As already indicated, partnerships represent a strange phenomenon; they relate to many different heterogeneous, and often even opposing, expectations. It is therefore not sufficient to interview just a few people who claim to be part of a partnership and to follow them over a period of time. It is also not enough to study a few partnership agreements and to draw conclusions based on them. Or to line up a number of variables and to conduct a partnership survey in order to see which variable responds under which circumstances. When dealing with partnerships, we have to ask: who is the observer? From whose perspective does the partnership emerge and how?

As will be discussed in Chapter Two, partnerships can be comprehended in many different ways. Different actors find partnerships to be meaningful in different ways; a number of metaphors for partnerships even seem to be identical, for example, community, dialogue and trust. As a concept, ‘partnership’ evens out differences to the point that it becomes hard to know what we are talking about.

A particular approach needs to be employed, therefore, that does not see partnerships as a given phenomenon but rather observes the way in which they are formed and take shape. This approach is referred to as ‘observation of the second order’. Without a second-order perspective of observation, the analysis remains too insensitive to the fact that the emergence of partnerships depends on the observer. Without a second-order perspective we run the risk of privileging a random perspective among many actual perspectives on partnerships that might cause us to disregard the fact that the special characteristics of a partnership might be its coupling of many different perspectives. A political scientist sees a network society, a sociologist sees a binding civil society, a lawyer sees the partnership's legal status as agreement, an economist sees a partnership as a strategic alliance and an organisational theorist sees the management and decisions of the partnership. What is interesting is not whether one of them is right, but that they occur at the same time. If we fail to see this, we are unable to describe it, which would mean that the partnership phenomenon had evaded us.