Explaining Innovation at Work: A Socio-Personal Account

Stephen Billett

Chapter 5 in Employee-Driven Innovation, 2012, pp 92-107 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract This chapter proposes a socio-personal account that explains innovations at work. These innovations are central to sustaining the viability of enterprises in the face of continual changes in work requirements and client needs. They also comprise the process through which workers come to both learn and actively remake their occupational practices. That is, innovations have important personal and socially derived purposes, and employee-driven innovations are no exception. Moreover, processes securing and sustaining innovations at work draw on interdependently personal and social contributions. For there to be new practices that secure effective responses to emerging or desired workplace goals, there must be situational premises for these innovations, including the means for them to be supported and adopted, and also the personal engagement by workers for these innovations to be enacted. These personal and social dualistic contributions are used here to provide an explanation of what constitutes innovations at work, in particular employeeled innovations, and how they might progress. Central to this explanatory account are concepts associated with workplace affordances (i.e. how individuals are permitted to participate in work) and individual engagements (i.e. how individuals elect to participate in that work), and, importantly, the relations amongst them. Thus, these contributions comprise a duality that is interdependent and relational.

Keywords: Work Practice; Work Task; Human Resource Development; Work Requirement; Employee Engagement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:pal:palchp:978-1-137-01476-4_5

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781137014764

DOI: 10.1057/9781137014764_5

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().