An initial path towards a diagnosis of the question of partnership was the concept of partnership as it is used by organisations. This chapter looks at the kind of communication that occurs around partnerships. How do partnerships become possible as the effect of particular semantic articulations of partnerships? Thus, we begin with a semantic analysis of partnerships.

In this chapter, therefore, partnership is observed as a particular semantics. Partnerships represent a semantics, that is, a reservoir of concepts that are currently available to an organisation for the description of and communication about interorganisational relations. An organisation observes itself, its environment and its relations to other systems in its environment through concepts, which in this way regulates what the organisation can and cannot see but also regulates the creation of expectations with respect to the organisation itself, its environment and to others.

What is interesting here is which observations and creations of expectations become possible through the concept of partnership? In which way do interorganisational relations become possible in the language of partnership? How do organisations come to observe each other when employing the conceptual reservoir that has formed around the concept of ‘partnership’? What happens to the dimensions of time, fact and sociality in the language of partnership?

The analysis here focuses on how a partnership is formed as a concept, including the relation between concept and counterconcept. How and in which multiplicity is meaning condensed into the concept of partnership? What is established as concept and counterconcept respectively? Are there several terms for partnership where the concept remains the same? Are we able to observe different or possibly conflicting concepts of partnership in which the concept is the same but the counterconcept is different or in which concept/counterconcept are equivalents but where the meaning dimension is different? Or does the concept of partnership actually have the characteristics of an empty concept where there is an ongoing struggle about the ascription of meaning to it? Which rules of argumentation relate to the observation of the world through the concept of partnership? Generally, how is the formation of expectations organised in the partnership semantics?