Exploring Motives for Collaboration within a Humanitarian Inter-Organizational Network

Ngamassi, Louis-Marie; Zhao, Kang; Maldonado, Edgar; Maitland, Carleen; Tapia, Andrea

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/14930 Copy

Description

Title

Exploring Motives for Collaboration within a Humanitarian Inter-Organizational Network

Author(s)

• Ngamassi, Louis-Marie
• Zhao, Kang
• Maldonado, Edgar
• Maitland, Carleen
• Tapia, Andrea

Issue Date

2010-02-03

Keyword(s)

• Inter-organizational network
• humanitarian NGOs
• social network
• collaboration
• network clusters

Abstract

While in recent years research has highlighted the rise of inter-organizational collaboration among humanitarian organizations/agencies in the nonprofit sector and has documented issues related to the forming and maintaining of these relationships, there is little known about their motives of collaboration. In this paper, we examine collaboration relationships among organizations/agencies member of a community of interest in humanitarian information exchange. The social network block-model method was used to analyze collaboration network data. Six strongly connected clusters were identified in the community. Evaluating reported reasons for these collaborations, it was found that the two main motivations are relational characteristics, which interestingly are the most and least reported reasons in two of the most densely connected clusters of relationships. These findings suggest that it is important to determine the different reasons for humanitarian - inter-organizational relationships if one is to understand the various patterns of collaboration within inter-organizational networks.

Type of Resource

text

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/14930

Owning Collections