Working Papers

- Drafts Available Upon Request -

Distributed Knowledge and the Creation of Public Value

Devin Stein & Maria Minniti

Abstract: Scholars have emphasized how public value is created by overcoming market frictions. Much literature, however, views addressing market frictions as the responsibility of public organizations, thus overlooking the potential of self-organizing communities in generating public value. Using a New Institutional Economics lens, we build on extant theory of collective action and public-private collaborations to unpack the distinctive role agentic communities may play alongside other organizational forms in the creation of public value. Knowledge is distributed. Thus, when a community self-organizes to address a common goal and, in particular, when it collaborates with organizations across levels, the combination of local and global knowledge enables the discovery of more and better opportunities to address market frictions. We test our argument using an original longitudinal dataset of community-level fire prevention plans in Northern California from 1998-2018. Our results show that communities taking local actions and coordinating them with state and federal organizations manage wildfires better and experience fewer property losses. The strength and number of stakeholders involved in cross-level collaborations reinforce this effect. Unpacking the knowledge complementarities engendered by community-based organizing and related cross-level collaborations has important implications for overcoming market frictions effectively.

In the Mix: Organizational Effectiveness and Complex Social Issues

Devin Stein, Maria Minniti, Roger Koppl

Abstract: Different organizational forms have been shown to possess different capacities to address complex social issues. Yet, organizations do not act in isolation from one another. They act in the context of other organizations. We argue that an organization’s ability to address a complex social issue is shaped by other organizations of different types and across jurisdictional levels. We expand upon existing work on organizational solutions to social issues by linking organizational performance to the diversity of their organizational mix, and the relative scarcity of different types of organizations in that mix. We provide evidence for our theory using wildfire prevention organizations and property losses experienced across California from 2013 to 2019. Our results demonstrate how the functional roles and allocation of resources among broad groups of organizations affects their shared impact on complex social issues.

Enabling Systemic Search Through Interorganizational Hybridity

Roger Koppl, Devin Stein, Maria Minniti

Abstract: We expand upon existing conceptions of interorganizational hybridity by arguing that when social problems are complex, the multitude of tasks needed to address them can be identified only through search by a heterogeneous set of searchers. In the context of complex social issues, organizations are the searchers who identify the tasks for which they have an “embedded comparative advantage,” thereby contributing to determining an appropriate partition of tasks. The set of organizations acting on the problem and the partition of tasks across them constitutes the organizational mix. The organizational mix creates interorganizational hybridity because it includes organizations of different types. Our theory of the organizational mix moves beyond hybridity in one or a few organizations to system-wide interorganizational hybridity. It also broadens the unit of analysis from social enterprises to include for-profit, non-profit, and public organizational forms arrayed in a hierarchy that supports multi-level system processes.