Multi-level antecedents of public sector innovation? An ethnography of a large UK postal services organization

This paper examines professional and organizational-level antecedents of public sector innovation using findings from a 9-month ethnography conducted within the marketing department of a large UK postal organization. The analysis centres on vignettes of two cross-functional projects to develop product and service innovations that involved external design agencies. The data are based on observation of the marketing teams, semi-structured interviews, and documentary analysis. The study highlights that social practices characteristic of communities of practice are antecedent to the generation of absorptive capacity, but also shows that the learning produced by communities of practice is mediated by relations of power associated with these groups and interaction with organizational absorptive capacity. This paper develops the theory of absorptive capacity by shifting attention away from ‘prior knowledge’ in enabling acquisition of external knowledge to highlighting the role of intensive interaction, organizational context, and power relations in shaping knowledge creation for learning and innovation.