unfold and which conditions contribute to this process (e.g. Es-Sajjade et al., 2021; Sundaramurthy and Lewis, 2003; Tsoukas and Cunha, 2017), a practice perspective can provide a better understanding of what actors actually do to navigate paradoxes (Lê and Bednarek, 2017). Such approaches have already shown to be quite powerful in explaining the complex process of paradox navigation in pluralistic settings (Jarzabkowski et al., 2022; Slawinski et al., 2024). However, we currently still lack a fine-grained longitudinal account of how different practices contribute to emergence and mitigation of vicious cycles in interorganizational contexts. Current research tends to only look at only parts of this process, which is troublesome as both paradox theory and practice perspectives treat social phenomena as relational, interdependent, and evolving over time (Jarzabkowski et al., 2007; Lê and Bednarek, 2017)—hence, emergence and mitigation of vicious cycles cannot be seen in isolation. For example, several studies investigate how actors may escape vicious cycles (Huq et al., 2017; Pradies et al., 2021). They show how this process is no easy feat but rather involves different practices that contribute to breaking dysfunctional dynamics underlying vicious cycles (Pradies et al., 2021). Furthermore, they shed light on the relational nature of breaking out of vicious cycles as supporting actors (Pradies et al., 2021) or other professionals (Huq et al., 2017) may be required to strengthen the weaker pole and facilitate new responses (i.e. practices) to paradox. Yet, such studies do not look into how this process unfolds in interorganizational contexts, where diffused power dynamics and conflicting priorities may complicate such efforts (Cunha and Putnam, 2019; Schad and Bansal, 2018). Moreover, they do not take into account how actors get stuck in vicious cycles.
Different studies investigate how actors get stuck in vicious cycles, showing the intricate process of how vicious cycles may become progressively worse (e.g. Es-Sajjade et al., 2021; Sundaramurthy and Lewis, 2003). Most notably, Ungureanu et al. (2019) show how unproductive engagement with tensions may lead to decision dysfunctions (e.g. indecision, procrastination, escalating commitment) that spark vicious cycles in interorganizational collaborations. Yet, these studies do not address the intricate process of breaking out of such vicious cycles in interorganizational contexts. Hence, to get a thorough understanding of how actors must navigate the business-society paradox in interorganizational collaborations to prevent collaborative failure, we cannot focus on either the emergence or mitigating of vicious cycles—we need to understand both. As such, we explore how actors’ practices uniquely shape the emergence, entrenchment, and mitigation of vicious cycles and the dynamic interplay between them.
Methodology
Research design
We conducted an inductive, comparative case study to build theory on the emergence of vicious cycles in collaborations; case studies help understand the dynamics occurring in a specific setting and build theory (Yin, 2003). We first followed two longitudinal cases of interorganizational collaborations in the context of livable cities, designed to address societal challenges in a business friendly and economically sustainable way (MediHub and CareHub; see Table 1). For these cases, we followed the emergence of recurring challenges over an extended period and observed practices in vivo (Pettigrew, 1990). We also conducted research on two retrospective cases (BuildHub and RetHub; see Table 1). To ensure comparability, all cases clearly pursued business and societal objectives in similar empirical contexts, were reasonably sized with more than 10 heterogeneous actors, and had a similar design involving customers, a hub, suppliers, and a municipality. In all four cases, the collaborations ultimately ended up prioritizing either business or societal objectives, despite their original pursuit of both. The inherent tensions resulted in actors getting stuck in recurring challenges and being unable to effectively address the opposite objective, with negative consequences.
Overview of different cases.
The benefit of combining both longitudinal and retrospective cases was that it provided interesting synergies we could exploit to build theory (Leonard-Barton, 1990). On one hand, the cases of MediHub and CareHub were ideal to trace change and decisions over time but more difficult to generalize, as the research was bound to specific contexts (Jarzabkowski et al., 2019). On the other hand, the cases of BuildHub and RetHub lacked depth to gain a better understanding of cause and effect (Eisenhardt, 1989; Yin, 2003) but were useful to increase generalizability and recognize process patterns. Together, the different characteristics of these cases provided both depth and breadth to our analysis, increasing the generalizability and trustworthiness of our findings (Jarzabkowski et al., 2019; Leonard-Barton, 1990).
Research context
Our research focuses on the context of livable cities, whose goal is to be inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable. More than half the world’s population is currently living in and around cities, and this number will dramatically grow through 2050 (United Nations, 2017). Thus, issues such as healthcare, transportation, construction, and safety are likely to exacerbate existing sustainability challenges. A particular issue is the increasing amount of goods and services that must be delivered to inner cities, often referred to as the “last mile” of a given supply chain. Last-mile deliveries are inefficient, polluting, costly, and complex to organize, as many organizations fail to collaborate to bundle the delivery of goods and services or use environmentally friendly delivery methods. Consequently, a growing number of trucks are congesting and polluting inner cities, contributing to an unsafe and unhealthy environment for inhabitants. Through smart organizational designs and bundling of goods and services, efficiency of last-mile deliveries can be improved (Figure 1), with lower costs or increased service levels and improved social and environmental outcomes. In general, last-mile collaborations involve customers, suppliers, a “hub” responsible for efficiently coordinating and bundling deliveries from suppliers to customers, and municipalities seeking to resolve pollution and congestion problems in urban areas. Despite their promise, many such collaborations struggle to scale up their activities and achieve their intended purpose.
Schematic overview of last-mile concepts.
The logistics industry, which tends to operate on low margins, requires a large number of participants and a systemic approach for ensuring the fair distribution of costs and benefits across the supply chain. While many last-mile initiatives are launched, often with the help of public funding, few survive after funding runs out for lack of a business case, despite having shown promising results in tackling safety, congestion, or emissions issues. Thus, last-mile collaborations, particularly those that aim to function as a business collaborative without ongoing support from public funding or philanthropic sources, present a uniquely suitable context for examining how actors navigate the paradoxical tensions between business and societal objectives. Actors may rely on traditional economic or business activities already well established in supply chains and try to make a sound business case without necessarily prioritizing or achieving a societal impact. They may also gain temporary funding and a short-term business case to explore innovative approaches to achieve societal impact but, over time, overlook business opportunities. Careful navigation is required for these collaborative efforts to flourish and pursue both objectives.
Data collection
We collected data from multiple sources, including interviews, observations, and documents (Table 2). For the two longitudinal cases, we followed their development from their inception in 2019 until late 2022, interviewing key actors and using snowball sampling to gain access to other informants. Informants were individuals who represented the different organizations involved in the collaboration, some of whom were involved in setting the strategic direction of the collaboration, and others who were responsible for carrying out operational tasks (Jarzabkowski et al., 2019; Lumineau and Oliveira, 2018). Interviews began with open questions about the collaboration and its objectives, followed by questions about how actors enacted and experienced the collaboration. As we recognized business–society tensions in the collaboration, we increasingly refined our interview guide to delve deeper into this dynamic (Locke, 2000). To track the evolution of each collaboration over time, we interviewed some informants several times at regular intervals over the three-year period of our study. The first author also regularly observed strategy meetings, research meetings, and brainstorming sessions held by each collaboration. These provided valuable data on progress, emerging tensions, and relations between actors and practices over time (Jarzabkowski et al., 2019). Finally, we collected periodic reports and presentations to triangulate our interview and observation data.
Overview collected data.
Approximately 18 months after data collection on the longitudinal cases had begun, we questioned whether our preliminary insights were merely a unique phenomenon of these cases or were also applicable and generalizable to other settings (Leonard-Barton, 1990). As the collaborations were quite complex, we wanted to make sure we considered sufficient nuance and detail to further theorize our findings. Thus, we added two retrospective cases, which experienced either a successful navigation orientation or a challenging and detrimental orientation (Eisenhardt, 1989). We reached out to several European last-mile initiatives and identified BuildHub and RetHub. For both cases, we interviewed key informants, all of whom were heavily involved in their respective collaboration. The interviews focused on how business–society tensions had evolved over time, how they affected collaboration, and what actors did in response to them. We also collected rich documents to help validate informants’ retrospective accounts and fill in missing information as necessary.
Data analysis
Analysis of our longitudinal cases data began early in the data collection process, allowing us to adjust our research design and interview protocols as the different collaborations evolved over time. While our analytical process was iterative, for reasons of parsimony, we present it here in four consecutive steps.
Step 1: writing thick chronological descriptions
Our first step was to structure the data for the different cases and construct thick descriptions of their progression (Langley, 1999). We used an open mind for the interviews, documents, and observations to construct chronological narratives of how cases developed from inception until the end of 2022. We wrote memos on topics and events of interest to track our thought process and reexamined these throughout the analysis process. After identifying the business–society paradox in the longitudinal cases, we fully embraced this perspective in the retrospective cases as well. We further explicated the tensions between business and societal objectives and identified how they affected the collaboration in each case.
