1
SENSEMAKING OF ORGANIZATIONAL INNOVATION AND CHANGE IN PUBLIC RESEARCH ORGANIZATIONS
Author Details:
Carlos Martin-Rios
Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne, HES-SO // University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland
Route de Cojonnex 18
1000 Lausanne; Switzerland
Corresponding author: [Carlos Martin-Rios]
[carlos.martin-rios@ehl.ch]
NOTE: affiliations should appear as the following: Department (if applicable); Institution; City; State (US only); Country.
No further information or detail should be included
Acknowledgments (if applicable):
I want to thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Also, I want to thank Charles
Heckscher and Cesar Gonzalez who have provided inspiration and contributed ideas on selected issues in the paper. An
earlier version was presented at the Mini-EURAM Workshop on Organizational Innovation (Rotterdam, 2012).
Biographical Details (if applicable):
Carlos Martin-Rios is professor at the École hôtelière de Lausanne, Switzerland, and managing director of the Center for
Management Innovation (Madrid, Spain). His research interests are concerned with organizational innovation and renewal with
an emphasis on knowledge-intensive work settings. His recent work has been published in Journal of Management Inquiry,
Journal of Business Research, Human Resource Management, or Research in Personnel and Human Resource Management.
Structured Abstract:
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine through a sensemaking lens the transforming nature of scientists’ work role
in Public Research Organizations (PROs) resulting from organizational innovations in the form of collaborative culture.
Design/methodology/approach – Based on a symbolic-functionalist theory of work role transition, the paper uses interview data
from a case study to explore scientists’ sensemaking of work role change.
Findings – Work role transition and identity processes amongst scientists in traditional PROs reveal tensions regarding
organizational restructuring, to the extent that organizational innovations changing scientific work conflict with organizational
norms, procedures, and reward structures in hierarchical, bureaucratic PROs.
Research limitations/implications – As the paper is founded on only one case study, further research should be carried out on
the difficulties involved in transforming the nature of the scientific work role and the way scientists recognize, contradict, and
make sense of changes.
Originality/value – The novelty of this paper is in the un-discussed role of organizational innovations in enabling new work
roles for scientists in public research centers and how scientists make sense of and react to these innovations. Therefore, this
paper could be beneficial for PROs facing pressure to restructure.
Keywords:
Public research organization; collaborative culture; process change; work role transition; organizational innovation
Article Classification: Research Paper
For internal production use only
Running Heads: Sensemaking in a Public Research Organization
1
1
Accepted at International Journal of Organizational Analysis
Published in International Journal of Organizational Analysis, 2016, vol. 24, no 3, pp. 516-531, which
should be cited to refer to this work
2
SENSEMAKING OF ORGANIZATIONAL INNOVATION AND CHANGE IN
PUBLIC RESEARCH ORGANIZATIONS
Introduction
The need for sustainable innovation and change reflects a way in which public services overcome
inertia and respond to changes in the external environment. Organizational or administrative innovation,
conceptualized as a way in which organizations respond to environmental challenges by the creation,
development and implementation of a new organizational method or practice that has an impact on the
organization’s overall success (Damanpour, 1991; Damanpour et al., 2009), can serve as an important
enabler of change in highly rigid work environments, as often characterized in public service
organizations, such as scientific or public research organizations (hereinafter, PRO). Scientific
organizations or PRO are defined as government-funded research organizations that include non-profit
research institutions, government agencies, and laboratories. It is commonly assumed that PROs carry
out basic scientific research, while private companies are engaged in more applied efforts (Merton,
1973; Nelson, 1990). However, nowadays trends in greater economic liberalization, less public funding
and greater pressure for tangible outputs (e.g. patents), have blurred the boundaries between the spheres
and new types of independent public research centers have emerged that depart from the civil service
model to adapt management practices from the private sphere. Traditional PROs are therefore
increasingly required to become service-oriented, in the sense that they are expected to offer products,
processes and performance. These trends toward increased complexity have wide-ranging consequences
on the way research scientists are managed. Therefore, PROs are a model case study of the growing
pressure on public services toward greater efficiency, public salience and accountability.
Since the early 1980s, the New Public Management (NPM) paradigm has permeated the practices of
public organizations in Western Europe and the USA as well most industrialized countries. Proponents
3
of the NPM paradigm posit that these new PROs are better suited to address institutional (i.e., political,
administrative and legal) environment pressures in which public service providers (in this case, PROs)
operate. However, there are also limits to the radical restructuring of public institutions guided by
private sector models (Fernandez and Rainey, 2006; McNulty and Ferlie, 2004). In this sense, sources of
organizational innovation promoted from the inside are deemed amenable to organizations of this kind
(Damanpour, 1991; Simpson and Powell, 1999; Salge, 2011).
