About the Project
The problem we set out to address
Communities everywhere face problems no single organization can solve such as pandemics, homelessness, flooding, and wildfires. Responses to these complex issues tend to be in the form of a coordinated arrangement across levels of government and sectors. Purpose-oriented networks, or PONs, are the formalized version of that response. PONs are defined as three or more organizations that consciously affiliate around a shared purpose.
PONs are everywhere in practice, and they have been studied for decades. But as typically studied, scholars tend to focus on a single network in a single context. In part, because gaining access to PONs can be difficult and collecting network data is time consuming.
We see the field as having a shortage of comparable data. Testing whether a proposed relationship holds requires many networks, observed over time, measured the same way. That is data no single scholar and no single lab can assemble. It was this data challenge that gave rise to Across the PONs.
How the collaborative came together
2022 — Barcelona. A small group of network scholars gathered at ESADE, just emerging from COVID and meeting in person for the first time in over two years. The question on the table was where purpose-oriented network research was headed and what was missing. The proposal made there was a team science one: if enough of us collected data on a few networks each, using a shared instrument, we could build collectively what none of us could build alone. Across the PONs began at that meeting.
2023 — Tilburg. The group assembled a wish list of hypotheses we would test given data on hundreds of networks at multiple points in time, all measured the same way. That list was translated into specific variables and organized into four thematic working groups: context, structure and inputs, governance, and process and outputs. Each group spent the following year determining exactly what to measure and how.
2024 — Chicago. The working groups reconvened to combine their measures and draft the instruments themselves.
Now. Three instruments exist — an interview guide for network managers, a survey for network leaders, and a survey for organizational members — along with their codebooks. They are openly available on the Open Science Framework. The first wave of data collection using these instruments is underway.
The collaborative now includes scholars across the globe, ranging from doctoral students to emeritus professors. A data-use and sharing agreement lets new members join and contribute to the shared database.
Our current study and data collection effort
The current study applies these instruments to health and human service PONs (with plans to expand to environmental PONs) in four countries: the United States, Mexico, the Netherlands, and Spain. These four were chosen for the variation they offer in two contextual dimensions that theory suggests should matter: (i) how a country provides social welfare, and (ii) whether its policymaking runs along corporatist or pluralist lines.
The study asks two questions.
What country and municipal conditions shape how PONs are configured?
Their size, the diversity of their membership, how they are governed, and what activities they pursue. Most PON research treats networks as closed systems, bracketing the environment they operate in. Drawing on historical institutionalism and population ecology, this aim asks what the environment actually does.
Which configurations are associated with network functioning and performance?
Our focus here is not on which single factor matters most, but which combinations work, since resources, governance, size, composition, and theory of change plausibly operate in concert rather than independently.
This framing drives our analytic approach. The project uses qualitative comparative analysis, a set-theoretic method that asks which combinations of conditions are associated with an outcome, rather than estimating the average independent effect of each. QCA accommodates an intermediate number of cases, treats each network as a whole configuration rather than a bundle of separable variables, and allows for equifinality (i.e., more than one pathway to the same result).
Why this work matters
The result will be a first-of-its-kind comparative database on PONs that includes qualitative, quantitative, and social network data at organizational, network, municipal, and country levels.
The instruments are open and the protocols documented, so other scholars can collect comparable data on on their own networks of interest. Our aim is to grow a data infrastructure that outlasts any single paper and facilitates the field’s ability to ask, and answer, important questions.