Social partnerships are local networks connecting public, nonprofit and private organizations with the purpose to achieve a mutually agreed upon goal. Social innovation can be a means to help develop new ways to create and sustain social partnerships in general and identify new partnership practices in specific that can balance competing interests between different partnership partners.
The paper focuses on one of the challenges social partnerships recurrently deal with in relation to sustainable HR, namely social inclusion. In specific, the paper investigates social partnership communication between educational non-governmental organizations (NGOs) organized as social enterprises and private businesses aimed at the inclusion of disadvantaged young people in the labor market. Based on an ethnographic case study and three theoretical pillars (social innovation, sustainable HR and practice theory), the aim of the research is to investigate how individual communicative practices contribute to social partnerships for inclusion in order to ensure innovative sustainable HR solutions. The findings highlight the importance to set the disadvantaged young person center stage and identifies the NGO representative's important role as facilitator for inclusion of the disadvantaged young person in the social partnership. The paper contributes to sustainable HR theory by highlighting the role of individual social partnership practices for social innovation. Moreover, it contributes to practice by identifying areas and individual communicative practices where partnerships may experience tensions and offers insights into how the tensions can be managed.