Step 2: inductive coding and temporal bracketing
In the second step, we used the descriptions as input for our inductive coding, identifying clusters of similar activities, ideas, and processes. We assessed what happened (e.g. events, decisions, conflict), by whom (e.g. individuals, project level, their roles), and how (what did they do, think, or aspire to do) and assigned codes guided by our research question (Pettigrew, 1990). This process gave us a sense of how tensions played out in different interorganizational settings. We took notes throughout our coding process to keep track of our ideas as we progressed through the analysis. We also identified how tensions were actually shaped by the “doings” and “sayings” of actors as they engaged with the paradox (e.g. prioritizing own business interests practices) (Lê and Bednarek, 2017). The use of temporal bracketing (Langley, 1999) enabled us to structure the emerging findings into three distinct phases in terms of how tensions were emphasized and actors responded to them: emergence, perpetuation, and mitigation of vicious cycles. Here, we became aware of an emphasis on either business or societal objectives, hinting at different “orientations.”
Step 3: zooming in and out per case
For a comprehensive analysis, in this step, we iterated between zooming in on specific temporal brackets, tensions, actors, and practices to identify their relationships on a micro level (e.g. actors pursuing individual objectives or steering away from discussing societal objectives) and zooming out to the challenges at the interorganizational level (e.g. actors collectively unable to construct a business case). This method helped trace tensions and responses over time, keeping the temporal story intact (Jarzabkowski et al., 2019). For example, zooming out showed how MediHub’s ongoing emphasis on the business pole emerged and persisted, with tensions becoming increasingly salient. By zooming in on the different brackets, we identified how a combination of practices fueled this process and how vicious cycles emerged. We found that different practices guided the evolution of vicious cycles. By zooming in on the phases of emerging and perpetuating vicious cycles, we identified “slipping points” that occurred when different practices caused the collaboration to move excessively toward one pole of the business–society paradox, creating a systemic imbalance that became self-reinforcing without intervention. We subsequently identified “tipping points” between the perpetuating and mitigating phases—these are catalyzing events in which tensions became particularly salient, creating collective recognition of systemic imbalance and making previously entrenched polarization visible and actionable. We identified how tipping points could lead to collaborative collapse or how actors enacted mitigating practices to try to escape the vicious cycle (see Table 3). This step shows the interplay of practices and different slipping and tipping points in vicious cycles.
Enacted practices across case evolution.
Crossed-out practices mean they are not enacted in these retrospective cases as opposed to in the longitudinal cases.
Step 4: cross-comparison of cases
After our in-depth analysis of the individual cases, we compared the insights from the longitudinal cases with those from the retrospective cases to gain deeper insight into the two orientations and to determine the extent to which the results were generalizable (Leonard-Barton, 1990). For example, we iterated between the emergent codes of MediHub and BuildHub and found that both the observed phenomena and the emergent codes we connected with the data were quite similar for both the initiating and perpetuating practices, as well as the slipping points. Next, we agreed on a final set of practices that initiated and perpetuated a vicious cycle in the business-dominant orientation, as well as the slipping point that connected them. We found similar evidence in the societal-dominant orientation when comparing CareHub and RetHub. The retrospective cases therefore confirmed our detailed longitudinal findings of the initial stages of emerging vicious cycles, providing more generalizable results (Leonard-Barton, 1990).
We applied a similar approach in the mitigating phase and uncovered differences in how the vicious cycles played out and how actors collectively responded to navigate tensions. We found that sometimes tipping points led to a regressive deadlock, resulting in collaborative collapse, and sometimes they sparked transformational breakthroughs, which allowed actors to adopt mitigating practices. We identified actors’ responses to the tipping point and traced backward to the initiating and perpetuating phases to identify how and why this could happen. For example, how was CareHub able to navigate tensions after a tipping point, but RetHub was unable to do so? This had to do with the practices and momentum they had generated earlier on, hinting at a relationality of the different practices as well. We used such comparisons to further enrich our understanding of the emergence and mitigation of vicious cycles, which we further refined and worked into a final conceptual model.
Findings
In this section, we elaborate on how the actors in our cases initiated collaboration, how they contributed to triggering emerging vicious cycles, and how they attempted to mitigate these. Although all four cases initially pursued both business and societal objectives, our analysis showed how particular practices led each to emphasize one or the other pole, resulting in a vicious cycle. We identified a business-dominant orientation in MediHub and BuildHub and a societal-dominant orientation in CareHub and RetHub. We also discuss how (un)successful navigation of the business–society paradox can escalate or mitigate vicious cycles in interorganizational collaborations. We start off with the longitudinal cases of both orientations and then move to a comparison of the retrospective cases. Appendices 1 and 2 provide additional data for both respective orientations.
Business-dominant orientation
Initiating practices: maneuvering toward self-interest
The MediHub collaboration was initiated in October 2019 by three organizations on a common campus (universities X and Y and a hospital, hereinafter called “project team”) as an experimental research consortium that aimed to design the sustainable transportation of goods to the campus to improve safety, congestion, and emissions, while making these solutions financially viable and scalable. The project team served as the end customer and was also responsible for coordinating the collaboration. The consortium also consisted of several suppliers, a new logistics hub for bundling goods, the municipality, and several research institutes. The project team received government funding to begin experimenting. Although off to a promising start, it quickly became evident pursuing both business and societal objectives was quite difficult. We identified two practices that initiated a vicious cycle in collaborative efforts: “prioritizing own business interests” and “deflecting responsibility.”
The project team selected a project manager from university X to bundle the delivery of goods, in close collaboration with the hub, with whom the team had to negotiate terms on how to connect more suppliers, both operationally and financially. The team met regularly and invested considerable time and effort to coordinate the objectives. However, in early meetings at the end of December 2019, we observed the hub owner prioritizing own business interests (observation, 11-2019/12-2019) to increase revenue and volumes, instead of actively engaging with other consortium partners: It could be that the [research] project will explore that the last-mile setup could be better, but I cannot concentrate on that. I am a business guy. I have to concentrate on my business. If researchers have another idea about how it should work, they can come to me. But I am not going to change, I already started one and a half years ago. (owner hub, interview, 12-2019)
Prioritizing his own business interests clashed with the need for a collective solution involving multiple actors, which now became clear: volumes of goods could only be increased if campus organizations and suppliers renegotiated existing contracts to include the delivery via the hub. As the hub lacked economies of scale to effectively and sustainably do so, this delivery option was initially more expensive, making suppliers unwilling to participate and, in turn, hindering the chance to increase volumes.
As the project team was still experimenting with how to develop the collaboration, the hub owner’s push to prioritize his own business interests sparked tensions between him and the project team, compromising their ability to move forward. His approach set up a seemingly insurmountable barrier early on: “It’s all about price, price, price. . . It’s all we ever hear from our suppliers, [the hub] is just too expensive!” (manager 2 university Y, vignette observation, 3-2020). The situation created more tensions in the business objectives and diverted efforts from tackling societal issues. Owing to this early uncertainty, none of the actors were able or willing to take up initiatives to provide solutions: actors began to deflect responsibility, and this was exacerbated by missing a formal orchestrator. For example, the project team wanted the hub to lower prices: The only way we can make this work is if the hub lowers its prices and creates transparency; we can’t expect to make a business case with these rates! (Manager 1 hospital, vignette observation, 3-2020)
Conversely, the hub owner wanted the project team to attract more suppliers: Zero emission transport is the future, but it’s expensive. I’ve invested in an electric truck, and I have to put a driver on it. I need a minimum of 20 suppliers [from customers] to break even. We can’t go back to using diesel trucks for this, can we? (owner hub, interview, 12-2019)
Suppliers, however, required affordable prices from the project team and hub as a condition to participate: We’re working with very tight margins in our industry. Sustainability is a high priority, but we can’t pay more; we will have to charge this to our customers. (supplier 1, interview, 3-2020)
There was neither a collective effort to navigate the emerging tension between business and societal objectives nor efforts to include societal objectives. Instead, practices of self-serving maneuvering created an environment in which the focus on the business pole dominated. Actors felt frustrated and were unable to extract themselves from the situation, as the persistent business focus left little room for different perspectives to be included.
Slipping point: deferred commitment
In August 2020, we observed new practices that served to reinforce the emerging vicious cycle. We identified how this resulted from a slipping point, which we called “deferred commitment,” which reinforced the vicious cycle, as actors continued to maneuver toward self-interest practices without progressing the collaboration. This slipping point emerged as similar questions kept being raised, but not answered, on an ongoing basis (e.g. “How do we connect more suppliers?” “How can we make a business case?” “Where do we start?” observations 3-2020 until 9-2020). We identified how the accumulation of such instances gradually resulted in a passive state in which the societal pole was increasingly overlooked, with the new “business as usual” turning to figuring out how to deal with business issues. The enthusiasm present at the start (“We are just going to start experimenting and see where the project [will] take us. . . . We will learn as we go”; research manager, interview, 4-2020) waned, and an ongoing focus on maneuvering toward self-interest completely overshadowed efforts toward societal objectives. Actors began skipping meetings more frequently, and progression of the collaboration faltered: “I feel like we are running around in circles, we’re not getting anywhere” (project manager, vignette observation, 1-2021).
Perpetuating practices: fracturing collective efforts
Inertia gave rise to a new set of practices reinforcing the singular focus on the business-dominant orientation, which we labeled “fracturing collective efforts.” Three practices contributed to fueling and maintaining the vicious cycle that prevented the collaboration from realizing its social objectives: “putting off decisions,” “venting frustration,” and “refusing to budge.”
