Boundary-spanning in academic healthcare organisations

Bryn Lander

Research Policy, 2016, vol. 45, issue 8, 1524-1533

Abstract: Policy makers view academic healthcare organisations as important to healthcare innovation because they act as boundary-spanning organisations that integrate science and care institutional logics. Institutional logics are implicit and socially shared rules of the game that prescribe behaviour within a social group. This paper explores how individuals affiliated with academic healthcare organisations negotiate science and care institutional logics within their day-to-day work through a qualitative case study of research and healthcare within academic healthcare organisations in Vancouver, Canada. It highlights that there is less hybridisation of institutional logics than policy makers might hope: some researchers hosted in academic healthcare organisations are not part of the care institutional logic, others are not well integrated with the research institutional logic. Clinician–scientists often struggle to integrate the science and care institutional logics in their day-to-day work; other workers do integrate science and care institutional logics through experiments of nature but their research may not be viewed as high quality science. Because of poor hybridisation, academic healthcare organisations may not be as effective in facilitating healthcare innovation as policy makers assume.

Keywords: Boundary-spanning; Institutional logic; Translational science; Knowledge translation; Medical innovation; Healthcare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004873331600007X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:respol:v:45:y:2016:i:8:p:1524-1533

DOI: 10.1016/j.respol.2016.01.006

Access Statistics for this article

Research Policy is currently edited by M. Bell, B. Martin, W.E. Steinmueller, A. Arora, M. Callon, M. Kenney, S. Kuhlmann, Keun Lee and F. Murray

More articles in Research Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().