ABSTRACT
Collaboration within and across sectors has intensified markedly over the past 25 years (Mattessich, Murray-Close, & Monsey, 2001; Selsky & Parker, 2005), both in the United States and around the world. Over the last decade, there has been a rapid expansion of organized voluntary activity in advanced and developing regions, leading one scholar to proclaim the emergence of a “global associational revolution” that may turn out to be “as significant a development of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries as the rise of the nation-state was of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (Salamon, 2005, p. 137). The twenty-first century is predicted to be the age of organizational alliances, and collaboration already has all the force of a social mandate (Austin, 2000). As a subset of collaborative activity, cross-sector social partnerships (CSSPs)—as distinct from the more familiar economic partnerships-are also growing in response to mounting public concerns about education, health, poverty, economic development, and the environment. As we have seen, society’s expectations of universities-and those of virtually every other organizational type-are changing dramatically with the “thickening networks of interdependence” (Brown, Khagram, Moore, & Frumkin, 2000, p. 273) brought about by globalization, changing demographics, and technological advances (Chisholm, 1998).