There are also consequences on how scientists make sense of the restructuring of PROs guided by
private sector models. The transition of PROs and, broadly, public service organizations toward post-
bureaucratic or collaborative types of organization presents intrinsic difficulties, particularly those
associated with the way individuals recognize, contradict, and make sense of changes in their work role
and identity (Josserand et al., 2006; Brunton and Matheny, 2009). The limited scope of knowledge about
professional role transition in public science theory may be contributing to scientists' unfamiliarity with
and lack of preparedness for organizational innovations designed to promote change. Research should
thus establish a link between external pressure and innovation, examining how researchers in PROs
actually think, experience, and react to role transitions. Significant questions remain unanswered,
specifically: How do scientists in PROs make sense of organizational innovations due to external
(institutional, political, administrative) pressures?
Building on the work of Nicholson (1984), I show how a symbolic interactionist theory of work role
transition is especially useful in explaining identity shifts due to the implementation of significant
changes to the culture and practice. Symbolic interactionism argues that reality is constructed as a social
interaction reality. Organizational members frame meaning to make sense of the construed realities
(Daft and Weick, 1984; Hernes and Maitlis, 2010; Maitlis, 2005). This study focuses on a government-
funded research institute under the administrative authority of the Spanish government, which, due to
4
funding and accountability pressures, launched an innovation initiative to formulate a collaborative,
multidisciplinary organizational culture. However, public research policies and work roles in Spain (and
Europe) are strongly based on the concept of knowledge areas or disciplines, and although the idea of
interdisciplinarity is often praised, an actual interdisciplinary implementation is unlikely to survive in an
environment built for traditional, discipline-oriented norms and incentives for scientists.
The next section first presents the conceptual framework to account for the blurring boundaries
between public and private research centers, and then looks at scientists’ responses to changes in work
role as symbolic interaction. The next section presents some background on the Spanish PRO focus of
this study and the qualitative data collection and analysis. Finally, discussion of findings and
implications for the study of work role transitions in national science systems are offered.
Literature review
Public science organizations are a heterogeneous group of research performing centers that benefit
from high shares of public funding (OECD, 2011). The literature on PROs distinguishes between public
universities, traditional overarching PROs, such as the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS)
in France, the National Research Council (CNR) in Italy, the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)
in Spain and the Max Planck Society (MPG) in Germany, and mixed or independent public research
centers that have emerged since the late 1990s and are characterized by more flexible organizational
arrangements. (Cruz-Castro et al., 2012). I give special attention to traditional PROs in our analysis,
focusing on scientists’ understanding and reaction to organizational innovations. External pressures
toward a more applied type of PROs must have consequences on the way scientists make sense of
organizational innovations and the consequences in their work role transition—both in their daily duties
and their professional identity at large.
New Public Management and the pressure toward postbureaucracy in PROs
5
In a time of evolving policy paradigms, institutional pressure toward greater accountability and
increasing competition for public resources falls squarely on PROs.
According to Ferlie et al. (1996), NPM involves introducing the “three Ms” into public services:
markets, managers and measurement. Underlying is the belief that the use of market-oriented
management methods will increase the efficiency of public services and institutions (Ferlie et al., 1996).
The NPM literature has pointed to the blurred boundaries between public and private spheres, which has
been called ‘publicness’ (Perry and Rainey 1988; Rainey and Bozeman 2000). Publicness is a
multidimensional concept that points to the constant influence of government authority. Bozeman and
colleagues have analyzed diversity among research centers (Bozeman 1987; Bozeman and Crow 1990;
Crow and Bozeman 1998) to reveal that boundaries between public and private organizations are more
permeable than before. New, mixed or independent public research centers have emerged that are not
tied to the civil service model and are oriented to do research that is both excellent and use-inspired
(Martinez et al., 2013).
The use of market-oriented management methods of NPM has recently found its way into PROs in
many European countries. Researchers working at these new PROs are hired with private labor law
contracts; contract extensions depend on evaluation results, and there is a high turnover of staff
(Bozeman and Boardman, 2003). Based on these methods, PROs are expected to adapt to changes by
conforming to isomorphic pressures toward more efficient and legitimate organizations. According to
Sanz-Menendez and Cruz-Castro, (2003) a large share of PROs have progressively conformed to a
funding strategy based on diversifying sources and increasing competitive public funding. Traditional
PROs face mounting competition for funding from new independent public research centers (Cruz-
Castro et al., 2012). It can therefore be expected that innovations in culture and management patterns
will take place among traditional PROs as well. The bureaucratic organizational system of PROs, which
