From partnership to firm: Hybridity as source of routine change

Paper in proceeding, 2020

Strategic partnerships have recently gained foothold in the Danish construction industry as a novel collaborative interorganisational relationship. Strategic partnerships have so far been used in major construction programmes and can be seen as a hybridised organisational form that draws on multiple existing organisational forms in creating new interorganisational routines and developing collective knowledge. The objective of the paper is to explore how a strategic partnership creates new routines by developing collective knowledge, and how these routines are transferred to the constituent organisations as firm-specific routines. Empirically, we draw on data from a strategic partnership between the City of Copenhagen's client unit, ByK, and a group of six AEC firms that constitutes the consortium named TRUST. Data is collected in the period 2017-2019 and consists of 22 interviews describing developments in the strategic partnership and in the constituent firms. In the analysis, we apply an institutional theory perspective in a parallel analysis of developments in the strategic partnership and in two of the constituent firms (the client and the contractor). We show that the strategic partnership creates new interorganisational routines in pursuit of collective knowledge and that the constituent firms learn from their engagement in the strategic partnership, which leads to creation of new routines and changes in existing routines. As such, the paper contributes to an understanding of how new intraorganisational routines created in a strategic partnership ramify to firm-specific routines in the constituent firms.