Shared Partnership Identity between Faculty and Community Partners
Open Access
- Author:
- Janke, Emily M.
- Graduate Program:
- Higher Education
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 20, 2008
- Committee Members:
- Carol L Colbeck, Ph D, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Lisa R Lattuca, Ph D, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Jeremy Cohen, Committee Member
Dennis Arnold Gioia, Committee Member - Keywords:
- partnership identity
organizational identity
public scholarship
campus-community partnerships - Abstract:
- This dissertation explored the role of organizational identities, social identities and communication in how faculty and community partners perceived and enacted partnerships for student learning. This dissertation contributes a set of characteristics of Partnership Identity that were present in five faculty-community partnerships. The study involved 19 members of five faculty-community partnerships. This research was grounded in theories of organizational identity, social identity, and communication/negotiation. The major questions explored in this study were whether faculty and community partnerships have identities similar to organizational identities, and if so, what are their key characteristics? This study also explored what factors are associated with Partnership Identity development. The research questions were: (1) how faculty and community partners perceived the organizational identities of their employing institutions; (2) how faculty and community partners perceived their social identities within the context of the partnership; (3) the relationship between faculty and community partners’ social identities and how they communicated/negotiated with one another. The unit of analysis in this study is a partnership between faculty and community partners. Three partnerships were selected from a private liberal arts college and two partnerships were selected from a public land-grant university. To understand each partnership, I studied the perceptions of its members. Data collection included multiple interviews with 19 faculty and community partners, observations of partnership meetings, interviews with relevant administrators at partners’ employing organizations, and analysis of partnership-related documents. Participants were interviewed to understand how they viewed their employing organizations and themselves with regards to their work with the partnership, how they communicated with partners, and how they viewed aspects of the partnership. Interview transcripts were analyzed for patterns of similarities and differences across all five cases. The partnerships differed in terms of how partners viewed and experienced their partnerships. Differences in whether partners had a unified mission, established nurture norms, developed organizational structures (informal or formal), held expectations to continue the partnership, and articulated the partnership as a distinct and identifiable entity were associated with those partners who felt a sense of “we” within the context of their partnership. Partnerships that exhibited these five characteristics were labeled as having a Partnership Identity, and those who exhibited none to few of the characteristics were labeled as being Without Partnership Identity. Factors that were associated with Partnership Identity included partners’ following a collaborative style of communication, and discussing shared credit and recognition, and future projects. Partnership Identity may be important for the successful functioning and longevity of faculty-community partnerships because how partners make sense of who they are together may influence their behaviors, commitments, and plans to maintain the partnership.