“We don’t feel like we are part of the project”: An analysis of tensions in the development and implementation of a public sector innovation project in Norway
NJSR
NORDIC JOURNAL of
SOCIAL RESEARCH www.nordicjsr.net
NJSR – Nordic Journal of Social Research
2021
“We don’t feel like we are part of the project”: An
analysis of tensions in the development and
implementation of a public sector innovation
project in Norway
Hilde Svrljuga Sætre*
Department of Business Administration
Western Norway University of Applied Sciences
Email: Hilde.Svrljuga.Setre@hvl.no
*corresponding author
Mai Camilla Munkejord
Department of Business Administration
Western Norway University of Applied Sciences
Email: Mai.Camilla.Munkejord@hvl.no
Abstract
Some of the extant literature on collaborative public sector innovation seems to
assume that collaboration per se implies a positive outcome. Recent research,
however, has demonstrated that innovation processes may take different shapes and
trajectories depending on, for example, the collaborating actors’ diverging (or
converging) perceptions of the given situation. In this article, we seek to contribute to
understanding the nature of potential challenges in public sector innovation processes.
We interviewed seven key actors involved in developing and implementing a new
introduction programme for refugees in a municipality in Norway. The interviews
explored how the innovation process evolved and how the different actors experienced
their participation in the process. In this article, we use the classic four ‘moments of
translation’ approach proposed by Callon (1986) to shed light on the main tensions that
arose for the project team in the 18 months after the project was launched. These
challenges related to why the innovation was realised, how such an innovation should
be operationalised, for whom the innovation was targeted and whose innovation project
the project was initially. In conclusion, we argue that to address the tensions that may
arise in any collaborative project, innovation leaders must establish a ‘structure for
collaboration’ that includes a space in which to acknowledge and potentially solve
emerging challenges.
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Keywords: Public service innovation, collaborative innovation, actor-network
theory, social enterprise
Introduction
Collaborative perspectives have long been central in public sector innovation
studies (Sørensen & Torfing, 2011). These studies have typically explored
how collaboration across different perspectives, experiences, knowledge
bases and competencies drives innovation (Sørensen & Torfing, 2011). Some
of the extant literature on collaborative public sector innovation portrays
collaboration as harmonious and appears to assume that collaboration per se
implies a positive outcome. Contrary to this assumption, it has been argued
that the collaborative innovation literature overlooks individual actors’
significance and that new perspectives are needed to understand how some
actors, but not others, manage to translate innovative visions into new
practices in specific contexts (Meijer, 2014; Windrum, 2008). Drawing on
translation theory, Røvik (2007) introduced the concept of the ‘capable
translator’. A capable translator is an actor with detailed knowledge of a new
idea, of the context from which the idea is exported and of the context in which
the idea seeks realisation. The ‘capable translator’ must possess specific
personal traits, knowledge bases and skills that he or she employs to convince
others of his or her understanding of the novel idea (Røvik, 2007). In applying
translation approaches to public sector innovation processes, research has
demonstrated that innovation processes may take different shapes and
trajectories depending on the collaborating actors’ diverging (or converging)
perceptions of what the problem actually is and how it should best be solved
(e.g., Gray & Ren, 2014; Magnussen, 2016; Myklebø, 2019).
In this article, we seek to further understand the nature of the potential
challenges facing public sector innovation processes. Methodologically, we
interviewed seven key actors involved in developing and implementing a new
introduction programme for refugees in a municipality in Norway. The
interviews explored how the innovation process evolved and how the different
actors experienced their participation in it. The initiative was defined as a
collaborative innovation project and obtained funding from the County
Administration and Norwegian Directorate of Diversity and Integration (IMDi).
