Exploring communication of resistance in cross-sector collaboration: Meaning-negations & counter-narratives in a case from the Danish education area

Abstract
This study addresses the role of resistance in cross-sector collaboration. It explores how resistance is communicated during collaboration to better understand not just its destructive, but also constructive effects on organizing cross-sector collaboration. In so doing, the paper conceptualizes communication of resistance by meaning negotiations and counter-narratives. It examines these in a case-study from the education area concerning a cross-sector collaborative initiative in a local government that includes stakeholders from the education department, preschool centers, union representatives, politicians, parents and children. The findings elucidate how communication of resistance both complicates and constructs the organizing of cross-sector collaboration: by constructing various stakeholders as resisters that become a barrier; by negotiating resistance as stakeholders’ diverging meanings that drive them; and by producing co-existing, but competing counter-narratives that enable different collaborative directions. All of which induces discursive tensions and infuses the organizing of cross-sector collaboration with resistance dynamics, suggesting them as endemic and potentially constructive to the process. Thereby, the study contributes with theorizing resistance and offers analytical insights on its dynamics and effects on organizing cross-sector collaboration.