Claiming collaboration success: Signifiers and caveats

Understanding what constitutes "success" in interorganizational collaboration is relatively unproblematized in practice, policy and research contexts. We taken an empirical approach to exploring the nature of espoused success signifiers in cases where participants have suggested that their collaboration is successful. We develop a rich conceptualization of colaborative success, which shows it to be more subjective, multifaceted, complex and tenuous than generally assumed. We show that the aspects of collaborative success that we identify - substantive outcomes, collaborative processes, emergent milestones, recognition and pride - along with some caveats, have implications for legitimizing and developing collaborative practice and supporting more useful performance research.