In this article, we neither explore this new introduction programme’s content
nor the participants’ experiences. Rather, using the classic four ‘moments of
translation’ approach proposed by Callon (1986), we analyse the experiences
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of the key actors involved in developing and implementing the programme to
shed light on the main tensions that arose in the project team in the first 18
months after the project’s launch. In particular, we discuss tensions related to
why innovation was realised, how such innovation should be operationalised,
for whom the innovation was targeted and whose innovation project the
project was initially. In conclusion, we argue that to address the tensions that
may arise in any collaborative project, it is crucial to establish a ‘structure for
collaboration’ that includes a communicative space in which to acknowledge
and potentially solve emerging challenges and oppositional views among the
collaborating actors.
The remainder of this article proceeds as follows: first, the background and
context for the new introduction programme under investigation are described.
The theoretical framework is then outlined, as are the methodological choices
and considerations. The main findings are presented next, followed by the
discussion and concluding remarks.
Background and Context
For nearly 20 years, the introduction programme for refugees has been
offered in Norway as an integrative initiative aimed at enabling refugees to
quickly find work or enter education or training (Djuve & Kavli, 2015, 2018).
According to the Introduction Act (2005), participants should be offered
Norwegian language and social studies classes and on-the-job training or
other working life preparations. Participation in the introduction programme is
both a right and a duty for refugees, who receive an introduction benefit1 while
taking part in the programme. The introduction programme is offered in the
municipality in which the refugee is settled and is a collaborative effort,
normally between two public sector organisations: the Refugee Integration
Office and the Adult Education Centre (Myklebø, 2019). The Refugee
Integration Office generally assumes responsibility for refugees’ working life
preparations and overall learning ambitions during their participation in the
introduction programme, while the Adult Education Centre is responsible for
delivering Norwegian language and social studies classes. Due to
disappointing introduction programme results in many parts of the country
1 An income support payment
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(e.g., Bredal & Orupabo, 2014; Djuve & Kavli, 2015; Kavli et al., 2007), various
initiatives have been encouraged recently, including new introduction
programmes, developed by the municipalities at the urging of the IMDi. In
policy papers, the government has also called for innovation in the introduction
programmes, especially for women with no formal qualifications, such as
through social entrepreneurship (Ministry of Education and Research, 2019).
The project under scrutiny is being carried out in the ‘Seaside Municipality’, a
medium-sized municipality of 25,000–40,000 inhabitants. The Head of this
municipality’s Refugee Integration Office and her colleagues remarked that the
introduction programmes for refugees in the area had had disappointing
results in terms of both participants’ relatively low scores on the Norwegian
exams and too few participants obtaining paid work after completing the
programme. In 2018, the Head and the municipal business advisor contacted
a group of researchers2 to discuss how to address this problem. A decision
was reached to apply for funding to develop and implement a new introduction
programme for refugee women. This new introduction programme was to have
two core principles: empowerment, to highlight the participants as ‘competent
and skilled persons’, and communicative language teaching, to position
linguistic interaction as both a means and a goal. To operationalise these
principles, the project proposed establishing a social enterprise in which
participants could learn language and work-related knowledge while practising
a task in which they already had expertise: cooking.
Funding to run a pilot project was obtained from the IMDi and the County
Administration. The main target group for the pilot project was refugee women
with little or no formal qualifications and an interest in cooking. The leader of
the Refugee Integration Office became the project leader for the pilot. In the
fall of 2018, the project leader recruited a programme coordinator (a chef), two
Norwegian language teachers and 10–12 participants, including both literate
and illiterate refugee women. In January 2019, even before the new
programme coordinator had started, the programme was launched by the
project leader. Cooking took place within a public sector social enterprise
established alongside the new introduction programme. This social
enterprise’s aim was to provide a training context for the introduction
2 Researchers from the research institutions NORCE and Western Norway University of Applied
Sciences.
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programme participants and potentially a future workplace for some of them.
Customers were made aware of the enterprise via social media marketing,
and they supported it by ordering food for various occasions. During the first
year of the pilot, the programme coordinator and the language teachers
received some training from an invited expert on how to implement a
communicative teaching approach. At the time of writing this article, the pilot
project had been running for two years.
