Customer Orientation and Management Control in the Public Sector: A Garbage Can Analysis

Recent public sector reforms have increasingly tended to re-cast citizens as ‘customers’. This paper explores the implications of such customer orientation efforts for management control based on a field study in a Swedish central government agency. We extend prior research on this topic, informed by critical and institutional theories, with insights from the garbage can literature and focus on a key decision-making process involved in making extant management control practices more customer-focused. Our analysis nuances the predictions of critical scholars, suggesting that customer orientation initiatives will commodify public services and narrow the interests served by public sector organizations. In doing so, we draw attention to how conflicting institutional arrangements fostered a garbage can situation hampering radical change in management control practices. Our garbage can analysis provides a bridge between critical and institutional perspectives by re-instating a focus on decision-making. We show how the intricacies of decision-making may moderate the power embedded in novel management control practices and foster inertia and unintended outcomes. Our analysis also raises important policy implications pertaining to the possibilities of combining customer orientation efforts with rationing of public services.     

Policy innovation in isolation?

Abstract

Innovations in public policy are difficult to realize if decision-making arrangements are not scrutinized at the same time. Rigid institutional arrangements often hinder the realization of policy breakthroughs. Consequently, in the day-to-day practice of public administration, more and more experiments with innovative arrangements towards realizing groundbreaking policy decisions are being seen. Two rather different examples of such arrangements in the Dutch context are transition arenas and pilot projects (proeftuinen). In this article we describe these arrangements from an innovation management perspective and evaluate their functioning by focusing on their approaches to two dilemmas: the dilemma between diversity and closedness within the innovation plans and the dilemma between openness and closedness of the plan in relation to its context, the outside world. From their comparison we can learn about the context-specific application of different innovation plans and the results of different ways of handling these innovation dilemmas.     

The (re-)configuration of digital work in the wake of profound technological innovation: Constellations and hidden work

This paper explores the technology-induced transformation of work by examining two fields, robotic surgery and teaching from home via Zoom. We begin by examining the perspectives of individual surgeons and lecturers and the relational, organizational, and institutional settings in which they are embedded. Recognizing and emphasizing the idiosyncrasies of these cases, we develop theoretical lenses that allow us to identify the dynamics of the transformation and patterns in reconfiguration work.To investigate these illustrative cases of digital work and their implications, we employ two conceptual frames, 1) configuration work (Suchman, 2012), specifically emergent configurations of digital-human work, and 2) orders of change (Bartunek & Moch, 1987), emphasizing the role and development of frameworks in making sense of organizational change.We thus combine multi-faceted accounts of individuals' experiences of “figuring out” how to make digital work feasible with reflections on how the transformation of work affects the identities of individuals, organizations, and institutions. We propose that this transformation affects the ways in which we think about ourselves, our colleagues and employers, and the institutions that shape our work.     

Changing the conversation on evaluating digital transformation in healthcare: Insights from an institutional analysis

The global health sector is engaged in significant digital transformation. Evaluating these transformations is important given the major investments involved and their major potential consequences. However, studies have critiqued both the quality of evaluations and the quality of evaluation research. The persistent lack of progress has led researchers to ask deeper questions about what is actually occurring when teams evaluate the benefits of digital transformation. This translational research essay explores how institutional theory offers a lens for understanding the complexities of evaluating digital transformations in healthcare and provides insights for improving it. In particular, we show how institutional theory can explain behaviors observed in the literature and in our own case study. We also show how institutional theory can benefit from the insights observed in evaluation work. Motivated by these opportunities, we suggest an agenda through which practitioners and researchers can jointly improve work in this area.     

Launching professional services automation: Institutional entrepreneurship for information technology innovations

Why do some information technology innovations come to be adopted widely while others do not? One promising research stream has begun to investigate how institutional factors shape the diffusion of IT innovations. Here we examine how these institutional factors themselves are shaped. Specifically, we explore how interested actors termed institutional entrepreneurs develop institutional arrangements to launch an IT innovation toward widespread adoption. Undertaking a contemporary case study of a new class of enterprise software, professional services automation (PSA), we found that to launch PSA, institutional entrepreneurs sought to mobilize an organizational community by developing and recognizing leaders and facilitating members’ focus on PSA. They further struggled to legitimate PSA by developing a coherent organizing vision that incorporated compelling success stories. We tie these findings together in a model that usefully shifts the focus of IT innovation research from assessing institutional effects to understanding institution-building. This new focus suggests an alternative IT diffusion theory with several practical implications.     

