Familiar strangers – managing engagements in public-private partnerships in education

ABSTRACT

Various forms of public-private collaborative organizations have been emerging in the education sector, a development that has made managing public-private partnerships an unavoidable imperative for school managers today. Addressing interactions between the partnership manager of and partners in a public-private innovation partnership, this article explores the attachments public and private actors establish in the framework of such partnerships. While formal structures often bind partnerships together, open innovation partnerships have a more fluid organization in which the participants have to establish the ground for their common work. Specifically, the article presents a study of a Danish partnership project aimed at developing a new secondary school. Drawing on the sociology of engagements, the article sketches out the differing forms of mutual engagements at stake between the actors involved and the challenges they face. As the partnership studied lacked formal agreements, the manager’s and partners’ locally performed acts of proximity became a means of binding the partnership together. In these acts, a mutual explorative engagement intertwined with a familiar engagement, thus creating a distinct attachment of familiar strangers between the public and private actors – an attachment through which ideas on education and common educational visions could traverse the public and private sectors.

KEYWORDS:

• Public-private
• partnership
• education policy
• collaboration
• management
• schools
• pragmatic sociology
• sociology of engagements

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The term attachment is employed to indicate the binding dimension of the bonds established between public and private actors. In the sociology of engagements, engagements are understood as binding in the sense that the human capacity for coordination secured in the engagement is dependent on an appropriately prepared environment, understood here as including both other persons and well as the milieu (Thévenot, 2015, p. 22).

2. The phrasing familiar strangers has previously been used in Stanley Milgram’s urban study (Milgram, 2010), Stuart Hall’s autobiographical narrative (Hall, 2017), and studies of virtual spheres and networks (Schwartz, 2013), each of which has employed the phrasing in a particular manner.