The project was initiated by the project leader, who travelled to other
municipalities for inspiration and learning, established contact with
researchers, contributed to writing the applications and was formally listed as
the project leader in these applications. However, the respective roles of the
collaborating organisations and their employees were neither defined prior to
nor during the implementation of the project. As will be illustrated in the
analysis, this caused some challenges.
Theoretical Framework
Innovation refers to the development and implementation of novel ideas that
deviate from established and habitual practices (Hartley et al., 2013; Osborne
& Brown, 2011). Innovation is not only about inventing ‘something new’ but
also about developing and implementing this ‘new’ element such that it
becomes accepted in a given context (Fuglesang, 2010). While private sector
innovation has long received scholarly attention, research on public sector
innovation only emerged in the 1990s (Kattel et al., 2013). Public sector
innovation can be defined as efforts or processes that enhance the capacity of
public sector organisations to address social or societal problems, such as by
improving the content or organisation of services (Damanpour & Schneider,
2009).
By applying a translation perspective to our analysis, we can explore how and
why tensions emerge in the innovation process and how different key actors
manage them. According to the actor-network approach (ANT), any diffusion
of innovation depends on the mobilisation of support for an idea or practice in
a network. This mobilisation is done by building relevant alliances to realise
the innovation (Callon, 1986). However, conflicting interests may emerge,
placing the realisation of the innovation at risk by impeding the ‘capable
translator’ from creating necessary alliances. Thus, a ‘capable translator’ must
possess some degree of power. However, this can foster power asymmetries,
which may prevent certain actors from voicing their opinions or bringing new
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ideas to the table (Torfing et al., 2009). As Torfing argues (2016, p. 133),
entering ‘a dialogue of the deaf’ in which leaders cannot hear others’ voices
can be detrimental to the collaborative process.
To understand the tensions described by the key actors in the innovation
project under investigation in this article and why they came about, we employ
Callon’s (1986) four ‘moments of translation’. Callon’s first phase is
problematisation, which refers to a ‘translator’ defining an observed social
problem. The translator must convince others that his or her solution is the
most appropriate for addressing the problem. It is important for the translator
to establish a system of alliances and to render him or herself a natural
facilitator within this system to continuously influence translation. The second
phase, interessement, entails a set of actions by which the translator imposes
his or her views on the actors involved in translation. To do so, the translator
will seek to prevent others from defining the problem or the solution to the
problem differently, such as by preventing competing definitions from being
voiced (Callon, 1986). The third phase, enrolment, involves assigning roles to
the collaborating partners in the translation process and ensuring their
willingness to accept their roles when the translator’s definition has become
the prevailing definition for the initiative. The final phase, mobilisation,
concerns the degree to which the collaborating actors play their roles as
defined during enrolment and the degree to which innovation is carried out as
defined during problematisation, thereby making the innovation incontestable
and credible (Callon, 1986). However, dissidence is prone to arise. While
dissidence may in some instances spur unintended and innovative solutions,
in other instances, as will be illustrated in this article, it may constitute a
bottleneck.
Research Design and Methods
To answer our research questions, we used a qualitative design. We
interviewed all relevant actors involved in developing and implementing the
introduction programme in the ‘Seaside Municipality’, including the project
owner, the project leader and the programme coordinator, who were all
employed by the Refugee Integration Office, and the Norwegian language
teachers and principal, who were employed by the Adult Education Centre
(see Table 1). The interviews focused on the informants’ experiences of their
involvement in the project, focusing on aspects such as collaboration,
tensions, roles and changes.
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The data for this article were collected over a period of six months. The main
source of data, in addition to reading project proposals, was in-depth
interviews conducted with the key actors of this project. The interviews were
conducted face-to-face in ‘Seaside Municipality’ in 2019 and via Zoom or
Microsoft Teams in 2020 due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The
recordings lasted from one to one-and-a-half hours. All interviews were
transcribed verbatim. The interviewees’ names and the name of the
municipality and social enterprise have been anonymised.