Institutional logics and innovation in times of crisis: Telemedicine as digital ‘PPE’

How do crises shape digital innovation? In this paper we examine the rapid adoption of digital telemedicine technologies in an Israeli hospital with a focus on the role of the institutional logics held by the stakeholders responding to emerging events. With the onset of COVID-19, the need for social distancing and minimal physical contact challenged and interrupted hospital practices. In response, remote audio-visual functionality of digital technologies were appropriated in different ways, as stakeholders – state actors, managers, health professionals, and family members – sought to improvise and enhance the protection of persons concerned. We show how emerging practices were guided by the dominant institutional logics of stakeholders responding to the crisis. Acting for many as a digital form of ‘personal protective equipment’ (PPE), the technologies enabled diverse action possibilities to become manifest in practices. We add to understanding the role of institutional logics in directing the attention of stakeholders to shape digital innovation in times of crisis.     

Rethinking Institutions and Organizations

In this Point–Counterpoint article we argue that institutional scholarship has become overly concerned with explaining institutions and institutional processes, notably at the level of the organization field, rather than with using them to explain and understand organizations. Especially missing is an attempt to gain a coherent, holistic account of how organizations are structured and managed. We also argue that when institutional theory does give attention to organizations it inappropriately treats them as though they are the same, or at least as though any differences are irrelevant for purposes of theory. We propose a return to the study of organizations with an emphasis upon comparative analysis, and suggest the institutional logics perspective as an appropriate means for doing so.     

技术创新背景下我国金融科技2.0发展路径

金融科技2.0模式的核心特征是由资金端创新转向资产端创新和基础设施创新,在现有金融规范秩序下拓展金融服务维度,为普惠金融和智慧金融发展提供可能。由于技术和资金约束,我国金融科技2.0模式发展存在数字鸿沟过大、金融创新发展质量不高、金融创新网络安全及法规监管滞后等问题。本文从制度、技术和内需角度提出了具体优化发展路径,即鼓励技术创新和金融领域应用,通过监管创新规范金融科技转型发展;鼓励技术创新,推动科技企业技术变革;加速传统金融机构转型,拓展金融科技内需。     

Recombination in the open-ended value landscape of digital innovation

Digital innovation introduces a new open-ended value landscape to anyone seeking to generate or capture new value. To understand this landscape, we distinguish between design recombination and use recombination, explore how they play out together, and redirect the attention from products and services toward digital resources. Digital resources serve as building-blocks in digital innovation, and they hold the potential to simultaneously be part of multiple value paths, offered through design recombination and assembled through use recombination. Building on this perspective, we offer the value spaces framework as a tool for better understanding value creation and capture in digital innovation. We illustrate the framework and offer the early contours of a research agenda for information systems researchers.     

Top managers in the digital age: Exploring the role and practices of top managers in firms' digital transformation

This study explores the role and facilitating actions of top managers in response to the digital transformation. Building on 27 in-depth interviews with top managers and close associates from large German firms, we find that top managers respond to the digital transformation by engaging in three key actions: understanding digitalization, setting the formal context for digitalization, and leading change. Moreover, findings emphasize that top management team support is essential in firms' digital transformation. Overall, this study contributes novel insights about the consequences of top managers for firms and establishes an initial foundation for investigating top managers in the digital age.     

Visualizing institutional logics in sociomaterial practices

This paper aims to deepen our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the mutual constitution of competing institutional logics and sociomaterial entanglements by combining a sociomaterial lens with the institutional logics perspective. We present findings from an interpretive, longitudinal case study at the emergency general surgery ward of a Nordic university hospital. By focusing our analysis on how sociomaterial affordances emerge through the implementation, use and continued development of digital and physical visualization boards, we show how these artifacts constitute an integral part of the operational staff's sensemaking and enactment of a new institutional logic. We make two contributions. First, we show how the perceived affordances of a technology are created from the experience of using several different technologies and how the rejection of one technology can simultaneously constitute another. Second, we show how visualization artifacts, entangled in sociomaterial practices, can shape individual focus of attention and thus facilitate the integration of a new institutional logic in operational practice.     

