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Updated to include result-oriented leadership in the various frameworks of collaborative practices. The bibliography has been expanded and updated.

Updated on 03 Sep 2013. The previous version of this content can be found here.
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date: 20 July 2017

Abstract and Keywords

Social workers are uniquely prepared to provide leadership for collaborative practice, especially when they employ intervention logic. Intervention-driven collaboration develops interdependent relationships among people. These relationships are cemented by norms of reciprocity and trust, enabling participants to organize for collective action in response to “wicked” problems characterized by uncertainty, novelty, and complexity.

Among the family of “c-words” (for example, communication, coordination), collaboration is the most difficult to develop, institutionalize, and sustain because it requires new organizational designs, including inter-organizational partnerships, as well as policy change. Notwithstanding the attendant challenges, collaborative practice is a mainstay in multiple sectors of social work practice, including mental health, substance abuse, school social work, complex, anti-poverty initiatives, international social work, workforce development, and research. Growing collaboration with client systems connects collaborative practice with empowerment practice and facilitates the achievement of social work's mission.

Keywords: collaboration, social work practice, collective action, complex change

Hal A. Lawson

Hal A. Lawson, Ph.D., holds a joint appointment in the Schools of Social Welfare and Education and also works regularly in the School of Public Health at the University at Albany, State University of New York. This three-cornered appointment reflects his interests in interdisciplinary, team-based scholarship conducted in communities challenged by social and economic disadvantage, especially communities with the most outcome disparities. Partnership and collaboration research and development initiatives are mainstays in Lawson’s scholarship. Recent examples of funded research include a family-centered obesity prevention and intervention initiative, with parent-led, community-based participatory action research (National Institutes of Health); the development of an innovative multi-service school in concert with an overall Cradle-to-Career System framework (New York State Department of Education); and complex policy research and development for chronically-underperforming New York schools and school districts needing dramatic turnaround models and strategies (New York State Department of Education). All of these initiatives require collaboration among the researchers and the funders. In turn, all employ twin interventions in vulnerable communities: Collaboration among people and partnerships among organizations.

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