Re-organizing Australian public sector work: Conditions for innovating-in-practice

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.