Center for the Study of Collaboration 

Mission:

Programs:

Presenting a counter-narrative to the market and bureaucratic reform strategies of the past decade, the Program on Collaborative School Reform has focused on professional collaboration among educators as a means to sustained student achievement. The program has studied numerous school districts throughout the United States, ranging in size from 300 to approximately 25,000 educators. It has linked student achievement outcomes to teacher collaboration within and between schools. It has also found that productive labor-management partnerships help to catalyze and sustain effective collaboration in school districts and schools.

The Program on Collaborative Health Care Delivery has conducted research in a set of New Jersey hospitals and has documented improved performance in units with strong cross-disciplinary teams.

The Program on Business and Stakeholder Relations, partnered with the Truepoint Center, draws on a network of CEOs who have expressed strong commitment to producing value for multiple stakeholders.

The Program on Mutualism in Civil Society, partnered with the Freelancers Union, experiments with and reflects on efforts to build networks of mutual aid to deal with social problems, including health insurance, career development, and environmental sustainability.

A program on teamwork and leadership focuses on the micro level of leader and team interaction.

Research and publications:

We have explored the effectiveness of collaborative union-management partnerships as an approach to school reform by documenting and conducting extensive research in a set of partnerships throughout the country. Initial results are reported in Collaborating on School Reform.

We have sought to understand why teamwork in medical care is so difficult to achieve, through fieldwork in acute cardiac care units observing interactions among the different providers, from nurses to nutritionists to doctors. A paper based on that research has been submitted for publication, and others are in preparation.

We conducted research on on the conditions for collaborative organization in over 25 companies; the results were published in The Collaborative Enterprise, Yale University Press 2007.

A project on “collaborative community” explored the problem of the creation and maintenance of trust in complex knowledge-focused organizations. This brought together sociologists and political scientists with business researchers and practitioners for a series of discussions that built a common theoretical framework and a set of linked empirical studies. The outcome was published in 2006 as The Firm as a Collaborative Community (Oxford University Press).

Research on accountability in complex team-based organizations, based on interviews and observations in seven companies, were the basis of a PhD dissertation by Carlos Martin.

Next:

• We are continuing to conduct research on collaborative organization of school systems, with the support fo the Gates Foundation.

• We are conducting a study on the value base of collaborative systems; an initial publication is a case study for Harvard Business School on the values transformation process at IBM. Research is ongoing at other companies.

• We are developing a survey to identify the degree of collaborative culture in organizations.