Searching for a collective ethos in interorganizational relationships

Globalization accelerates the need to accommodate the ethical guidelines of different cultures, the subject of many of the papers in the symposium. In a similar manner, the increased use of interorganizational relationships to accomplish projects accelerates the need to confront the value discontinuities in collaboration among representatives from the public, private, nonprofit, and volunteer sectors within American society. Rather than tackling the question of the precise principles to follow in models of interorganizational relationships versus the need for the thick descriptions of the particular, the focus of this paper is more middle-range. The paper outlines some suggested means of connecting the assumptions of several models of interorganizational relationships with the insights of models of establishing a collective ethos. The tone is meant to be tentative and suggestive of a way to begin connecting diverse strands of literature, the problematic posed by the increasing engagement of interorganizational relationships in public administration