While ‘partnerships’ represent one of today's buzzwords, they are more than just a buzzword – for example, they are able to unite the political Right and Left. And endorsing partnerships can also unite the public sector with voluntary organisations, voluntary organisations with private companies, and private companies with the public sector. Buzzwords often become such because they seem to unite a difference or a dilemma, but as a buzzword, ‘partnerships’ possesses this quality twofold. To the political Centre and the Left, partnerships overcome the dilemma between public shared responsibility and independent social criticism. Partnerships between the public sector and voluntary organisations solve the question of how to unite the systemic independence and critical potential of voluntary organisations with public responsibility for uniting the welfare society. To slightly more conservative groups, partnerships overcome the dilemma between competition and cooperation. Public–private partnerships (PPPs) seem to provide the answer to how to unite the striving towards more competition in the public sector on one hand with cooperation with private companies for the collective benefit on the other hand.

Partnerships are much praised, but often without great accuracy regarding their actual content. Most of us know partnerships as a loose metaphor, which we can inscribe almost any meaning to. We nod our heads and smile at each other in mutual affirmation of the fact that partnerships represent the way forward. But no one sees that we may in fact be speaking from entirely different perspectives and about entirely different concepts, or at least not until the project fails and the partnership does not turn out as desired. This book, therefore, looks at the effort to transform partnerships from a loose metaphor into a binding concept, with the aim of capturing the actual qualities of partnerships. It has subsequently turned into a book covering many concepts – because partnerships are formed in an effort to unite two dilemmas in one form, they involve a multitude of social phenomena.

The concept of partnership as the designation of specific relations between mutually independent organisations is not entirely new. Before the Second World War a partnership indicated a business corporation between single individuals usually composed of close friends or relatives only sometimes supported by a partnership agreement. ‘Mutual trust’ and ‘goodwill’ were already buzzwords at that time (Bevis, 1932).