https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282457445_What_would_Max_Weber_Say_about_Public-Sector_Innovation1

Concluding remarks

Summarizing above 150 years of discussion on conceptualizing public-sector innovations and innovations generally, we can draw the following conclusions: It can be argued that a recently emerging literature on social innovation tries to fi ll the gap in public-sector-innovation literature by looking at values and social relevance and thus moves the discussions towards issues of authority, trust, etc; see Bekkers et al. 2013 for an overview.

What would Max Weber Say about Public-Sector Innovation? From the oldest literature discussing public-sector innovations (Tocqueville, Weber):

  1. Public-sector innovations are in the most abstract sense related to public authority and legitimacy;
  2. Innovations lead to evolutionary changes in constraints and enablers that are intrinsic to the public sector (rules, relationships, institutions); B From recent public-sector-innovation literature:
  3. Literature on public-sector innovations rarely deals with authority (and related phenomena such as legitimacy, trust, etc.) but rather with relatively specific features of these changes, e.g. with specifi c modalities (within public-sector organisations), agency (reactions to external stimuli such as technology, politics, social challenges) and morphology (incremental changes); most of these changes are in fact not evolutionary, or their impact remains diffi cult to discern;
  4. Innovation is too oft en defined from a normative viewpoint (as something leading to significant improvement in public-service delivery), rather than a process that explains how profound changes take place in the public sector.
  5. In defining innovation, the literature has focused mostly on organizational or policy levels, but in doing so it has neglected the wider, public-sector-level, constraints and enablers.

In sum, looking at these two strands of older and recent literature on PSI, we can see that disproportionally large areas of public-sector activity in relations to innovations are under-researched in current PSI research. Max Weber