ABSTRACT
Collaboration seems to have become as rampant in management and organization studies and practice as it is in contemporary fine art. While scholars and practitioners of the former discipline are eager to promote collaboration as a way of organizing that succeeds competitive relationships (Markova and McArthur, 2015), collaborative practices have become an oeuvreconstituting element of contemporary art (Kester, 2004; Ruhsam, 2011). In management and organization research, this shift towards a collaborative notion of organizing is closely related to developments that are read as phenomena of a transforming business world. On the one hand, it is embedded in a narrative about business that has gone through fundamental processes of de-verticalization as to be “far more flexible and better suited to the volatile nature of the new global economy” (Rifkin, 2001:23). On the other hand, collaboration is considered to play a major role in what is often called knowledge-driven economies that are a “heterogeneous set of productive activities that revolves around the processing of information and to workers who focus on the creation, development and diffusion of knowledge” (Armano, 2014:246). With innovation and learning being regarded as major drivers of economic well-being, management and organization, researchers conceive collaboration an adequate organizational form for responding to the demands of knowledge-driven businesses (MacCormack et al., 2007). Used interchangeably with cooperation, collaboration is treated as rather neutral technique of organizing (Andrews and Mickahail, 2015). If scholars like Snow (2015) distinguish between cooperation and collaboration, they do so by means of a third notion-that of competition-conceptualizing cooperation as engagement with another party to accomplish a goal that cannot be reached alone. In cooperatives relationships, trust is an issue. Collaboration “is a process of shared decision making in which all the parties with a stake in the problem constructively explore their differences and develop a joint strategy for action” (Bengtsson and Kock, 2000:435). This
notion of collaboration is embedded in assumptions of voluntary participation, care and commitment amongst the participating parties (Appley and Winder, 1977) that attribute to collaboration an undeniably positive connotation, closely connected to the democratic and humanistic values found in early organizational development approaches (Jamieson and Worley, 2008). This positive notion of collaboration tends to negate power issues that do not vanish into thin air by reducing hierarchies.