Reproduction and Change on the Global Scale: A Bourdieusian Perspective on Management Education

Despite a proliferation of critical studies on management education, there is a paucity of knowledge of the ways in which problematic beliefs, values, and practices are reproduced in and through management education. By drawing on and extending Bourdieu's seminal work, this paper offers a new perspective on reproduction on the global scale. Our framework spans three inter‐related levels of analysis: the dominant beliefs, values, and practices (nomos and doxa) of management in global society; the structuration of the field of management education on a global scale; and the prevailing pedagogical practices in management education programmes. Our analysis adds to critical studies of management education by elucidating the overwhelming institutional forces of reproduction and thus explaining how difficult it is to effect change in the prevailing ideas, values, and practices. Unlike most critical analyses, we also explain how change might take place and what it would require. Thus, our analysis advances studies of reproduction in this era of globalization more generally. It also provides an example of how Bourdieusian ideas can be applied and expanded upon in novel ways in research on education in general and management education in particular.     

Between advocacy,compliance and commitment: A multilevel analysis of institutional logics in work environment management

In this study we explore the development and enactment of institutional logics in the field of work environment management. We show how three historically developed logics constitute different values and practices that guide professionals’ organizational action. Using both historical and contemporary qualitative data, we show how the three institutional logics are present in the field of work environment, and how the logics are enacted simultaneously by actors within four large organizations in Denmark. The study contributes to the literature on institutional logics. The logics perspective is combined with critical realism to describe the inter-relatedness between the levels of society, institutional fields, and organizations, and by elaborating the near-decomposable relations between institutional logics and orders. The study contributes to the literature on work environment management by investigating the ideational lenses through which regulations and interventions are perceived by organizational actors, and how these perceptions may lead to different organizational outcomes and outlooks in work environment management.     

Playing with the Rules of the Game: Social Innovation for Urban Transformation

Innovation is perhaps the buzzword in local economic development policy. Associated narrowly with neoliberal ideas, conventional notions of innovation—like its capitalocentric counterparts, enterprise and entrepreneurialism—may promise higher productivity, global competitiveness and technological progress but do not fundamentally change the ‘rules of the game’. In contrast, an emerging field reimagines social innovation as disruptive change in social relations and institutional configurations. This article explores the conceptual and political differences within this pre‐paradigmatic field, and argues for a more transformative understanding of social innovation. Building on the work of David Graeber, I mobilize the novel constructs of ‘play’ and ‘games’ to advance our understanding of the contradictory process of institutionalizing social innovation for urban transformation. This is illustrated through a case study of Liverpool, where diverse approaches to innovation are employed in attempts to resolve longstanding socio‐economic problems. Dominant market‐ and state‐led economic development policies—likened to a ‘regeneration game’—are contrasted with more experimental, creative, democratic and potentially more effective forms of social innovation, seeking urban change through playing with the rules of the game. I conclude by considering how the play–game dialectic illuminates and reframes the way transformative social innovation might be cultivated by urban policy, the contradictions this entails, and possible ways forward.     

企业数字化转型提高了审计质量吗？——基于多时点双重差分模型的实证检验

企业数字化转型作为促进数字经济与实体经济相互融合的重要方式,对构建新发展格局、促进经济高质量发展有着至关重要的作用。综合考虑企业数字化转型的三个阶段及其特点,利用文本挖掘和人工阅读相结合的方法,从二维角度衡量企业数字化转型,以2009—2019年沪深A股上市公司为样本数据,采用多时点DID模型,考察了企业数字化转型对审计质量的影响及作用渠道。研究发现,企业数字化转型可以通过提高信息透明度和降低企业风险承担来提高审计质量;在进一步研究中发现,企业数字化技术应用有利于审计质量的提高,而商业模式创新作用并不明显;企业数字化转型对审计质量的提高主要出现在盈利、机构持股较高及非国有企业里,并且在2015年国家实施实体经济数字化转型产业政策方案后,企业数字化转型提高审计质量的作用表现得更为明显。研究结果拓展了企业数字化转型的审计后果,为注册会计师应对企业数字化转型中的错报风险提供了丰富的经验证据。     

Can supplier innovations substitute for internal R&D? A multiple case study from an absorptive capacity perspective

Prior literature suggests that significant internal R&D resources are needed to leverage suppliers for innovation and that external knowledge sources can be used to complement the internal knowledge base. Based on the analysis of four inbound open innovation projects at Fortum, a multinational energy utility company, we argue that companies with low R&D intensity may adopt an alternative approach which aims at substituting – not merely complementing – internal R&D with external innovations. We adopt the absorptive capacity perspective while investigating the cases and focus on four distinct capabilities: acquisition, assimilation, transformation, and exploitation. We find that the substitution approach consists of short-term research on new technological areas in order to gain the ability to identify and evaluate alternative technologies, as well as joint business models and operations based on complementary capabilities between the parties. The cases also suggest that the innovation process requires significant collaboration and the buying company's supplier management capabilities may improve the success of inbound open innovation projects of this type.     

