The journey of great expectations: A study on how institutional expectations impact collaboration expectations and collaboration enactment in hybrid interorganizational partnerships

Our research is concerned with the role played by expectations in hybrid interorganizational collaboration projects. In particular, we look at how organizations participating in public-private partnerships negotiate broad and ill-defined goals and expectations set by policymakers to carry forward heterogeneous expectations about the partnership. We empirically study a hybrid partnership in which public and private actors came together with the broad goal of supporting regional innovation and fostering knowledge exchange. We use a process-perspective derived from the sociology of expectations to analyze the generative and transformational role of expectations, that is, how expectations shape dynamics and outcomes of hybrid collaboration. In particular, we document that the tendency to create ad-hoc material objects or spaces (in our case, a regional science park) can lead to vicious self-reinforcing mechanisms that push partners away from the initial collaboration goals. Notably, too many expectations and promissory commitments associated to an already configured physical space may lock partners in rigid and repetitive interaction schemes, especially when the configuration of the space is not backed up by social centrality— willingness and ability to modify pre-existing organizational structures. We offer contributions to a better understanding of collaborative dynamics in partnership failure and a more nuanced understanding of policy goal-setting through hybrid private-public partnerships.