The Colorado Community Organizing Collaborative: A Critical Realist Case Study

As nonprofit organizations (NPOs) have struggled to effectively address social issues given the constraining reality of funding pressures, shrinking economic resources and services accessibility (Mattessich, Murray-Close & Monsey, 2001), one alternative NPOs have explored includes different forms of working together to achieve goals associated with significant social, political and economic change. This has been illustrated over the past 15 years, where working together has meant engaging in collaborative endeavors. Collaboration as a social science construct has been utilized across the social sciences as a term that captures the multifaceted nature of organizations working together and the individuals who compose them.

The purpose of this study is twofold. The first is to engage critical realism as a methodology in a social work study as a manner of deepening our understanding of collaboration. The second is to re-conceptualize collaboration from a critical realist stance. In performing both, the author will illustrate that the social work profession not only inherently embodies the meta-theoretical tenants of critical realism, but in practicing these tenants in research, the dualism attached to social work research is transcended.

Critical realism at its core posits human agency back in to the collaborative endeavor and reframes how social work research can move beyond the traditional nomothetic or idiographic approaches to understanding person and environment (agency and structure). Both are active dynamics with distinct powers and properties. Utilizing the Colorado Community Organizing Collaborative, the interactions between agential and structural interactions were documented.

This study uses Danermark, et al. (2002), a mixed methodology in social science research as it is framed in critical realism:

Critical realism is a meta-theory, which enables us to understand the importance of methodologies in a new way. That is also the significant difference between our view and the pragmatic one (169).

Utilizing Danermark, et al. (2002) as a frame, a case study design with the unit of analysis was the Colorado Community Organizing Collaborative (CCOC). The embedded units of analysis were nine nonprofit organizations composing the CCOC and their executive directors. Data were collected during ten months of intensive face- to -face interviewing, participant observation of seven CCOC member meetings and five years of CCOC archival documents.

Results found that collaboration was redefined despite the review of literature. First, collaboration was found to be driven by an external mandate to work together for financial reasons. Collaboration as trust was defined by many CCOC members as being a dynamic “built” during meetings. Collaboration as concern emerged from data as efforts and issues CCOC member organizations defined as what makes them work together. It provided the CCOC a sense of purpose among their different missions. Collaboration as commitment was illustrated in archival documentation where CCOC members in their collective engagement gave rise to an ongoing commitment to social change.

Implications for future social work research is through the use of critical realism and utilizing Danermark et al. (2002) to provide an alternative framework to exploring complex social systems.