When a Practice Becomes a Contract (and vice-versa): The Construction of Inter-Organizational Partnerships for the Co-Design of Welfare Services

The aim of this paper is to analyse how a multi-faceted practice (the inter-organizational collaboration for the design and implementation of social welfare services) is transformed when it is inscribed within the norms of a formal contractual arrangement of inter-organizational cooperation. One of the implications of this shift is the rise of a set of organizational skills that transform the management of this cooperation into a new repertoire of practices.

These processes occur when the creation of a meta-organization (particularly in the case of the creation of project organization) is a requirement for applying to calls for the implementation of innovative welfare services funded by public or private actors. This is a growing trend in those countries, such as Italy, where austerity policies have sharply reduced the public funding of the social welfare system. The creation of project-organizations with the purpose of implementing innovative services is an opportunity for sharing resources and tackling emerging social needs more effectively and efficiently. A growing number of public institutions (Regions and Municipalities firstly) as well as private actors (such as private foundations) are encouraging this practice in order to overcome the limits that the traditional forms of design and provision of social welfare services are facing because of the socio-economic crisis.

From a theoretical point of view, our paper aims at joining the literature developed in the field of the practice-based studies with the studies on meta-organizations. The rationale of this framework is the idea that the management of a new meta-organization implies the development of new practices both at the administrative and at the managerial level. This reflection is supported by the analysis of three case studies of project-organizations created for the development of innovative social welfare services in Northern Italy.