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The rhetorical work of a partnership coordinator in mega-project construction

2015; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 1; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/2055563615596349

2055-5644

William Foster, Brian P. Soebbing, Chad Seifried,

Public Policy and Administration Research

Over the past six decades, owners of sport teams and municipalities have been involved in the shared construction of new, state-of-the-art sport facilities. The negotiation and acceptance of these Private–Public Partnerships (PPPs) has often been contentious and unsuccessful. There are, however, other examples where team owners and cities enter into productive business relationships. We argue that one reason for a PPP being successful is that there are certain key actors, partnership coordinators, who are involved in this process. In particular, their skilful “work” at using rhetoric helps characterize the PPP in a specific way whereby the perception is that the risk of the project is distributed evenly amongst all the parties. To explore these ideas, a case study is presented of the successful negotiations in Canada between the Edmonton Oilers of the National Hockey League and the City of Edmonton to build a new downtown arena.