Recombination in digital innovation: Challenges,opportunities, and the importance of a theoretical framework

In this article I argue that the quest to establish digital innovation as a research domain is hindered by three challenges. As digital innovation research we are too often: a) reifying the agency of digital innovation actors; b) developing explanations of digital innovation detached from the specifics of digital technology, and c) developing overly specific explanations of digital innovation. I begin by providing a brief overview of the recombination perspective and considering why this perspective holds great appeal in the digital age. I then engage with Henfridsson et al.'s (2018) value spaces framework as a platform for framing value creation and value capture in relation to recombination in digital innovation. Next, I push Henfridsson et al.'s arguments one step further to discuss them in relation to what I consider to be the key challenges for digital innovation research. Illustrating with some of my own recent projects, I suggest that in order to fully address these challenges we need to (1) develop explanations of digital innovation acknowledging the complexity of sociomaterial interaction in digital innovation; (2) develop explanations of digital innovation building on the specifics of digital technology, and (3) develop explanations of digital innovation based on an oscillation between the specific and the general. The article concludes by pointing to future challenges and developments for digital innovation research.     

THE CREATION AND DIFFUSION OF INNOVATION IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW

In this study, we review the literature on the creation and diffusion of innovation in the private sectors (industry and services) in developing countries. In particular, we collect evidence on what are the barriers to innovation creation and diffusion and the channels of innovation diffusion to and within developing countries. We find that innovation in developing countries is about creation or adoption of new ideas and technologies; but the capacity for innovation is embedded in and constituted by dynamics between geographical, socio‐economic, political and legal subsystems. We contextualize the findings from the review in the current theoretical framework of diffusion of innovations, and we emphasize how the institutional context typical of developing countries impacts the diffusion itself.     

Bridging the cultural divide: Trust formation in university–industry research collaborations in the US,Japan, and South Korea

Academia and industry increasingly work together, but this is not always an easy endeavor. In this article we investigate how relational mechanisms facilitate trust formation in university–industry research collaborations (UICs) in three countries and contribute to the understanding of international similarities and differences in UICs by considering institutional factors, specifically, the strength and maturity of UICs in each country. Analyzing survey data of 618 recent UICs in the US, Japan, and South Korea, we identify the activities of innovation champions as a critical trust building mechanism between firms and universities that complements initial trust formation through tie strength, partner reputation, and contractual safeguards. We find that partner reputation and champion behavior are more important for trust formation in South Korea than in the US and Japan, indicating that in ‘emerging UIC countries’ where most firms and universities have little collaboration experience, reputation and the leadership by innovation champions are more important for trust formation in UICs than in ‘advanced UIC countries’ with strong and mature UIC networks. From a public policy perspective, our findings suggest that networks between firms and universities should be generally strengthened and collaboration partners should be provided with effective contractual safeguards to enhance trust formation in UICs.     

Enterprise resource planning: technology acceptance in Thai universities

The primary objective of this paper is to identify the factors associated with computing satisfaction for existing legacy systems and the perceptions of usefulness and ease of use of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for Thai university staff. Questionnaires were used as a means to gain insights and perspective of ERP systems in Thai universities. The results found significant relationships between university tenure and system satisfaction, and that computer experience, age, prior knowledge and education were significantly related to ERP perceptions. Diversity is also required in administration staff to allow new ideas to be recognised and exploited. This study has investigated ERP as a new innovation at a very early stage in Thai universities. This research study has shown that potential adopters of ERP do have uncertainty about a new innovation and this compels them to find out more information about the innovation. Any efforts at persuasion should be staged over a period of time to allow a build-up of knowledge to occur in organisations that implement ERP. ERP training could then focus on explaining the advantages of ERP over the existing system, while providing users with ‘hands on’ experience of an ERP system.