Ideal Collaboration: A Conceptual Framework of Community Collaboration

Abstract

Collaboration has become a central feature of organizational and community landscapes in recent years. Although the concept of collaboration has received much scholarly attention, community collaboration has not been adequately considered and conceptualized as a unique and important form of collaboration. This chapter first offers a conceptual framework for understanding community collaboration that emerges from principles and concepts articulated by the bonafide group perspective and the systems perspective. The 12cell matrix, produced by combining the four constituents of community collaborations identified from a bona fide group perspective (individual representatives, collaboration groups, organizational stakeholders, and the communities within which collaborations are embedded) with the three major categories from the systems perspective (inputs/antecedents, throughputs/processes, and outputs), provides the basis for reviewing what is known from the extant literature about successful or ideal community collaboration and what remains to be known. The framework, thus, serves the heuristic purpose of conceptualizing collaboration, organizing the relevant literature, and suggesting directions for future research, especially about the constitutive role that communication plays in community collaborations.