Public sector innovation recently attracted extensive research attention (Pandey et al. 2017). Public organizations had for a long time the image of being irresponsive to societal developments (Borins, 2002). While New Public Management (NPM) proposed the introduction of market mechanisms as a remedy for all the illnesses of public sector (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992), recent research indicates that there is more nuance needed in formulating the impact of the macro level reforms such as NPM on the long-term and pending on the politico-administrative context (Drechsler and Randma-Liiv, 2015).
Theories on public sector innovation outline environmental, organizational, and individual factors that influence the engagement in innovation (Van de Ven, 1999; Bekkers and Tummers, 2016:63, Osborne and Brown, 2005). Here, we focus on both organizational factors and environmental factors, and in particular the interplay between the two. On the organizational-level, we hypothesize that with the advent of the NPM paradigm, public organizations adopted a different attitude towards change in organizations, more prone towards accepting technological innovation. We examine whether the more public organization use “business-like practices”, the more they are likely to implement technological change. Moreover, we also hypothesize that interaction exists between the environmental and organizational antecedents of innovation. We expect that the negative effects of being in the public sector are mitigated by (more effective) politico-administrative environments.
This type of comparative research regarding the determinants of (technological) innovations in public organizations remains, however, in incipient stage. Previous research has often studied innovation in specific national and sectoral contexts – not seldom limited to the United States. The few available almost exclusively take countries as the unit of analysis, not organizations within countries. Moreover, a systematic empirical comparison between innovations in the public versus private sector is virtually absent.
To advance our understanding of public sector innovation, we propose to extend the research in three ways: (a) by looking at the level of individual organizations to examine previously untested micro-mechanisms of public sector innovation; (b) by applying a research design that is not only cross-national, but also cross-level in nature, i.e.: suited to determine how country-level factors moderate organizational-level relationships; (c) include private sector companies as a relevant comparison group. Ultimately, this article sets out to address the following question: “What are the organizational-level and country-level determinants of the technological innovations in public and private organizations in EU countries?”
Empirically, we use the 2013 wave of the European Company Survey (ECS). The ECS-2013 is a large-scale cross-national workplace survey in the European Union. The survey is applied to 27.000 public and private organizations across all EU countries. This data covers a wide range of information on work organization, HR practices and workplace innovation. As a pivotal element of innovation, our focus is on the changes in the use of technology at the workplace. We supplement the ECS-2013 data with country-level data from the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI). Hypotheses are tested through a series of multilevel logistic regression models. Cross-level interaction effects are used to determine the conditioning effect of country-context.
Management and organizational performance in comparative perspective (PMRA-sponsored panel
