Abstract
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Public sector organizations continue to re-organize in response to reform imperatives but
are they more innovative when they transform to market or customer orientations? This
paper examines what we call innovating-in-practice in a hospital emergency department,
a local government council and a corrections centre by analyzing how work organization
dualities are negotiated using a practice theory lens. In public sector work, work dualities
and tensions are often created when reform initiatives are introduced, requiring existing
work practices to be challenged and changed. Our empirical illustrations expose the messiness
and enmeshing of various practitioner interests, relations, materialities and purposes
of practice in ways that restrict or embrace innovation. Innovating-in-practice ‘troubles’
the structural limitations of conventional approaches to organizing or designing for innovation,
suggesting in contrast, the value of more fluid processes for reinventing work that
emerge from accommodating work organization dualities and interrogating the complexities
of practice-based accomplishments.
-
Public sector organizations continue to re-organize in response to reform imperatives but
are they more innovative when they transform to market or customer orientations? This
paper examines what we call innovating-in-practice in a hospital emergency department,
a local government council and a corrections centre by analyzing how work organization
dualities are negotiated using a practice theory lens. In public sector work, work dualities
and tensions are often created when reform initiatives are introduced, requiring existing
work practices to be challenged and changed. Our empirical illustrations expose the messiness
and enmeshing of various practitioner interests, relations, materialities and purposes
of practice in ways that restrict or embrace innovation. Innovating-in-practice ‘troubles’
the structural limitations of conventional approaches to organizing or designing for innovation,
suggesting in contrast, the value of more fluid processes for reinventing work that
emerge from accommodating work organization dualities and interrogating the complexities
of practice-based accomplishments.