Table 1.

Study theoretical propositions

Proposition 1	Child health network organizations foster the development of embedded ties and a sense of social connectedness among network members. Formation of embedded ties is reflective of “the duality of structure and the recursiveness of social praxis, thus attending to social embeddedness and co-evolutionary processes in network life” [64]. This refers to the close connection between the developing structure of the network and the practice side of network life. Sydow [64] suggests that the process of developing social connections within the network is key to its evolution.
Proposition 2	Underlying the development of embedded ties in child health networks are normative standards of reciprocity and trustworthiness that are traditionally fundamental to network forms of organization. Each member of the child health network feels a sense of obligation to the other party or parties rather than a desire to take advantage of any trust that may have been established [118].
Proposition 3	It is crucial that network members purposefully maintain a contextual and systemic orientation as members navigate the internal and external historical, cultural, political, and economic influences on network formation, evolution, and sustainability [97–99, 119]. This means that the contexts and the public systems surrounding networks matter or have an impact on them. Particular contexts are worth paying attention to including historical, cultural, political and economic contexts.
Proposition 4	There is a macro-micro level tension created by the external historical, political, and social institutional forces and the more local internal micro-level organizational forces that are developing and evolving [120, 121]. This proposition seeks to expand our understanding of proposition 3 to particularly consider how the macro-level forces that originate outside the network may impact the internal network experience. For example, a history of poor communication between child and adolescent mental health services and the local schools (historical macro-micro level tension) gets brought into the developing child health network and may impact how these two sectors work with each other on initiatives within the developing network, perhaps even negatively, affecting the network organization success.
Proposition 5	Historical social and political institutional forces encourage growing formalization and centralization of the network, emulating traditional public service sectors [102]. This means that, even though network organizations are designed as a counter to traditional public service sectors to deal with their known constraints (e.g., hierarchy, slowed and siloed decision-making, turf protection), there is still a natural tendency for network members to lean towards developing the network organization in the traditional ways in which they have been educated and socialized. There are also political forces that drive a network towards traditional public service models, such as expecting a network to fit into standard governmental reporting and daily communication patterns. In this way, the networks end up ‘emulating’ or patterning themselves after traditional public service sectors.