Strategic Quality Management and Organizational Performance in Educational Institutions
Keywords:
strategic quality management, strategic quality capability, organizational performance, educational institutions, dynamic capabilitiesAbstract
School-community collaboration is increasingly important for mobilizing knowledge, resources, and support beyond school boundaries, yet participation opportunities and formal partnership structures do not explain why voluntary collaboration endures over time. This conceptual article addresses temporal, mechanism, action, and infrastructure gaps in existing explanations by developing Relational Trust Infrastructure Theory (RTIT), a middle-range theory of sustained school-community collaboration. RTIT integrates complementary insights from relational trust, social exchange, social capital, and collaborative governance while preserving their distinct explanatory functions. The theory specifies a recursive mechanism linking relational signaling, reciprocity confirmation, relational trust, relational investment, sustained co-participation, and relational infrastructure accumulation. Relational investment explains how trust-based willingness becomes consequential resource commitment, whereas relational infrastructure captures how trusted ties, reciprocal expectations, accessible interaction channels, and reusable routines condition subsequent collaboration. Six propositions further specify reinforcement and erosion pathways under relational and contextual contingencies. RTIT advances collaboration scholarship by shifting explanation from participation occurrence to collaboration durability and provides a theoretically bounded foundation for longitudinal, multilevel, network, and cross-contextual empirical testing.
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