Table 1 Professions and Functions of the Informants
Informant Profession Function
1 Director of Municipal
Welfare Services
Project owner
2 Leader of Refugee
Integration Services*
Project leader
3 Project coordinator* Coordinator of cooking
training, manager of
the social enterprise,
coordinator of the
introduction
programme
4 Principal of the Adult
Education Centre
Leader of the teachers,
mediator between the
Adult Education
Centre and Refugee
Integration Office
5 Language teacher Norwegian language
teacher (chose to quit
at an early stage)
6 Language teacher Norwegian language
teacher
7 Language teacher Norwegian language
teacher
* These informants were interviewed twice, first separately and then, some months
later, together.
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Permissions and Ethical Considerations
We obtained permission to perform this study from the Norwegian Centre for
Research Data (project number omitted). It should be noted that the second
author assisted the project leader and her team in writing the applications for
funding. While financial support to develop and implement the programme was
obtained from IMDi and the County Administration, the municipality also
received funding from the Regional Research Council to conduct a follow-up
study of the first semester of developing and implementing this new
introduction programme. The second author was part of the team undertaking
that follow-up study and a co-author of the report resulting from this project.
The report did not lead to any major changes to the development and
implementation of the new introduction programme.
We applied a thematic analysis of the data (Braun & Clarke, 2006, 2019). After
completing their initial analysis independently, the authors met for a two-day
analysis workshop in spring 2020. On the first day of the workshop, we
discussed the preliminary findings by identifying any issues that the actors of
the collaboration project had agreed upon and any that had caused tensions.
We found that all informants agreed on the overarching goal of the
introduction programme, but that the employees of the Refugee Integration
Office and Adult Education Centre entered the project with diverging
expectations about how the new introduction programme should be
developed. On the second day of the workshop, a more theoretically informed
analysis was performed to identify tensions among the different actors
involved in the project related to why innovation was realised, how such
innovation should be operationalised, for whom the innovation was targeted,
and whose innovation project the project was. Callon’s moments of translation
was found to be a fruitful analytical framework for understanding and
explaining our findings.
Main Findings
Our findings suggest that the actors involved in the project shared the
overarching goal of the new introduction programme; that is, supporting the
participants to learn more Norwegian and eventually find paid work. Despite this
agreement on the goal, throughout the development and implementation period,
four central tensions arose that seemed to threaten the entire initiative. These
tensions arose during the problematisation, interessement and enrolment
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phases identified by Callon (1986), potentially preventing advancement to the
crucial mobilisation phase.
Problematisation: Why Should We Do This Project in the First Place?
According to Callon (1986), problematisation involves the translator observing
a social problem and striving to gain support for his or her solution to the
problem. The translator must reinforce the importance of translation and
establish a network of alliances, becoming a natural facilitator in this network.
The data show diverging perceptions of the problem among the employees at
the Adult Education Centre and the employees at the Refugee Integration
Office. That is, they differed in their understandings of why the innovation
project had been developed. According to the Refugee Integration Office
employees, the alternative introduction programme was launched in response
to a ‘crisis’. As the project owner, the Director of Municipal Welfare Services,
said:
We faced a great challenge in including [refugees] in the labour market […].
The [language] results were not that good either. […] We were not that
pleased with [the Adult Education Centre], and they [the Adult Education
Centre] were probably not so pleased with us either. […] We realised that
things needed to be done differently […] to not have an entire generation that
would depend on welfare benefits. (1)
On the other hand, the Adult Education Centre employees, including the
principal and the Norwegian language teachers, did not agree that there had
been a ‘crisis’. Nevertheless, they considered the new introduction programme
‘valuable’ and an ‘important alternative’ for the defined target group. This view
is clearly expressed in the following quote:
I believe that [the new introduction programme] is important, especially for
women with families […] and with little or no education who are about to
embark on a long educational journey [in Norway] and eventually get a
permanent job. […] It is important that there is an alternative introduction
programme for them where they can carry out practical work while at the
same time being trained not only in the Norwegian language. (4)
A possible explanation for these diverging perceptions was raised by the
project leader, as expressed in the following quote:
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I have always felt a strong commitment [to the project] myself, but have I been
able to convey this commitment or ownership to the whole team? Why is
everybody not as enthusiastic about the new introduction programme as I am?
