| Complex social problems (e.g., health disparities, poverty, social discrimination) are obscurely embedded within a variety of context-specific economic, technical, social, political, and legal spheres that signify substantial consequences for individuals. Community-wide cross-sector partnerships have become the dominant preferred approach to dealing with such problems and often involve interorganizational collaborative structures despite evidence of their effectiveness in creating meaningful social change. Applying systems thinking to conceptualizing community allows for an understanding of the deeper organizational forces influencing behaviors involved in changing processes and outcomes of community systems, which allows for a deeper understanding of collaborative endeavors. Taking a community-based research, and two-phase sequential mixed-methods approach, this case study explored organizational culture within a local collaborative to uncover the implicit more indiscernible aspects of organizations that influence behavior related to participation in community-level systems change initiatives. Using social network analysis, this study describes the dense dynamic network of a long-standing collaborative consisting of over 300 organizations. Inductive and deductive qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with a sub-sample of the collaborative was used to characterize the culture of the collaborative, in terms of artifacts, beliefs, values, and assumptions of participating organizations that facilitate or constrain participation with the network and for the collaborative. Exploratory results discuss possible hypotheses to be tested in future studies and implications for practical coordination of interorganizational systems change initiatives. |