Actors collectively did not know how to progress and became trapped in a vicious cycle favoring business issues. Objectives remained quite broad, such as “developing a sustainable and livable campus,” and actors struggled to pursue a more concrete way forward. Their lack of clarity and ongoing focus on persistent business issues led them to put off decisions instead of solving them, which further exacerbated the business pole. For example, during a brainstorming session on how to formulate a way forward, the project team listed different areas of interest, such as increasing suppliers with the hub or building logistics or lockers for storage on campus (document brainstorming, 4-2021). Despite a long list of ideas, decisions on how to mobilize resources to implement these ideas were postponed. For example: They keep getting stuck on the same issue with the hub. How long has it been? Months? We now have this overview but we still keep talking about the same thing over and over. They’re not making any decisions (research officer, interview, 5-2021)
Our observations showed that when difficult decisions had to be made or issues were raised, discussions often ended with the line “it’s tricky, we have to think about that” (e.g. vignette observation, 02-2021); no concrete plans were made, and similar issues would return during the next meeting. As tensions rose during meetings, actors also began venting their frustration with each other and the lack of progress. Instead of tackling issues head on, they got caught up in heated conversations, diverting them from collective problem solving. Over time, these practices began dominating their joint discussions:
Okay, but what do we want? Do we want to continue [with the hub], or . . . what are our options?
I don’t know, but last week he [hub owner] called me about a tender we did not communicate with him, he was furious!! . . . This was way out of line, you can’t do business like this!!
Ok, . . . yeah . . . it’s difficult, we need to take a look at that. (vignette observation, 5-2021)
This quote shows how the project manager tried to discuss a pressing issue, only for the hospital manager to deflect discussing the topic by instead venting her frustration with the situation. This practice of venting frustration occurred across several meetings, with little action being taken to break free from this recurring pattern. The situation was made worse by the hub owner making several confrontational phone calls to project team members about the lack of progress, which further amplified tensions and made finding common ground increasingly difficult.
At the same time, the hub owner refused to budge during negotiations, which stalled new collaborative approaches to also include societal topics. Earlier in the collaboration, informal agreements had been made on how the growth and addition of suppliers would work in theory, as the project team would connect suppliers with the hub. Adding suppliers was difficult, however, given the lack of an integrated approach. Yet the hub owner still wanted the project team to keep its promise, even though this was not possible, partially because of his own decisions. He often tried to revert back to the promise and make the project team somehow add more suppliers: The number one thing [customers] should do is to tell their suppliers “you can only deliver here if you use the hub, otherwise you will not get in” and then tell them “we [the customers] will carry the extra cost, or split that extra cost.” That is also how we agreed upon this. . . It is up to them (hub owner, interview, 5-2021)
Such examples further exacerbated tensions and paralyzed the collaboration, as no room was given to exploring different solutions. Taken together, the fracturing collective efforts further intensified the focus on the business pole, most notably by the increasing frustration they caused throughout negotiations and actors’ passive state of considering ad hoc issues that emerged in front of them. Without any intervention, they increasingly drifted away from acknowledging or including societal objectives in their approach.
Tipping point: breakdown due to collaborative rupture
Heated negotiations and talks continued and went nowhere, plaguing the already-struggling collaboration. This continued up until mid-2021, when a few last explosive talks about costs and suppliers led to a tipping point, which we called “breakdown due to collaborative rupture.” The ongoing festering of business issues led to a situation in which neither side could no longer stand talking or working with each other—a critical threshold had been reached: “I do not know any more where to start or where to end with these discussions. . . It is impossible!” (manager university Y, observation, 7-2021). These last few confrontations sparked a cooling-off period: the parties still knew they needed each other but were simply getting nowhere. Only existing arrangements, such as contractual obligations on deliveries to campus, continued during this time. We observed no talks about the hub owner or the upscaling issues during this time (observations, 9-2021 until 4-2022). Surprisingly, the mood in the project team slowly began to lighten up, as if the absence of the persistent conflicts sparked new energy among the project team members. The project team picked up the pieces and began trying to turn things around to mitigate the vicious cycle.
I acknowledge [the collaboration] has not worked out the way we planned, but I still believe we should do the most with the time we have left in the project (project manager, vignette observation, 10-2021)
Mitigating practices: re-envisioning collaboration purpose
We zoomed in on how actors tried to mitigate the vicious cycle through “re-envisioning the collaboration purpose,” which constituted three practices: “recalibrating collective interests,” “instigating small wins,” and “instigating targeted interventions.” The cooling-down period opened up the first step in mitigating the vicious cycle, as it allowed the project team to recalibrate its original collective interests and acknowledge the societal pole of the paradox. We observed that during the first few meetings, a sort of calm came over the project team as members were no longer preoccupied by the day-to-day issues revolving around the hub, as the topic simply had not been on the table for a while. This allowed them to view the collaboration from a fresh perspective and to refocus on the initial societal objectives. By zooming in on this phenomena, we traced this shift to a single “aha” moment when discussing future campus deliveries:
Should it really matter how our current or future hub organizes the last mile? I mean, as long as it is organized in a sustainable way, that should do the trick for us.
Hmm, actually we just want a sustainable way of transporting our goods, and as long as it does not hinder us it shouldn’t really matter how (vignette observation, 9-2021)
This seemingly trivial comment was an important recalibration moment for the project team. The project team openly questioned whether the current hub was actually the best partner, as previously members had been reluctant to stop collaborating with the hub, despite difficulties with business-related issues, as they had set out on this journey together: On the one hand we can say, alright we did a good job, we have six suppliers with [hub], but I mean, what if we had chosen another partner?. . . I wouldn’t mind stopping our collaboration and figuring that out. (director university X, vignette observation, 10-2021)
Yet leaving this locked-in situation relieved the pressure of having to work with just one hub and opened up other opportunities to make the campus more sustainable. Thinking about other hub deliveries alleviated the tension with the persistent business pole, while still enabling the team to pursue a sustainable campus. Such constructive discussions and recalibration of the initial objectives for the campus led to the second new topic, which brought back momentum to explore options, such as sustainable deliveries between the organizations instead of merely focusing on hub deliveries. This realization pushed actors to try to instigate small wins, which helped address the vicious cycle and bring back momentum. Team members decided to branch out with smaller projects aimed at making a direct impact on the campus (e.g. deliveries by bike, storage lockers, logistics): We were contacted by [contractor] on exploring building logistics opportunities for [building area], and it sounds very promising. They have a lot of data [at their disposal] and are willing to share that with us for research purposes. . . It would be nice to get something off the ground again (project manager, interview, 10-2021)
These small wins did not necessarily create a big impact yet on campus, but they did rejuvenate the spirit of the project team to build momentum and continue with the initial goals in the beginning of 2022: developing a sustainable campus by predominantly working on such new initiatives (e.g. meeting minutes, 2-2022). The team had a clear objective again, one not burdened with merely business-related issues and challenges with suppliers and the hub. It brought back opportunities to actually address and solve different challenges that would make the campus more sustainable and safer.
The final step to escape the vicious cycle and proactively work toward the societal pole was to instigate targeted interventions. The prior practices resulted in increased clarity, as well as renewed momentum, which could now be leveraged to instigate targeted interventions on troublesome topics. The project team began making changes to its organization to become more streamlined and uncover opportunities to integrate societal objectives into its approach. For example, it launched an operational project group to alleviate some of its organizational burden, as previously members had to strategize and execute simultaneously, which resulted in sluggish execution (as experienced in the perpetuating phase): Our project team has been erected to take the load off the shoulders of the [management] group. . . It’s a big project, and we’re now in a phase of exploring the opportunities . . . so we’re going to look at, for example, how to align the IT systems or how [to] deal with delivery addresses on campus, that kind of stuff (team leader university X, interview, 5-2022)
Team members also restructured how they worked together through their periodic meetings. Previously, meetings were rather unstructured with a lot of room for ad hoc decision making, which had also fueled the vicious cycle.
I feel like we haven’t been very effective, we mostly talk about what we have been doing. I think we can use our time more productively and look at how we can turn this around. . . I . . . will make sure that I can attend these meetings more regularly. (director university X, vignette observation, 2-2022)
Meetings became less frequent but more focused on concretely strategizing on future directions. These decisions made room for project team members to actually think through how to pursue societal objectives. Concrete topics, such as procurement or aligning suppliers, were delegated to the new operational team so that the team could focus on strategic decisions. For example, the team implemented the idea of suppliers using a third-party hub for campus deliveries, instead of forcing them to use MediHub, relieving the business tension experienced previously. This idea contractually shifted the responsibility to suppliers to choose a hub, with the project team paying an extra fee for any additional costs (document final report, 6-2023). Such solutions served the team’s societal objectives, while also acknowledging the possibility of added costs. Furthermore, members followed up on the sustainable bike delivery and locker initiatives: while these did cost money, they were for a more sustainable campus (the main objective all along). This was made possible by targeting the underlying issues: moving away from solely business-driven issues. Only through the combined enactment of these practices could the project team recalibrate toward its societal objectives and initiate concrete efforts to navigate tensions. While the collaboration changed with the different role of the hub, it still achieved a better balance between business and societal objectives.
