Employee-based innovation researchers point to the important role of welfare workers in public service innovations. Bureaucratic and New Public Management inspired managerial agendas, still widely present in Nordic welfare organizations have been tied to an increase in feelings of inau- thenticity and use of coping strategies by welfare workers. At the same time, post-NPM principles of collaboration and service tailoring are more in line with professional values of welfare workers. Drawing on a critical realist informed case study comprising qualitative interviews and observations in the Norwegian public welfare and employment services, we describe types of revision and resis- tance practices used by frontline employees when faced with top-down implementation instructions, linking them to different types of innovations. The article adds to literatures on employee-based innovation by conceptualizing resistance practices as value-motivated resistance-driven innovation that may have a function of calibrating public value creation in welfare organizations submerged in bureaucratic and NPM-inspired managerial regimes
How is the complexity of contemporary professional work and services organized differently by management at the strategic level and professionals at the operational level? And what are the implications for managing this complexity? Drawing on literatures on institutional complexity, organizational roles and the analyses of case study data from interviews, observations and documents at a large public service provider in Norway, this article advances the understanding of management in complex organizations and makes the following three contributions to the institutional logics literature. First, we show how multiple institutional logics have different functions at strategic and operational levels, resembling a dynamic interplay in organizing professional work and services. Second, we show how these differences in handling multiple logics are contingent upon the different roles of the strategic managers and operational professionals. Finally, we advance the understanding of what institutional complexity may involve in organizations by disclosing how the significant conflicts stem not only from the presence of multiple logics, but also from differences within the organizations in how multiple logics are handled. Our findings have implications for the planning and management of organizational design and implementation strategies and demonstrate the utility of the institutional complexity perspective for managing complexity in contemporary organizations.
The effective implementation of politically initiated public service innovations to the front-lines of the public service organization, where the innovation is to be applied, is a challenge that both practitioners and researchers struggle to solve. We highlight the importance of analysing contextual factors at several levels of the implementation system, as well as the importance of considering how the practical everyday work situations of the front-line workers influence their application of the innovation in question. We illustrate this by exploring the implementation process of a specific work inclusion measure, looking at its wider context and some of its implementation outcomes at a specific public agency. The intention is to illustrate the significance of considering the contextual complexity influencing implementation work as a reminder for practitioners to take this into account in their planning and practices.
Many public agencies promote renewal in the public sector through projects that require a productive combination of research and innovation activities. However, the role of research in innovation processes is a neglected theme in the public sector innovation literature. We address this gap through an analysis of five cases from the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration. We find few examples of innovations based directly on research, but several examples of research on innovations and on more complex co-evolutionary processes of the two activities. Research seems to be particularly important for the diffusion and scaling up of innovations. We find that research has an impact on innovation in later phases of the innovation process through the formalisation of practice-based and unsystematic knowledge, codification of experiences, and legitimation to ensure political support and funding. This new conceptualisation contributes to the public sector innovation literature and may help improve policies that set up a rather limited role for research.
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