How Organisations Connect: Investing in Communication.
Academy of Social Sciences of Australia Workshop held at Queensland University of Technology,
26-7 August 2005

The above titled workshop was convened by Simon Ville, Gordon Boyce and Stuart Macintyre. One of the aims was to showcase research in economic history and demonstrate how it can be used to engage a central concern in the social sciences, notably the problems of interoganisational communication.
The interorganisational domain provides the setting for a mutual exchange of complementary competences with the prospect of building synergies if the collaboration is sufficiently wide-ranging and sustained. Unfortunately, many interorganisational collaborations fail to satisfy the expectations of their initiators. We argue that this is because most organisations under-invest in the complex and multifaceted task of external communication, instead concentrating upon the productivity and efficiency of internal operations. Therefore, the workshop aims to increase our understanding of why interorganisational collaboration has a high failure rate and establish what can be done to improve the prospects of success. We sought to do this by focussing on the development of institutional norms governing patterns of interaction and through the examination of historical case studies of collaboration.
Professor Kabanoff, Research Director in the Faculty of Business at QUT, welcomed participants. 11 papers were presented in 5 sessions across 2 days with each paper being critically assessed by a discussant then thrown open to general discussion. Paul Robertson, David Merrett, Diane Hutchinson, and Stuart Macintyre served as discussants. The final session of the workshop sought to clarify common themes and approaches that had emerged and could be used in drawing together the studies into a single volume, which will be published by Melbourne University Publishing towards the end of 2006. A workshop dinner was held at Quay West. The conveners gratefully acknowledge the support of the Academy and QUT in finding the workshop.

Images from the Workshop