Collaborative Communities

Critical Collaborative Communities describes diverse approaches to writing partnerships, interrogating their strengths and limitations and proposing recommendations. Authors outline how trusting relationships have helped avoid isolation and have led to their self-authorship as academic writers.

Collaborative Communities show how companies can develop this profitable new business pattern of seamless alliances. Profitably satisfy customers' personal needs and wants. Generate revenue from each business building process that lets you quickly try, quickly learn, and quickly adapt. As cofounders of The Rhythm of Business, a think tank for the networked economy, Jeffery Shuman and Janice Twombly have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, CIO Magazine, and Business Start-Ups, and provide expert advice and commentary on business start ups for a number of Web sites including altavista.com, campuscareercenter.com, and cio.com.

Faced with the ever-accelerating pace of technological change and the restructuring of markets, many firms have been questioning the appropriateness of their own organizational structure and effectiveness. Consequently, we have witnessed much organizational experimentation and the development of new forms of organizing over the last decade. Firms are more dependent than ever on the need for continuous and radical innovations – and often innovations that go beyond their existing businesses. This challenges firms in terms of knowledge and idea sharing, and often necessitates the need to expand beyond the boundaries of the single firm for multi-party collaboration to meet serious challenges and develop creative solutions. Drawing from the Fourth International Workshop on Organization Design, and featuring contributions from an international array of specialists, this volume focuses on the expansion beyond the boundaries of the single firm and multi-firm networks, to include, for example, community-based organization designs. A community is a connected set of firms; the connections can take on many different dimensions. For organization design theory, community-based organizations have many implications. For one, organization design theory has to identify and describe designs that enhance collaborative behavior among firms without restricting the ability of the individual firm to continue to compete within its own marketplace. Moreover, organization design theory also has to identify and describe information processing strategies and designs that allow the continuous generation, sharing, and application of existing information and knowledge. The development of effective collaborative community designs is critically important to the global economy because, increasingly, our future depends on pursuing shared goals and sustainably developing our global commons. Ideally, the ideas and findings in this book will contribute to increased attention to new organization designs capable of meeting 21st-century opportunities and challenges.

Building and Maintaining Collaborative Communities: Schools, University, and Community Organizations is a new and noteworthy volume in the literature on collaboration among schools and universities. It expands the playing field to include both publically and privately funded community organizations and the effects of the interaction of the three on projects in a multitude of settings both domestically and in international venues. Asked to analyze their projects following the Slater Matrix, nineteen examples provide an inside glimpse into the success and limitations of each project. Chapters are organized in order of complexity of type of collaboration. The editors expect this to be a useful guide for university personnel, school administrators, and community organizations wishing to embark or expand on projects involving schools, universities, and community organizations. In a time of short resources and uncertain sustainability, it should serve as a useful tool in making decisions in the planning, process, carrying out, and analysis of each endeavor.

This volume explores the changing nature of community in modern corporations. Community within and between firms - the fabric of trust so essential to contemporary business - has long been based on loyalty. This loyalty has been largely destroyed by three decades of economic turbulence, downsizing, and restructuring. Yet community is more important than ever in an increasingly complex, knowledge-intensive economy. The thesis of this volume is that a new form of community is slowly emerging - one that is more flexible and wider in scope than the community of loyalty, and that transcends the limitations of both traditional Gemeinschaft and modern Gesellschaft. We call this form collaborative community. The trend towards collaborative community is difficult to detect amidst the ferocious forces of market and bureaucratic rationalization. But close analysis of some of America's most successful corporations reveals three dimensions of the emerging form: · a shared ethic of interdependent contribution: distinct from the uneasy mix of loyalty and individualism that prevailed for so long; · a formalized set of norms of interdependent process management that include iterative co-design, metaphoric search, and systematic mutual understanding: distinct from both rigid authority hierarchies and informal log-rolling; · An interdependent social identity that supports these organizational features: distinct from both dependent, traditionalistic identities and the independence of the autonomous self that is often associated with Western culture. This volume is a collaborative effort of leading scholars in organization studies to delineate the new form of community and the forces encouraging and constraining its growth. The contributors combine sociology and psychology theory with detailed analysis of business cases at the firm and inter-firm level.

Understudied relative to other forms of intentional community, and under-recognized in policy-making circles, urban cohousing communities situate wellbeing as simultaneously social and subjective, while catering for groups of people so diverse in age. Collaborative Happiness looks at two such urban cohousing communities: Kankanmori, in Tokyo; and Quayside Village, in Vancouver. In expanding beyond mainstream approaches to happiness focused exclusively on the individual, Quayside Village and Kankanmori provide an alternative model for how to understand and practice the good life in an increasingly urbanized world marked by crisis of both social and environmental sustainability.

This innovative book examines the changing relationship between communities, citizens and the notion of the archive. Archives have traditionally been understood as repositories of knowledge and experience, remote from the ordinary people who fund and populate them, however digital resources have led to a growing plurality of archives and the practices associated with collecting and curating. This book uses a broad range of case studies which place communities at the heart of this exciting development, to illustrate how their experiences are central to our understanding of this new terrain which challenges traditional histories and the control of knowledge and power.