Framing Public-Private Partnerships: Perspectives on Sociotechnical Spaces, Staging, and Innovation of Meanings

Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) has recently gained attention in the public sector and the Danish construction industry as a new business model giving promises of increased productivity and innovation through long-term collaboration. PPP is widely used worldwide and can be considered an effective way to pool competencies across organisations and thus reach objectives that cannot be realised by individual companies. However, there is no tradition for such commitments between public bodies and companies in the Danish construction industry and very few insights are available about the development and activities shaping the PPP-model. Drawing on design-driven innovation and actor-network theory, we examine an ongoing PPP between the City of Copenhagen’s Department of Construction and a business unit of six Danish AEC companies and their efforts to organise and manage a productive collaboration in order to fulfil specific public and private business objectives. Furthermore, we highlight how radical new meanings and languages of the PPP-model emerge. The analysis is organised in a number of sociotechnical spaces where activities and staging processes are performed between heterogeneous diversities of organisations and actors. Data from the ongoing PPP is collected using ethnographic methods and translated into the analysis as retrospective descriptions of the development and the activities. The conclusion offers real time insights into the complex and ‘fuzzy’ network of continuous negotiations that, on one hand, influence the development and activities in the ongoing PPP, and on the other, frame and reframe the meanings and languages of the PPP-model.