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Record W2102896407

Public Sector Innovation Theory Revisited 1

2014· article· en· W2102896407 on OpenAlex
James Iain Gow

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.
aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

Venue˜The œinnovation journal · 2014
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicPublic Policy and Administration Research
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSociologyNewspaperGovernment (linguistics)Public sectorPolitical sciencePublic relationsMedia studiesLaw
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this paper is to inquire into the state of public sector innovation (PSI) theory. Four authors, Rogers, Borins, Behn, and Glor and recent comparative governmental practices are chosen to represent a variety of approaches. This sample allows identification of both areas of consensus and of controversy in the field. Important disagreements remain about the defining parameters of PSI study and about the basic questions PSI studies should address.Keywords: public service innovation, theory, concepts, problems.IntroductionInnovation is a prime subject in our time. In business and government, it is held to be essential in the face of the massive and complex problems and the rapid pace of change in contemporary society. Innovation is thought to be the way to harness the creative potential of the human race in order to survive, to progress, and to prosper. letter in the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir (26 April 2013) noted that the Latin and Greek words for stupidity referred to immobility, lethargy or inertia, so we might infer that the opposite of stupidity would be mobility, energy, adaptation.Public sector innovation (PSI) is a subset of all innovation. Google search in July 2013, found references to 316 million publications, of which PSI constituted 4,4 million, or about 1.4 per cent of the whole, a small part, but a big absolute number. In the final edition of his masterwork on the diffusion of innovations, Rogers (2003: 45-46) identified nine disciplinary fields producing the greatest number of studies, of which marketing and management accounted for 16 per cent. This group did not appear to cover the public sector, but some of the others include subjects like city managers, public health and education. Publications on PSI thus appears rather marginal to the field of innovation studies.Having written a book on the diffusion of administrative innovations among Canadian governments twenty years ago (Gow, 1994), I was curious to learn how the field had evolved since then. I wanted to see how the subject itself had changed, what are the main theoretical approaches and what the outstanding unresolved issues. What follows is not a primer on all the contemporary theories of PSI. Instead, I have chosen five theorists and approaches in order to see what unites and what divides them. In part one, these authors and schools are presented briefly. In the second part, the contentious issues are examined with a view to exploring their potential for asking good questions.What to expect of a theoryThe very first step in considering this subject is to enquire what we mean by theory. The root meaning is not controversial: the Shorter Oxford Dictionary gives, among others, one that fits our case, A scheme or system of ideas or statements held as an explanation of a group of facts or phenomena. The operative word is explanation; the familiar expression descriptive is an oxymoron.Theories use concepts to organize raw material into variables, abstract categories concerning causal variables (independent) and outcome variables (dependent). The common distinction is between deductive and inductive theories. In deductive theory, the hypotheses to be tested are drawn from postulates and principles that are held to be true while inductive theory builds up hypotheses from observation and adjusts them as experience dictates. Most social science is inductive, but there are important theoretical schools that are deductive. Both Marxism and Public Choice theories start from first principles and deduce their hypotheses. The theory of the class struggle, for example, made it very difficult for the leaders of the Communist countries to accept that working class protests against their governments could be genuine.Glor (2008: 3) recalls the advantages of inductive theory, since it is constantly adjusting itself to take account of new evidence. She also makes a distinction between substantive and formal theory. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.014
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.004
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies, Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.803
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0140.004
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.005
Science and technology studies0.0020.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.130
GPT teacher head0.384
Teacher spread0.253 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it