Societal-dominant orientation
Initiating practices: maneuvering toward a common purpose
The CareHub collaboration was initiated in October 2019 by a home care organization that sought to provide integrated services for vulnerable clients by combining home care, well-being, and logistics services. This experimental research consortium included suppliers, the municipality, a community center, well-being and volunteer organizations, and several universities. Together, the parties received governmental funding to begin experimenting. The project team consisted of representatives from the home care organization, well-being organization, a logistics specialist, a research manager, and a dedicated project manager. The cornerstone of the new approach was a new role: a community concierge that would visit clients, identify their care needs, and connect them with relevant organizations for goods or services. The aim was to provide a tailored service to allow people to live at home longer, reduce loneliness, improve economic efficiency, and reduce congestion in the neighborhoods. While the project got off to a good start pursuing societal objectives, over time it struggled to reconcile these with business objectives. We identified how actors that “maneuvered toward a common purpose” led to the initiation of a vicious cycle, which constituted two practices: “leveraging available resources” and “sidelining business issues.”
The project manager developed the project and formed a team to experiment and structure the work. Although there was no clear project structure or strategy yet, the goal was “to get started and see where the project takes us!” (manager home care, interview, 11-2019). Actors from the different organizations collectively got the project up and running by quickly leveraging available resources. Our interviews reveal how actors individually mobilized their available resources around a clear and tangible idea: providing high-quality service of home care, well-being, and logistics for vulnerable clients. The home care organization provided funding, set up the initial project structure, hired the first concierge to provide deliveries, and organized a car for deliveries: You really see what can happen if you put your mind to it. We were like, step 1, OK, we need a car for deliveries. So, we asked around and within a few days . . . we had a partner who could provide a car. Ok, what’s next? (manager home care, interview, 11-2019)
The suppliers asked their internal network for clients who could join the concept: Well, frankly, we simply decided on a certain neighborhood for [CareHub] to focus on, and asked clients if they would like to join. . . . Nothing really changed for us, besides us not having to do the deliveries ourselves, and the clients potentially would get something out of the extra visits [of concierges], so we might as well try it. (supplier 1, interview, 4-2020)
The new concierge began delivering goods such as medicine and meals and received feedback for the project team, and the project manager translated the vision into concrete milestones and trajectories. Overall, we observed a strong emphasis on pursuing and achieving societal objectives through many early successes: the concierge made bundled deliveries, local and regional governments expressed interest in participating, and clients appreciated the tailored care they received. This emphasis on pursuing societal objectives created an atmosphere of pioneering, openness, and purpose in January of 2020 (document presentation, 1-2020).
Yet our observations and interviews also revealed that the project team was sidelining business issues, which unintentionally kept tensions with the business pole latent. With its early success, the project team of CareHub received several grants from the municipality to continue experimenting to provide a proof of concept. The main challenge was to make the business case for prevention: combining home care, well-being and logistics would reduce the need for expensive care in the future but required up-front investment, which would only partially be supplemented by income from suppliers for deliveries. The team was aware of this challenge but did not know how to address it: It’s a chicken and egg story. We need to make a business case, but to make the business case we also need more time and funding to measure and implement our findings. . . But it’s tricky, we are just beginning to make an impact. (manager home care, interview, 11-2019)
As the project team did not know how to tackle the financial issues due to the project’s complex nature and the team’s lack of experience on the topic, this topic only occasionally resurfaced, even when a new project manager was installed to strategize how to scale up CareHub: In the long term, we worry about how we can finance this. . . I would be interested to see the possibilities in efficiency, but not really sure where to start. It is a social concept and cannot be cost driven (community hub manager, vignette observation, 11-2020)
Although tensions with the business pole sometimes emerged as actors collectively maneuvered toward a common purpose, these remained relatively latent—actors did not yet experience the long-term financial implications of their actions. Sufficient funding was still available from the municipality and home care provider, and the project team focused on more ad hoc topics to grow the project. At the same time, despite significant early successes and momentum toward the societal pole, the team slowly drifted further away from the business pole.
Slipping point: escalated commitment
At the end of 2020, actors at CareHub collectively created something truly innovative that successfully addressed pressing societal issues. Simultaneously, we observed how new practices fueled the (latent) vicious cycle favoring the societal pole. We identified how this resulted from a slipping point we called “escalated commitment,” after actors previously maneuvered toward a common purpose in the previous phase. The societal focus slowly became dominant, as the ongoing successes were followed up with more expectations, which required more successes and efforts toward this pole: The municipality is keen to learn more about the project. . . For the next phase we are going to launch two new neighborhoods and hire four new concierges, so we can really grow and learn. We will have to become organized to show the municipality that we can make an impact, show them what we can do in the neighborhoods (project manager, interview, 12-2020)
The commitment to develop societal objectives increased, partially due to new funding from the government. However, marrying this success with a sustainable business case remained difficult, as some money came in through the suppliers, but the promise of how preventive care could provide additional income was unclear and not clearly articulated. Furthermore, increasingly less time was available to actually focus on such matters. A collective state emerged in which actors predominantly focused on making ends meet to keep the pace of the development going: a new app had to be developed, branded clothing was required, officials from the government visited, and so on (meeting observation, 12-2020). All these factors overshadowed the need for action toward the business pole.
Perpetuating practices: amplifying collective efforts
The mismatch in pacing between emphasizing the societal pole and further developing the business pole led to escalation of the vicious cycle favoring the societal pole through “amplifying collective efforts,” which constituted three practices that continued to fuel the vicious cycle that prevented the collaboration from realizing its business objectives: “idealizing success,” “overextending resources,” and “omitting key actors.”
The project team was so caught up with the successes that it began idealizing success, which further emphasized the societal pole: the team overestimated the degree to which the successes would cover the financial challenges and believed that the municipality would continue to play a key funding role. However, the team needed a proof of concept to get the municipality to fund the project in the long run, and expectations were growing. Yet it was still confident in the municipality’s future involvement: We are basically already partners [with the municipality] . . . and it helps that we also initiate long-term collaborations with insurance companies, and that is really quite unique for neighborhood care; they made an agenda for four years with us, and they only do that with a handful of organizations. But that is because we are large, there is trust, there is a vision. Everybody also says: “you are really far, you have a vision,” that’s something they want to get on board with. (home care manager, interview, 4-2021)
The municipality strengthened this idea by expressing serious interest: This [concept] really is something new, something fresh. . . A concept, an idea like this, is needed to deal with the day-to-day issues we see every day in our neighborhoods (municipality representative, interview, 5-2021)
Actors in the project team shared this sentiment. Yet the future role of the municipality in the collaboration remained unclear, and it gave no concrete agreements on how to support that project financially in the long run. Again, tensions remained latent as business issues were not adequately addressed. Instead, the initial success seemed to compensate for the missing proof of financial viability. The project also grew, acquiring more partners and neighborhoods. As a consequence, the project team began overextending its resources, as more work needed to be done with the same amount of people. In interviews, project team members voiced their concern about moving from deadline to deadline with sometimes barely enough funds to keep the project running. The home care organization had to step in with temporary funding. The team focused mostly on ad hoc operational issues instead of more long-term financial planning: I feel like most of my time involves solving operational issues with the neighborhood concierges or contacting suppliers when orders were wrongly delivered for example. This is not what I was hired to do. . . It’s frustrating that I don’t have sufficient time [or resources] to actually focus on organizing the project. (project manager, interview, 11-2021)
The stretch in capacity left two major issues: first, the project team was unable to effectively plan and strategize for the future of CareHub, and second, it had even less time to address the business case. While business issues continued to arise, the limited time and resources prevented the team from addressing these tensions effectively.
Tipping point: breakdown due to business-induced rupture
The vicious cycle favoring societal objectives, which had remained relatively latent up until that point, climaxed when the project team was suddenly confronted with the business pole after the summer of 2021: the latest funding round had ended, and the municipality suddenly announced it would no longer support CareHub financially, given the lack of progress on making the project financially viable. The business pole was suddenly salient for the project team, and the entire project was halted: It’s such a devastating blow. They told us: “We didn’t make any agreements on us being a strategic partner. We can’t justify this to the council or mayor if we don’t know what it’s going to cost and what we’ll get out of it. . ..” The negotiations have been so intense. I must admit, sometimes I thought, “Let’s just pull the plug.” (research manager, interview, 12-2021)
This situation became a tipping point: the project team’s expectations clashed with the reality of the municipality’s decision. The combination of idealizing societal successes and overextending resources had increasingly drawn the team away from pursuing the business pole. The critical role of the municipality was also unclear. The sudden climax forced the team into crisis mode to attend to the other pole and determine if, how, and with whom the project could continue. The home care provider and well-being organization maintained day-to-day operations, but development of the project stopped. Intense negotiations with the municipality ensued behind closed doors. The situation worsened further when the project team omitted key actors. Suppliers, members of the community hub, and the concierges indicated they were left in the dark about the future of CareHub, despite the need to continue day-to-day activities and solve ad hoc issues with suppliers: We have been in close contact with the suppliers; we of course see them every day, but they are also growing increasingly concerned. . . We have been reassuring them things are going to be all right and about the continuation of the contract as they haven’t heard anything either from the project team. (community concierge, interview, 2-2022)
Suppliers were unsure whether they were still even part of the project at all given the lack of communication. These actors were critical to keep the project alive: without suppliers or concierges, CareHub would be impossible to run. The sudden confrontation with the business pole in combination with the lack of communication fostered an environment riddled with uncertainty, resulting in the increasing discontent of members and threats to leave the initiative if the vicious cycle was not resolved.
