LINKAGE THREE: Third edition of a newsletter concerned with inter-organisational relations in providing community services

Abstract

This third edition of the LINKAGE newsletter, published by the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, is the last to have appeared during the course of the three year IOR programme of research on inter-organisational relations in the provision of community services which was funded by the UK Social Science Research Council between 1975 and 1978. This enlarged issue includes contributions from several of the members of the research team and its external advisory group, reporting on their experiences in a variety of settings of inter-organisational working. It concludes with a review of the findings of the programme which subsequently provided the structure of the team’s final report to SSRC. An analysis of the circulation of Linkage Three shows that it was distributed to just over 1,000 recipients. Of these, just under 50% represented public authorities in the UK while another 20% were based in other countries. Several readers expressed an interest in receiving further issues on a subscription basis. A further four issues – LINKAGE FOUR TO SEVEN – therefore appeared between 1980 and 1983, including some contributions on challenges of inter-organisational relations in fields other than the provision of community services. From time to time, it is intended to add selected articles from these later issues to the IOR legacy section of the OR Society’s Document Repository according to an assessment of their relevance to future research and practice.