The Evolution of Dyadic Interorganizational Relationships in a Network of Publicly Funded Nonprofit Agencies

Abstract

This article addresses a gap in the extant literature on networks by assessing how interorganizational relationships evolve in a public sector network setting. The context for the research was a network of publicly funded health and human service agencies involved in service delivery to people with serious mental illness. Longitudinal data were collected from a single community. The analysis suggests that public and nonprofit sector relationships evolve differently than private sector partnerships, providing an alternative perspective to the prevailing view in organization theory.