Mitigating practices: re-envisioning collaboration viability
The vicious cycle’s escalation paralyzed CareHub while the project team tried to find solutions for the financial situation during the latter half of 2021 when the project was left in a stalemate. Yet a shared commitment and purpose remained among the project team members; they believed they had come too far and were too certain about the initiative to quit. By zooming in on this process, we identified how actors resorted to “re-envisioning collaboration viability,” which constituted practices of “reflecting on business-oriented issues,” “leveraging past successes,” and “substantiating business viability” through which actors navigated the tensions back to equilibrium. Still, doing so was not easy, as the municipality had serious doubts about CareHub: I realize we have reached a turning point of “until when are we going to continue.” Do we want to keep investing as a municipality? And when do we reach the point, “Wow, now it’s getting really expensive.” Look, if you say you want to start in a new neighborhood and you need €50,000, we will be able to find that, but if you structurally need €300.000 to €400,000 per year it’s going to be complicated. (municipality representative, interview, 6-2021)
We distinguished three steps in mitigating the vicious cycle. First, the sudden confrontation with the business pole triggered the project team to reflect on business-oriented issues to gain clarity. Although members had been aware of the need to create a business case, they had taken the financial support from the municipality and the ongoing success of CareHub somewhat for granted, which in turn led to insufficient action to navigate the latent tension. Now, they were forced to make the financial requirements explicit. Although this was sometimes difficult, they needed to tackle the core of the financial issues to move forward: I was flabbergasted actually and can’t blame the municipality for feeling the way they did and pulling out. I also found out there had been no financial planning for the entire project; there was hardly a long-term goal, no foundation. Without these things you simply can’t expect to safely scale up (community hub manager, interview, 3-2022)
This sudden shock forced the project team to confront the underlying issues. Through talks with the municipality and subsequent reflection, team members realized they had not undertaken sufficient financial planning and lacked direct alignment with the municipality’s objectives. As such, a new organizational form had to be set up to scale the initiative, and a long-term (financial) vision was required.
The municipality could not believe that such a group of professional organizations had come this far with such a lack of direction or even a plan for how to organize their finances. (research manager, vignette observation, 4-2022)
The topics that had been submerged under the societal objectives now needed to be addressed. These insights informed the second step in the mitigation process, though challenges to navigate tensions remained the same; thus, the team leveraged past successes during negotiations with the municipality. The manager and director of the home care organization reached out to influential actors within and around the municipality to further promote CareHub’s impact and convince them of its viability, still without a concrete business case. After assembling an overview of persistent issues, the team reiterated its drive, commitment, and past successes to convince the municipality about their common objective to provide better quality care for vulnerable citizens and to, at least, alleviate the tension with the business pole: Eventually we turned things around and asked the municipality, “OK, but what do you find important in your city? What are the issues?” We then used this to position CareHub directly in terms of the needs of the municipality to show what we could offer [by what we had already done]. I really think this helped them to see “aha, there’s something there.” (research manager, interview, 6-2022)
This alignment between CareHub and the municipality also materialized in the form of a policy report in which a researcher and project team members linked the needs of the municipality to the successes and possibilities of CareHub (document, 11-2021). The report addressed loneliness, connecting and strengthening social cohesion, and infrastructure in the neighborhood and how the hub and the community concierge could play a key role in achieving this, all the things they were already doing in practice. It listed future issues of the healthcare sector, such as staff shortages, aging population, and rising healthcare costs, to emphasize why the CareHub concept was urgently needed. This argument created a window of opportunity to further discuss the financial situation together.
These combined efforts created a new momentum in the collaboration as objectives, understanding, and synergies between the project team and the municipality became clear, which somewhat alleviated the tension with the business pole and opened up opportunities to take the final step to mitigate the vicious cycle: substantiating business viability. The project team and municipality attempted to make the loose vision on the business case more concrete.
We went back to the core of CareHub –“What are we?”—which was prevention, the social element of it. We used that to design the business case by bringing it all down to a price per visitation of a client per year. So you have some cost covered by logistics, and then whatever remains, we can cover with the extras we provide as a CareHub service through for example prevention [for the municipality] (director home care, interview, 4-2022)
The home care director was crucial in negotiating this deal because of his good relationship with the municipality. The fixed price per client allowed the project team to cover the current operational costs, and it would generate more income as the scale of CareHub grew. This provided a reasonable basis for negotiations with the municipality to start paying for CareHub’s services, as the project team had also demonstrated what CareHub could do and how it would connect to the municipality’s vision. Although the situation was not yet watertight, the actors felt comfortable to move forward together. They also created a new organizational form, by setting up a nonprofit charity that facilitated integration of future neighborhoods: The charity reduces the concept’s fragility; it provides stability. Previously concierges were more or less loosely connected to existing teams. But we can now take a more integrated approach with these teams as a real entity [in the neighborhood]. (manager community hub, interview, 3-2022)
By targeting concrete issues such as the (partial) business case and the organizational form, the actors were collectively able to alleviate the tension with the business pole. Societal objectives and successes were still guaranteed, but now they were also able to navigate the tension with the business objectives, thereby mitigating the vicious cycle. Through a tipping point and subsequent substantiating business viability practices, CareHub was able to turn things around. As a result, the combined practices led to new subsidies and guarantees from the municipality to continue the collaboration in the beginning of 2022. The benefits, for now, outweighed the uncertainties.
Retrospective comparison of Buildhub and Rethub
To further inform and validate our analysis, we compared and contrasted our findings with the two retrospective cases of BuildHub and RetHub, which had a business- and societal-dominant orientation, respectively. As Table 3 shows, both BuildHub and RetHub predominantly showed similar practices that fueled vicious cycles in either the business- or societal-dominant orientation—with a few exceptions, indicated by the crossed-out practices in the Table. At BuildHub, we identified how maneuvering toward self-interest caused a shift toward the business pole, which subsequently led to a slipping point of deferred commitment and the fracturing of collective efforts. At RetHub, we found that maneuvering toward a common purpose engendered a vicious cycle toward societal objectives, which subsequently led to a slipping point of escalated commitment and amplification of collective efforts.
While these insights confirm our findings from the longitudinal cases of MediHub and CareHub and therefore provide generalizability, the mitigating phases of both retrospective cases shed further light on how actors tried to address vicious cycles during the mitigation phase. Similar to MediHub, in the business-dominant orientation of BuildHub we also identified a tipping point we defined as a “breakdown due to collaborative rupture.” From 2013 to 2017, struggles on lowering costs, the hub’s efforts to increase profit, and its refusal of sustainable delivery options led to persistent tensions between the municipality, as the main customer, and the hub. Tensions became particularly salient when the municipality discovered that the hub had been secretly charging 20% more costs than what had been agreed on. This discovery led to a breakdown due to collaborative rupture—trust was broken, and the ongoing tensions combined with this tipping point led to a point of no return, and the contract with the hub was terminated. Initially, termination led to feelings of shock and fear that the entire initiative would collapse: There was a big break between us and the hub. . . It was a great embarrassment for the municipality. We felt rather lost during that time, we were not sure how we would recover from this at the time (program director, interview)
This indeed was the end of collaboration, at least in the form to which the actors had collectively agreed—the vicious cycle escalated, resulting in collaborative collapse. However, the collapse also provided a new opportunity: the municipality recalibrated collective interest with its existing partners and even new partners to explore potential fruitful avenues to continue collaborative efforts.
We have been learning a lot due to how we are doing it today. . . We had a lot of talks with the new companies, asking them, “How should we do the procurement process?” “What kind of requirements do you have to collaborate?” “How could you manage this and that?” . . . It was really important that we do this together (program director, interview)
By emphasizing collective interest among (prospective) members, the municipality was set on designing a sustainable scheme as it had come too far to quit. Furthermore, the municipality was able to incorporate feedback from the existing and prospective organizations and to build on its own learnings to determine how to move forward. It understood that a predominantly business-driven solution with a primary profit focus—as with the “first” hub—could not address the underlying challenges and reach the objectives set out at the beginning. Although it required the expertise and experience of private organizations, it needed a more balanced approach on how to navigate business and societal objectives: The way we had been working . . . it did not work out in the end. We had to move away from a profit focus. I think a healthy profit is needed in this idea we are working on, but it should not be the sole focus. We had to regain control to make this happen (hub manager, interview)
Unlike MediHub, here the municipality wanted to continue the initiative and was in the position to leverage the new situation. Indeed, while the collaboration had failed, the municipality’s initial idea, the existing suppliers, and the experience remained. Informed by prior reflections, a thorough understanding of the underlying issues, and its role as end customer, the municipality set out to revamp the collaboration by instigating targeted interventions. In 2018, it took back control and established itself as orchestrator (vs a private hub) and appointed a new hub operator contractually under its control that shared its nonprofit objectives. Next, the municipality took several measures in collaboration with the new hub to navigate both business and societal objectives: for suppliers, it lowered the price for bundling activities at the hub and provided free transport to the construction areas, which would stimulate bundling at the hub instead of doing direct trips without bundling. It also increased prices for direct deliveries without bundling, disincentivizing this option, which subsequently led to less congestion and emissions (document presentation). Although the new measures came at a financial cost, they enabled the municipality to pursue a healthier balance between business and societal objectives.
