This chapter uses a case comparison to show the behavioral consequences of uncertainty about relationality – how it prevents new collaborative relationships that people would value from forming in the first place.

This chapter discusses the importance of collaborative relationships in civic life, and how the relationships that people would value do not always arise on their own. Instead, there can be an unmet desire to collaborate. It underscores why it’s important to distinguish between two types of goals for collaborative relationships: informal collaboration oriented toward knowledge exchange, and formal collaboration oriented toward projects with shared ownership, decision-making authority, and accountability. It also introduces the book’s main argument, which is that in addition to commonly cited factors such as resource constraints and a lack of organizational incentives, unmet desire arises because potential collaborators (who often begin as strangers) can be uncertain how to relate to each other. Uncertainty about relationality is a key barrier to new collaborative relationships. Last, the chapter also connects a rich understanding of the science of collaboration to several other topics: the nature of democratic agency, how to strengthen the link between science and society, the nature of discursive participation as a form of civic engagement, and how we conceptualize civic competence.

This chapter summarizes the main findings of the book, and then presents a tool called an unmet desire survey (designed based on those findings) that potential collaborators and organizational leaders can use in order to form new collaborative relationships. It also briefly discusses how the findings are helpful for forming new research partnerships, a type of formal collaboration discussed in greater detail in one of the appendices. Last, it includes several policy recommendations for how organizational leaders can put the results into practice, as well as science policy recommendations for valuable future research on the unmet desire to collaborate in civic life.

Relationality captures how people want others to relate to them, and how they will relate to diverse others, yet as this chapter shows “relating to others” may include many different elements and be person- and/or context-specific. This chapter uses interviews with nonprofit practitioners and researchers, and also national surveys of policymakers and AmeriCorps program leaders, to lay out some of the ways in which different kinds of people who seek change in civic life express uncertainty about relationality.

This chapter provides an overview of the theory of relationality – the idea that people care about how others relate to them, and whether they can successfully relate to others – and how potential collaborators can be uncertain about these relational aspects. “Relating to others” captures both the information to be shared, and also the experience of interacting. Key to the theory of relationality, as it applies to potential collaborators with diverse forms of expertise, is that status-based stereotypes can drive a wedge between having expertise and having that expertise be socially recognized. This chapter builds up to a series of hypotheses about how potential collaborators care about the information to be shared and the experience of interacting when choosing whether to engage in new collaborative relationships with diverse thinkers. It also identifies several possible interventions for fostering valuable new collaborative relationships.

This chapter tests two ways of overcoming uncertainty about relationality – having potential collaborators directly communicate how they will relate to each other, and using third parties such as matchmakers and boundary spanners. Both are useful for creating valuable new collaborative relationships, especially between people who begin as strangers. In addition, this chapter also presents evidence showing the impact of new collaborative relationships on strategic decision-making. Data in this chapter come from a variety of national surveys, field experiments, and case comparisons.