From Survival to Shift: Value Creation by Cross-Sector Partnerships Under Authoritarianism

Abstract

This study explores how cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) create value in authoritarian contexts, employing a goal–outcome lens to investigate the interplay between organizational intentions and realized outcomes. Drawing on five CSP cases from China and Vietnam, it demonstrates how CSPs generate intended and auxiliary value across social and market dimensions by strategically deploying “selective coupling” with dominant state logic to secure legitimacy and sustain operations, while preserving elements of market and civil-society logics to pursue their core objectives. Although this conformity stabilizes the prevailing institutional order, CSPs simultaneously introduce civil-society and market practices—such as community empowerment, awareness raising on sustainability and human rights issues, and outcome-based performance management—that incrementally expand the normative space for civil society logic. CSPs function both as stabilizers and subtle catalysts of evolutionary institutional change. In examining these dynamics, this study contributes to scholarship on value creation and institutional complexity in politically constrained contexts.