The Pseudo-Social Actor: A Case of a Cross-sector Partnership For Refugee Employment

Abstract

Over the past few decades, cross-sector partnerships have become the dominant vehicle of choice for businesses and non-profit and community organisations to work together to address a societal issue of shared concern. As a part of these partnership arrangements, businesses make commitments - both general and specific, small and large - towards ameliorating a societal issue. These commitments made by businesses suggests that we can expect some form of social change. Yet, if this is the case, why do partnership arrangements have such a high failure rate and few achievements to show? What happened to their commitments towards addressing a societal issue of shared concern? What is going on here? These lines of questions animate this thesis which theorised a story of a cross-sector partnership between businesses and non-profit community organisations that exists on paper and in discourse. The research I present draws on the literature of organisational identity (OI) to reflect on the processes involved in forming a cross-sector partnership and the development and maintenance of a distinctive partnership identity. I adopt Burawoy’s Extended Case Method to examine, within context, how and why a specific pattern of events emerged so as to form what I call a pseudo-social actor: an organising form that achieves a high level of external legitimacy despite its lack of effective action. Based on 16 months of field engagement within the refugee settlement services sector, interviews and documentary data, I propose a revised accountability framework to extend existing theory on the social actor perspective of OI. This revised framework lays the basis for a more critical approach to the study of OI, one that illuminates how power and politics are integral to, and deeply embedded in, processes of OI construction and maintenance; and more specifically how this can potentially lead to a lack of accountability of the part of organisations that are claiming to deliver social value.