Altering Frontiers. Группа авторов
a slack of solidarity, when individuals, companies, merchants, etc., spontaneously offer their help and service. The term slack refers to the surplus (time, resources) which we do not know a priori what it can be used for, except when it has to be used! Schulman (1993) identifies two types of slack: that of resources (surplus not strictly engaged in current activities) and that of control relative to the degree of freedom in organizational activities (i.e. a set of actions that are not framed by formal modes of power, and supervision). It is thanks to these that the crisis is overcome as quickly as possible. May this lesson be kept in mind, not only because some people predict the multiplication and complexity of future crises, but more generally because it is an important condition for any innovative organization, when individuals have time, outside of protocolized and routine activities, to imagine how to renew themselves in a different way.
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1 1 EHPAD: Etablissement d’Hébergement pour Personnes Agées Dépendantes; retirement home.
2 2 SAAD: service d’aide et d’accompagnement au domicile (social homecare service); SSIAD: service de soins infirmiers à domicile (home nursing service).
Introduction written by Corinne GRENIER and Ewan OIRY.
PART 1
Innovations as Seen by Stakeholders
Introduction to Part 1
Taking up the challenge of “altering frontiers” through organizational innovations raises the double question of the place of different individuals in this profound transformation.
Individuals are first and foremost at the heart of this transformation because they are the driving force behind it. They are singular individuals – the innovators – who develop new interdisciplinary practices, implement decompartmentalization and transform usual routines (Gherardi 2008). They transform their practices by experimenting in “innovative spaces” typically outside the organization, sometimes protected from the rules that usually govern it (Bucher & Langley 2016). They are sometimes tired of the multiple social norms to which they cross in order to innovate (Alter 2011). However, they are clearly, for many, the heart and driving force of the organizational innovation process that enables decompartmentalization.
As for the rest of the professionals, even if they are not exactly innovators, are they not also the target of organizational innovations that aim to decompartmentalize? In this way, they discover and experience on a daily basis the transformations that have been designed for them and that they must appropriate and implement. These innovations transform their ways of working, shake up their skills and sometimes their professional identities (Robelet et al. 2005). This can also make them more efficient and even satisfy them by giving more meaning to their work, emphasizing that a decompartmentalized organization ensures better and more effective patient care or support.
“Altering frontiers” through organizational innovations is therefore bringing about interplay of identity dimensions as well as questions of competence or performance.
Finally, we must not lose sight of the fact that compartmentalization cannot be overcome without taking into account the major consequences that this can have. Indeed, in healthcare organizations, compartmentalization is merely a fortuitous and damaging consequence of significant bureaucracy (Weber 2003). Compartmentalization is also that. The sheer amount of bureaucracy means that employees are gradually losing out the