ABSTRACT
Federal and state policies increasingly call upon community and technical colleges to collaborate with industry and other outside stakeholders in order to improve career and technical education programs. We apply a framework from the public administration literature to understand how these collaborations are built. Using data from in-depth interviews with 49 participants engaged in building collaborations to improve workforce education and training across Tennessee, we find that productive networks rely on dynamic individuals that act as boundary spanners, facilitating communication across sectors. In addition, successful collaborations make use of meetings involving multiple interest groups to bridge, rather than reinforce, boundaries between stakeholders.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank everyone who agreed to be interviewed for this research, as well as Amanda Klafehn and Brandon Hudson at the Tennessee Higher Education Commission for answering our questions about background and context. Joanne Golann, Carolyn Barnes, Jenny Irons, Celeste Carruthers and Carolyn Heinrich provided valuable feedback on this manuscript. Any errors are our own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).