Organisational, relational and personally experienced differences between working in the public and third sectors

This paper seeks to contribute to the understanding of interaction and collaboration across sectors, by exploring what characterises working in the public and third sectors respectively, as a starting point for
working across these sectors. The paper frames cross-sector collaboration as the collaboration of
individuals working in specific sectors with certain characteristics and conditions. The agency of these
individuals along with the structural conditions set out by sectorial and organisational characteristics,
make up the starting point of their interactions with other individuals. How they act and think in each
sector, make up conditions for interaction and collaboration across sectors.

Rather than studying actors’ thoughts and interactions as they move across sector borders, the paper
explores how the same actors interact in and understand working concurrently in two different sectors
– the public and the third sector. This makes the study what Chen (2012) calls a public–non-profit
comparison, and the aim is to establish a form of case-based baseline of how the same individual actors
can act in and make sense of working in two different sectors. The same individuals are studied
working in two different sectors, to avoid finding differences having to do with studying different
persons.

The paper on the one hand explores contingent structural conditioning through the influence sectorial
and organisational differences can have on the experiences and actions of individuals (see e.g. Ben-Ner
& Ren, 2015; Lee, 2016; Word & Park, 2009). On the other hand, it explores differences between
working in the two sectors, which seem to not be the result of structural differences, but still make up
clear distinctions (see e.g. Knutsen, 2013; Knutsen & Brock, 2014; von Essen, 2015).

The paper is also aimed at making a contribution towards the interpersonal organisational
communication (IPOC) field (Alrø & Frimann, 2008; Dahl, 2008) as it employs micro-level analysis of
communication and juxtaposes this with the sectorial and organisational contexts in a constitutive
understanding of the relation between these entities.
Data sources are participant observation, documents, interviews and video observation, and the study
applies critical realism (Bhaskar, 1998; Sayer, 2000) as its philosophy of science and the DiaLoop model as its basis for micro-level analysis of interactions and the sectorial and organisational context (Alrø, Dahl, & Schumann, 2016; Frederiksen, 2018, pp. 75–85).
(The above abstract was accepted, but the conference unfortunately canceled due to COVID-19)