In the end, it is about making choices, and we made the choice to focus on healthy logistics. I think this new business model has something for everyone, suppliers, citizens, and the municipality. It is not perfect, but I think we solved some key issues, and keep monitoring it to improve it over time (program director, interview)
These joint insights and efforts led to less emissions and congestion in the city, as well as an acceptable business case that was easily scalable. Thus, this case shows how a breakdown due to collaborative rupture can lead to termination of a collaboration, but it also reveals how actors can reinvigorate collective efforts and navigate to a paradoxical equilibrium between business and societal objectives through practices of re-envisioning the collaboration purpose.
Owing to the societal-dominant orientation of RetHub, tensions on how to construct a sustainable business case had been simmering for a while (2011–2016), but ongoing financial support from the municipality, in combination with several research grants, had kept this tension mostly latent. This allowed emphasis to be put on the societal pole through ongoing efforts to experiment and keep the hub operational with only a few suppliers, but it also meant that no scaling or business case construction occurred. However, this changed when the municipality faced a tipping point through a breakdown due to business-induced rupture. The municipality announced after a multiyear audit in 2016 that its ongoing financial support had not resulted in a sustainable business case.
In this case, it’s a false success. Because I would say that the most difficult thing, financial sustainability, is being covered by local authorities. So it wasn’t like a genuine, financial balance. It was more forced and false because it was supported by local authorities in financial terms. (RetHub researcher, interview)
The municipality had been paying more than half the costs for years, without considerable growth from the collaboration with the current hub. The council informed the project team that it was considering withdrawing further funding. This sudden shock led the project team to reflect on business-oriented issues underlying the lack of a business case, one of which was the lack of suppliers to increase volume. The team knew this was crucial, but its initial efforts had been rather superficial: Congestion had already been a major issue [in city centers], but over time we found that emissions also became increasingly important for suppliers . . . so they tried to use that as well in the discussions with suppliers. (researcher, interview)
Yet the suppliers in the city centers were rather diverse, so the discussions did not resonate well with them. The municipality and hub could not provide sufficient added value to the suppliers: they could not leverage past successes, as the collaboration had been stagnant for some time. They had not effectively communicated the scheme to suppliers, they had little added value to offer suppliers on top of the already higher cost, and there had been no incentive for anyone to restructure the financial scheme as everything was set in a contract, which offered operational agreements, but nothing on growth or adding suppliers by the hub. However, the now clear urgency of the tipping point, combined with the more acute understanding of the need to add more suppliers, led the project team of the municipality to initiate a communication campaign in 2016 to inform suppliers about the benefits and details of the scheme.
It was challenging for marketing materials because, you know, if we were promoting a message, we needed to be promoting the right one (municipality representative, interview) Communication is key if you want to make a scheme successful, a stronger communication campaign: awareness, training, education could have been like key to making it more financially sustainable in a more genuine way (researcher, interview)
Unfortunately, the campaign was “too little, too late,” as hardly any new suppliers joined. Although the project team had now become aware of the urgency to add more suppliers, the severity of the tipping point, combined with the lack of thorough understanding of the complexity of the underlying issues, meant that it was unable to substantiate business viability. So, the municipality board decided to pull the plug and ended the scheme around 2017, ending the collaboration and thereby leaving the vicious cycle. The project had stayed alive through the continued belief in societal objectives, but after 14 years the cities were still responsible for covering approximately 60% of the scheme’s costs. Ironically, the hub operator continued with the scheme after the municipality stepped out and, with only minor changes to its internal bundling efforts and a different hub, was able to turn it into a viable scheme. This indicates that the vicious cycle could have been reversed if the actors had taken adequate action.
A model of emerging vicious cycles
Drawing on our findings, we propose a conceptual model of how actors navigate the business–society paradox and how their practices contribute to the emergence, mitigation, or collapse of a vicious cycle (see Figure 2). Actors aim to address societal challenges through interorganizational collaboration, but the complexities of navigating both business and societal objectives may not be obvious at the start. Actors can easily be drawn into socially shared patterns of action and thereby shift toward either pole of the paradox: if collaborative practices are skewed toward a business-dominant orientation, they run the risk of maneuvering toward self-interest. A single dominant actor may pursue own interests if others continuously deflect responsibility, which can create a vacuum in which tensions begin to fester, instigating a vicious cycle toward the business pole and frustrating collective efforts. If collaborative practices are skewed toward a societal-dominant orientation, actors may collectively overemphasize the societal pole while sidelining important business topics. Over time, such one-sided patterns reinforce the tensions. Even if actors are aware of the other pole, practices of the dominant orientation are likely to persevere and feed the vicious cycle.
Conceptual model of emergence and mitigating of vicious cycles.
These amplifications can gradually lead to slipping points, which we define as critical thresholds that occur when practices excessively emphasize one pole of the business–society paradox, creating a systemic imbalance that becomes self-reinforcing without intervention. Actors collectively become locked into their respective orientation, often without being aware of it. If the collaboration is characterized by a business-dominant orientation, deferred commitment leads to a slipping point at which no adequate action is taken to navigate the escalating tensions. This reproduces the initiating practices, as actors have not developed any repertoire for including the opposite pole. In this case, these practices involve fracturing collective efforts with an increasingly narrow focus on business issues. Such a situation can be exploited by individual interests and further exacerbated by practices of putting off decisions, refusing to budge on individual standpoints, and venting frustration. If the collaboration is characterized by a societal-dominant orientation, the slipping point can arise from escalated commitment to the societal pole at the expense of the business pole: the initiating practices cross a critical threshold at which the created momentum makes considering the business pole and navigating tensions increasingly difficult. This escalation of commitment again leads to similar practices to the initiating phase, in this case by amplifying collective efforts. Actors may idealize their successes and overextend their resources while omitting key actors crucial for developing the business pole. In both orientations, actors can become increasingly drawn to one direction, leaving them unable to navigate the paradox.
We stipulate that overemphasizing one paradoxical pole ultimately leads to a tipping point: a collaborative breakdown during which tensions become particularly salient, making previously entrenched polarization visible and actionable. This can become a catalyzing event during which actors collectively recognize systemic imbalance. In our multiple case study, we found different scenarios of how this can play out within the two orientations. In the business-dominant orientation, tensions became particularly salient after a breakdown due to collaborative rupture, which inhibited progress and worsened relationships. We found that a sudden and more explosive tipping point can potentially end the relationship immediately with a regressive deadlock between actors; they have no recourse to collectively stop the vicious cycle, and the collaboration collapses. Yet we also found that if the remaining actors are sufficiently committed and have a shared purpose, the tipping point can become a transitional breakthrough. As the tipping point pushes actors to collectively reflect on what they have been doing, they begin to re-envision the collaborations’ purpose and navigate the vicious cycle back to equilibrium. They first reemphasize collective interest to acknowledge the societal side of the paradox. To overcome the uncertainty, they instigate small wins to bring back momentum and slowly move out of a passive state. A more thorough understanding of the societal pole and the renewed momentum allow actors to instigate targeted interventions in the collaboration to address underlying issues.
In the societal-dominant orientation, we found that tensions may become salient through a tipping point we call “breakdown due to business-induced rupture,” as business or financial matters lead to a sudden or exacerbated salience of tensions. We again find that a severe tipping point can lead to a regressive deadlock, breaking down shared commitment and purpose, which leads to termination of the collaboration. We also find opportunities for a transitional breakthrough when this tipping point is less severe and when shared commitment and purpose remain among actors, allowing them to instigate mitigation practices of re-envisioning the collaborations’ viability. The tipping point makes tensions salient and forces actors to acknowledge and reflect on the business pole, to navigate toward equilibrium. Next, actors can leverage past successes, to build on the progress they have made while working toward (i.e. overemphasizing) the societal pole, using this to their advantage for negotiations and showing impact with critical stakeholders. Finally, actors can substantiate business viability, by leveraging the understanding and momentum of both poles to design more concrete business proposals in line with both business and societal objectives. This last practice is only possible because of the tipping point, as it forces actors to go through a multifaceted mitigation process collectively.
Without sufficient shared purpose and momentum achieved during the perpetuating phase, actors may find themselves unable to enact the entire multifaceted mitigation practice: if lacking successes and understanding of the paradoxical tensions, they are not able to leverage these insights to address underlying issues in time. An important insight is that cycle escalation through a sudden tipping point does not preclude a collaborative collapse. If some of the actors show sufficient progress, commitment, and purpose, escalation may instead provide a window of opportunity to recalibrate toward a new course of action. The vicious cycle previously hampered exploring other courses of action, but once part of the collaboration has fallen apart and some relationships are terminated, new opportunities can arise for actors to navigate the business–society tension.
