This paper studies the productive role of innovation in organisations. Using the post-structuralist insight that innovation is an open concept that can become performative, we shift the emphasis from analysing innovations themselves to analysing how the concept of innovation affects the organisational practices through which it acquires meaning. Deploying this framework, we studied the development of an innovation unit within TUI, a corporate tour operator. We found that actors interpreted innovation in different ways and that initially the innovation unit was considered a failure. The subsequent dramatisation of this failure resulted in a new version of this innovation unit that strengthened established actors and institutions within the organisation. Our study shows how the use of the concept of innovation in an organisation can both stimulate and hamper its innovativeness. Addressing this paradox requires sensitivity to the concept's productive role and evaluations of innovation that look beyond accomplished results.
Prerequisites (AVAC-SCP) metric was developed to assess whether an organisation plans and implements activities that correspond to prerequisites for fostering a positive safety culture. The metric was designed based on an inclusive theoretical framework stemmed from academic and professional literature and in cooperation with knowledge experts and aviation companies. The goal of the AVAC-SCP is to evaluate three aspects, namely (1) the extent to which the prerequisites are designed/documented, (2) the degree of the prerequisites’ implementation, and (3) the perceptions of the employees regarding the organizational safety culture as a proxy for the effectiveness of the prerequisites’ implementation. The prerequisites have been grouped into six categories (common prerequisites and just, flexible, reporting, information and learning cultures) and the metric concludes with scores per aspect and category. The results from surveys at 16 aviation companies showed that these companies had adequately included most of the Safety Culture Prerequisites (SCP) in their documentation where Just culture plans scored the lowest and Reporting culture plans were found with the highest percentage of planning. The level of SCP implementation was the same high as the organisational plans and quite uniform across the companies and sub-cultures. The perceptions were at the same overall level with implementation, but employees perceived the organisational environment as less fair and more flexible than managers claimed. Although the study described in this report was exploratory and not explanatory, we believe that the results presented in combination with the ones communicated to the participating companies can trigger the latter to investigate further their weaker areas and foster their activities related to Safety Culture Prerequisites. Also, the AVAC-SCP metric is deemed useful to organisations that want to self-assess their SCP levels and proceed to comparisons amongst various functions and levels and/or over time.
Failure is a popular topic of research. It has long been a source of study in fields such as sociology and anthropology, science and technology studies, privacy and surveillance, cultural, feminist and media studies, art, theatre, film, and political science. When things go awry, breakdown, or rupture they lead to valuable insights into the mundane mechanisms of social worlds. Yet, while failure is a familiar topic of research, failure in and as a tactic of research is far less visible, valued, and explored.In this book the authors reflect upon the role of creative interventions as a critical mode for methods, research techniques, fieldwork, and knowledge transmission or impact. Here, failure is considered a productive part of engaging with and in the field. It is about acknowledging the ‘mess’ of the social and how we need methods, modes of attunement, and knowledge translation that address this complexity in nuanced ways. In this collection, interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners share their practices, insights, and challenges around rethinking failure beyond normalized tropes. What does failure mean? What does it do? What does putting failure under the microscope do to our assumptions around ontology and epistemologies? How can it be deployed to challenge norms in a time of great uncertainty, crisis, and anxiety? And what are some of the ways resilience and failure are interrelated?
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