External and Internal Supervision Methods and Modalities for Organizational Networks Addressing Complex Societal Issues (EISON)

Solving complex societal issues (like avoiding school drop-outs, advancing sustainability goals, making cities more livable, or managing crises caused by a pandemic) requires cooperation of multiple organizations in so-called organizational networks. Existing supervision arrangements are however mostly developed to support control of individual organizations and are not particularly suitable to deal with the dynamics of inter-organizational collaboration and complex problem solving. There is little evidence on the types of supervision that may support the development of networks: e.g. what approaches for external inspection and internal supervision are needed? How to solve potentially conflicting loyalties of institutional versus organizational network performance? This proposal addresses these questions in developing and studying innovative supervision arrangements which evaluate the functioning and performance of organizational networks and how these networks solve complex societal issues. We will study the appropriateness of different supervision arrangements in different types of networks in different sectors, focusing on education, health care, social housing and safety. We propose ‘design research’ as a methodology to trial and test new approaches in collaboration with the inspection agencies and organization networks operating in four domains. The approach allows us to co-create new knowledge which is of immediate value and enables the participating organizations to incorporate emerging insights into their current practice.