Discussion
To better understand why collaborative efforts often fail and how this can be prevented, we investigated how actors contribute to the emergence and mitigation of vicious cycles while navigating the business–society paradox in interorganizational collaborations. We build on previous studies that stress the need for interorganizational collaboration to address societal challenges (Ferraro et al., 2015; George et al., 2024) and why navigating paradoxes in such contexts is difficult (Jarzabkowski et al., 2022; Sharma and Bansal, 2017). We aim to shed light on the practices actors enact to get stuck in recurring challenges and how practices contribute to or mitigate the failure of collaborative efforts.
Theoretical contributions
Based on our findings and proposed model we make three contributions to the literature: first, we provide a processual account of how collaborations can fail over time. By building on the business–society paradox, we show how vicious cycles emerge through practices that exacerbate initial one-sided orientations. Second, we show such trajectories are characterized by interconnected practices which contribute to the emergence and mitigation of vicious cycles. We introduce two concepts—slipping and tipping points—to explain how and why different practices continue to spark different practices which either exacerbate or mitigate vicious cycles. And finally, we provide fine grained insights on how to mitigate vicious cycles. Mitigation is an iterative process in which prior practices as well as the nature of the tipping point influence actors’ ability to navigate tensions. We theorize how escalation of vicious cycles can turn into opportunities for recalibration if there is sufficient shared commitment among actors to work through tensions and develop new practices.
A processual understanding of failure in interorganizational collaboration
Our research contributes to the literature on interorganizational collaboration by providing a processual account of how collaborative failure evolves. This is important because failure is not a static or linear phenomena but a complex, iterative, and long-winded process. Prior studies provide ample evidence of how governance challenges (Couture et al., 2023), difficulties in aligning different frames (Grimm and Reinecke, 2024), or efforts to overcome the hurdles of initiating collaboration (Deken et al., 2018) can contribute to the complexity and failure of interorganizational efforts (Zuzul, 2019). Yet, an understanding of how interorganizational failures emerges over time is still lacking. By drawing on paradox theory, in particular the business–society paradox, and taking a practice perspective, we show how collaborations fail over time as actors are unable to make sense of and navigate the tensions between the opposing poles in interorganizational settings. When initiating collaborations, actors often rely on their respective practices in an attempt to deal with the complexity and uncertainty of the collaboration (Deken et al., 2018). If this assemblage of practices exhibits a one-sided preference for either the business or the societal pole, actors are likely to stick with these practices, which amplifies tensions and complicates efforts to collaborate. This lack of individual awareness of tensions and the absence of a paradox mind-set to embrace opposing demands (Hahn et al., 2014; Miron-Spektor et al., 2018), can lead to collective drift in collaborations. While active responses to paradoxes are desirable (Jay, 2013; Smith and Lewis, 2011), they become difficult if actors are not aware of the implications of their actions, and may be further complicated by the dispersed responsibilities in collaborations to provide an overview of the situation (DeFillippi and Sydow, 2016).
Building on the business–society paradox, we contribute to a better understanding of how such unsuccessful navigation may play out in interorganizational contexts. Prior research on the business–society paradox highlights the challenge of reconciling these diverging objectives due to e.g. different logics and timelines (Jarzabkowski et al., 2022; Smith and Besharov, 2019). We extend these insights by showing how excessive responses to one of the two poles can lead to escalation, beyond the notion that focusing on either pole leads to negative consequences (Hahn et al., 2014; Van der Byl et al., 2020). We find how practices of maneuvering toward self-interest may lead to increasing focus on the business pole and spark practices of fracturing collective efforts which, together, fuel an escalating one-sided business focus. Hence, we extend insights into how business case thinking (Hahn et al., 2014; Kaplan, 2020) manifests itself in interorganizational settings through actors’ practices. We also identify the under-researched societal-dominant orientation consisting of practices aimed at maneuvering toward collective purpose and amplifying collective efforts. While often issues arise related to business objectives (Sharma and Bansal, 2017; Slawinski et al., 2024), we show how societal orientations can also be detrimental to interorganizational collaborations, as financial viability becomes increasingly at stake. While research has identified the risks of an instrumental approach to competing demands in which one objective is prioritized over the other (e.g. Hahn et al., 2016, 2018), we provide a more fine-grained understanding of how prior practices can fuel one-side responses in interorganizational settings.
Interconnectedness of practices in navigating paradoxes in interorganizational collaboration
Our research harnesses the practice perspective to explain how interconnected practices lead to vicious cycles emergence and escalation, and demonstrate that such practices cannot be seen in isolation in a broader context, heeding prior studies’ call to connect practice-based approaches with more systemic outcomes (e.g. Albertsen et al., 2024; Lê and Bednarek, 2017). This is important because navigating paradoxes is an ongoing effort and an actor’s ability to respond to tensions depends heavily on the practices established and enacted over time.
Earlier work on paradox theory shows how practices contribute to the emergence of vicious cycles when pursuing collaboration (Ungureanu et al., 2019) and how practices are enacted to break out of vicious cycles in organizational contexts (Huq et al., 2017; Pradies et al., 2021). Yet, studies do not necessarily account for the interrelated nature of practices when investigating how practices drive vicious cycles and potentially mitigate them (Lê and Bednarek, 2017). Whereas prior studies do highlight the importance of looking at the relationship between different paradoxes (e.g. Cunha and Putnam, 2019; Jarzabkowski et al., 2022), responses to different stages of paradox navigation are also interconnected, we argue. Our study reveals how different practices occurring at different stages of paradox navigation cannot be taken in isolation: they are interrelated, such that one set of practices gives rise to the next while navigating tensions. We identified two core concepts that help explain this dynamic: slipping points and tipping points. For instance, while research shows that unsophisticated responses to paradox spark vicious cycles (Es-Sajjade et al., 2021; Smith and Lewis, 2011; Sundaramurthy and Lewis, 2003) or that factors such as indecision contribute to this process (Ungureanu et al., 2019), slipping points elaborate on how simplistic responses continue to spark simplistic responses: when different practices cause the collaboration to move excessively toward one pole of the paradox, this leads to a systemic imbalance that becomes self-reinforcing without intervention—further escalating the vicious cycle. It is through slipping points that practices enacted at the start of collaborating thereby continue to persist and amplify a vicious cycle. We see this as a pattern akin to the dynamic that Gersick (1991) found in her analysis of shifts in the dynamics of individual and collective change processes: social systems tend to carry on in established ways of doing without noticing signals that do not fit their way of thinking until problems accumulate and require revolutionary change. We observe a similar dynamic for tipping points, where prior practices either enable or restrict actors’ ability to effectively navigate tensions. Hence, we provide a more holistic account of dealing with tensions and in particular navigating to address vicious cycles. We show how navigating is an ongoing process, which is challenging to fully comprehend without taking into account the broader context and enacted practices over time.
Different pathways in dealing with vicious cycles
Our research provides a comprehensive and fine-grained understanding of the different ways in which actors can navigate paradoxes to mitigate vicious cycles. Prior work on paradox shows that a multifaceted process is required to break free from vicious cycles in individual contexts (Pradies et al., 2021) and that different responses are required to navigate paradoxes over time (Lê and Bednarek, 2017; Schneider et al., 2021). Based on our comparative case study, we provide additional insights into how different tipping points and mitigating practices may produce different outcomes when trying to shift from vicious to virtuous cycles in collaborations. This is important as a better understanding of how this complex process unfolds can help prevent the collapse of interorganizational collaborations. First, our concept of tipping points indicates the moment at which actors collectively recognize the systemic imbalance: a sudden catalyzing event makes previously entrenched polarization visible. It thus provides the trigger to deliberately address the tensions. Prior research has identified scarcity, plurality, and change as factors that can spur vicious cycles (e.g. Schad et al., 2016; Smith and Lewis, 2011) and has shown that supporting actors can trigger instances to navigate vicious cycles (Pradies et al., 2021). Our study extends these insights by showing how a tipping point can increase the salience of latent tensions, and that this salience can provide insights into possible alternative courses of action that enable actors to reverse the destructive dynamics. These courses of action are dependent on prior practices, either enabling or constraining opportunities for paradox navigation. Second, we show how tipping points can trigger breakdowns that are crucial for taking collective action to reverse entrenched practices. As Jarzabkowski et al. (2019) and Lauche and Erez (2023) have found, social systems may reach a breakdown in their attempts for change and in their relations, which can become fruitful as it forces them to reflect on their practices and attend to underlying problems. We argue that tipping points present a similar phenomenon in terms of how actors respond to paradoxes: they change the dynamic of an escalating vicious cycle and prompt actors to rethink their approach, which in turn helps them mitigate the tensions and move toward a new equilibrium. While research has identified different responses to paradoxes, comprehending the complexity of how tensions are navigated through day-to-day practices remains challenging. We extend Pradies et al. ’s (2021) and Schneider et al.’s (2021) by showing how responding to a tipping point through practices of re-envisioning collaboration viability or purpose is an iterative, ongoing, multistep process. Although tipping points may first cause uncertainty, we find that they also trigger reflecting practices, which are crucial for understanding paradox and taking well-informed action in collaborations (Jay, 2013; Stadtler and Van Wassenhove, 2016). Subsequent practices bring back collective momentum among actors to leverage available resources and initiate directed action to the opposite pole. Actors can then concretely tackle the underlying issues that caused the vicious cycle in the first place, which helps address tensions and slowly reverse the vicious cycle. Our insights extend Ungureanu et al.’s (2019) work by showing the intricate process underlying cycle reversal in collaborations, which reaffirms joint collective efforts. Furthermore, we elaborate on how the persistent nature of paradoxes (Cunha and Putnam, 2019; Lê and Bednarek, 2017) and the inability to “resolve” them (Schad et al., 2016) require iterative approaches to navigate back to equilibrium. Third, we show that a sudden tipping point can result in immediate termination of the interorganizational collaboration, as actors are unable to navigate the paradox and the sudden salience of tensions leads to a regressive deadlock. While studies have also touched on the importance of shocks (e.g. Sundaramurthy and Lewis, 2003; Tsoukas and Cunha, 2017), either restricting or enabling responses to paradox, and leading to (un)successful outcomes (Couture et al., 2023) we extend these insights by showing how shocks relate to the interconnectedness and longitudinal nature of vicious cycles. If earlier phases are fraught with insufficient momentum, shared purpose, and commitment, a sudden tipping point may result in collaborative termination. Actors may try to enact practices to try to respond to the tipping point, but such actions are unable to overcome the complex situation at that point. That is, once a threshold is crossed, organizations may not be able to regenerate themselves (Masuch, 1985; Tsoukas and Cunha, 2017). However, our study also offers insights into the opportunities under system disequilibrium and the subsequent escalation of vicious cycles. Prior research emphasizes the risks associated with emphasizing paradoxical poles (Jarzabkowski et al., 2022; Smith and Lewis, 2011) and shows how such one-sided emphasis may lead to negative consequences (Jarzabkowski et al., 2013; Sundaramurthy and Lewis, 2003). Yet research has also called for the exploration of the potential of harnessing disequilibrium (Cunha and Putnam, 2019). Jarzabkowski et al. (2022) show how short periods of disequilibrium in collaborations can actually foster positive features of paradox and thereby aid in novel solutions. We extend these insights by showing how the emphasis on one paradoxical pole through the ongoing enactment of practices (e.g. societal) may lead to unique opportunities to design novel solutions. While tipping points after excessive emphasis can cause collaborative collapse, we show that with sufficient commitment and purpose, tipping points provide opportunities to leverage past successes and enact practices to navigate toward a new equilibrium. Escalation does not necessarily lead to a finite state often found in the literature (Masuch, 1985; Tsoukas and Cunha, 2017). Instead, it can give rise to a new phase of collaboration in which persistent tensions are overcome and a platform for further fruitful collaborative efforts is formed.
Boundary conditions and future research
Our study has several limitations that provide opportunities for further research. First, we address only one specific context (i.e. last-mile logistics), though this context provides a rich setting for assessing business–society paradoxes in interorganizational collaborations. Last-mile logistics are distinct collaborations with a specific, though central and powerful, constellation of actors (e.g. customers, suppliers, a hub). Future research could investigate the extent to which other collaborations show similar or different results, such as more diverse collaborations or collaboration with multiple powerful actors. Such collaborations may have different dynamics in how they navigate paradoxes.
Second, we followed the emergence of a vicious cycle over time in each of the four cases. Future research could investigate how new or even multiple vicious cycles play out over time. Given the persistent and oscillating nature of paradox, navigation will always be necessary (Jay, 2013), though it may become more effective over time as actors become more acquainted with each other and learn from past mistakes, giving rise to new practices that can help prevent interorganizational failure.
Finally, the cases we observed had a relatively fixed number of actors who continued to work together over time and consequently got stuck in a vicious cycle. Yet research indicates the potential of including supporting actors (Pradies et al., 2021) or actors outside the home organization (Pamphile, 2022) to help navigate paradoxes, as these actors could provide useful input to break free from the vicious cycle. Future research could investigate how using outsiders could help make sense of paradox or effectively escape a vicious cycle. These actors could potentially become new members in the collaboration, redirecting collective efforts or suggesting useful opportunities to recalibrate collective efforts.
Practical implications
This research also has several practical implications for actors in interorganizational collaborations addressing societal challenges. Navigating the competing demands of business and societal objectives can be difficult, especially if an interorganizational context is riddled with uncertainty. When initiating new collaborations, participating actors should reflect on what characterizes the way they have worked in the past. For example, what are common pitfalls they experienced? What are they good at doing? What challenges should they tackle early on when experimenting? While asking these questions may not prevent all future challenges, it can prepare actors to work differently and prevent them from reverting to business as usual, which, as we show, often hampers collaborative efforts in the long run. When actors get stuck in a business- or societal-dominant orientation and face a tipping point, one influential actor can take the lead to rethink the collaborative efforts and recalibrate attention around a common objective. These are important preconditions for the actors to escape a vicious cycle and approach mitigation. Sometimes collaborative collapse may even be a blessing in disguise, as it facilitates rethinking of the relationship or realigning relationships with key actors to obtain collective solutions again.
Footnotes
Appendix
Data excerpts societal orientation of CareHub and RetHub.
| Aim | Practices | Exemplary excerpts | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Initiating practices | Maneuvering toward common purpose | Leveraging available resources | Last May we met for the first time [. . .] and in September I told everyone: “on the first of February I want to start with two new neighborhoods, four concierges, six days a week with six suppliers”, and we did it. [. . .] it wasn’t easy, but we all put our shoulders under to make it work (CareHub, interview project manager, 12-2020) It was quite difficult to get in touch with the different organizations in the neighborhood [. . .] But I reached out to many organizations and people at the beginning. We got the word out and told people about CareHub. People quickly noticed us and saw what we could do. (CareHub, interview concierge, 6-2020) To get up and running we implemented a 15 month free trial for suppliers to join the scheme. [. . .] [Hub] and us shared the costs on that. (RetHub, interview, municipality representative) |
| Sidelining business issues | A common thing in decarbonization projects is you might have a goal [business case], but how do you get there? I’ve seen that quite vividly at RetHub. People usually don’t know. [. . .] or if I want to achieve that what should I do first and second. [. . .] I believe that was missing. (RetHub, interview researcher) |
||
| Perpetuating practices | Amplifying collective efforts | Idealizing success | For the future [. . .] you know I think that if we, at the end of the year, three neighborhoods, [neighborhood 1 and 2], and then started a third one, and operational in a good way, then I’ll be very content. If we have grown to nine, ten, well then we have something, then you’re really something. Then you’ve learned a lot and I think after that, the year after we will be ready for the next step, into a new region. (CareHub, interview director home care, 5-2021) |
| Overextending resources | I love it, don’t get me wrong, but I’m in over my head. I only have a few hours per week to spend on this project, but last week for example I already worked three full days on CareHub. I have other projects to run as well, and that’s also on top of my regular workload. (CareHub, interview home care manager, 5-2021) |
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| Omitting key actors | We heard practically nothing since the funding ran out [from project management]. It puts a strain on us, because we don’t know what’s going to happen. I have to pay the concierges, but [. . .] I’m not sure if I can pay them next month, and I feel responsible because they are under our employment. (CareHub, interview community hub manager, 11-2021) |
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| Mitigating practices | Re-envisioning collaboration viability | Reflecting on business-oriented issues | I think part of the problem is that we are not established yet, we need some kind of new organizational form which will provide us with legitimacy, people and tools to work this through to a viable concept (CareHub, interview coordinator social care, 2-2022) |
| Leveraging past success | Home care manager: I’ve tugged and pushed for CareHub, we had to do a lot of negotiating and convincing [laughter]. It was all or nothing. [. . .] I brought it up during various meetings with the municipality and other relations we have in the neighborhood and tried to convince people that we had something that was working and that had benefit. Even though the business case isn’t done yet, this does not mean it’s not worth pursuing. (CareHub, vignette observation, 3-2022) |
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| Substantiating business viability | We finally put our money where our mouths were and got this foundation up and running. Took long enough [haha]. [. . .] we made sure there was someone from the municipality on the council, as well as someone from the home care organization [. . .]. We can hopefully talk more as equals now; each have a voice. (CareHub, interview community hub manager, 4-2022) |
Acknowledgements
The authors thank three anonymous reviewers for their constructive, thoughtful feedback and in particular our editor, Charlotte Cloutier, for her excellent, hands-on guidance in developing this paper. They thank the participants from our four cases for generously contributing their time during data collection. They also thank Nora Lohmeyer, Bennet Schwoon and numerous other colleagues from Radboud University for their constructive comments throughout the development of the paper. Finally, they are grateful for the feedback they received from participants at the European Group for Organizational Studies Colloquium (EGOS) 2022, the Strategy-As-Practice Community Day at EGOS 2022 and the International Process Symposium for Organizational Studies (PROS) 2022, where we presented earlier versions of this paper. They also thank the TIM Institute for their support in the final phase of the writing.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) under the Living Lab Sustainable Supply Chain Management in Healthcare project [grant no: 439.18.457].