(2)
The data suggest that over the first 14–16 months of the innovation project,
the project leader struggled to establish a common understanding of why the
innovation was being implemented. From the start, the Refugee Integration
Office was strongly motivated to improve the existing introduction programme
due to poor results. The solution, according to the project leader, was to
develop a new introduction programme building on the participants’
qualifications (empowerment) and a new pedagogical model (communicative
language teaching) to be implemented in a social enterprise that would
provide the opportunity for refugee women to prepare food for real customers.
However, the Adult Education Centre employees did not perceive the situation
in the same way. They felt the quality of the programmes already offered was
good and that the steps being taken in the new introduction programme were
not particularly ‘innovative’ because, they said, similar steps had already been
attempted. Importantly, as the project leader herself suggested, the why of the
project was not adequately conveyed to all actors involved in the
implementation of the new introduction programme. According to the project
leader, because she thought the need for this new initiative was ‘obvious’, she
had initially taken for granted that the other actors involved would share her
enthusiasm.
Interessement 1: How Can the Communicative Teaching Approach be
Operationalised?
Callon (1986) characterised interessement as a set of actions by which the
translator imposes his or her viewpoint on the actors that were united in the
problematisation phase. The second tension identified in the data relates to
how communicative teaching was to be operationalised. This issue, according
to our informants, was heavily debated during the first 18 months of
implementation and involved professional disagreement between the
employees of the Refugee Integration Office and the Adult Education Centre.
The Refugee Integration Office employees, although they had no formal
education in how to teach Norwegian as a foreign language, voiced the
importance of following the conservative communicative teaching approach
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proposed by the expert. The core idea was that language teaching should be
directly related to cooking practices. The Norwegian language teachers were
thus expected to teach the participants the language (e.g., words, phrases and
grammar) for cooking (e.g., following and writing recipes) and for selling food
to customers (e.g., taking and delivering orders). This represented a move
away from traditional blackboard teaching using formal textbooks to a task-
oriented ‘learning-by-doing’ approach.
From the perspective of the language teachers, this communicative teaching
approach was too time consuming. They said they would prefer to use a
textbook at least some of the time but that none of the existing textbooks were
considered ‘communicative enough’ by the expert. Therefore, the language
teachers had to spend considerable time developing ‘tasks’ (i.e.,
communicative exercises that the participants would complete and then glue
into their notebooks). A language teacher explained:
We have to prepare different tasks so that the participants can cut and glue
them together in their notebooks. [The participants] are dead tired of it, right?
They are tired of cutting and pasting instead of having a real book. (5)
Despite the strong reluctance on the part of the language teachers to follow
the advice of the expert, the issue of how they could practice the
communicative approach in a meaningful way and ensure they had enough
time to prepare their classes was, according to the language teachers, never
really discussed between the Refugee Integration Office and the Adult
Education Centre. Instead, for more than a year, the project leader and project
owner remained determined that the ‘pure’ form of the communicative
approach should be implemented. By the time of the follow-up interview in the
spring of 2020, however, the project leader had begun to reconsider her
position on this topic. She said:
From the very start, we were quite clear about the fact that we wanted to
implement this [communicative teaching] method in the project. (…). This was
mentioned in the project description. The training offered by the expert was
supposed to create the basis for how the Norwegian teaching was to be
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done in this programme. As the project leader, I feel responsible for making
sure that we do what we wrote in the project description and for executing the
project in the best possible way. So, I think that we should give it
[communicative teaching] a try. But there is this resistance from the language
teachers. I feel that they have been reluctant to change, reluctant to try
something new and make it work... (2)
In the same interview, the project leader reflected on her initial haste bringing
in the communicative teaching approach without first carefully evaluating
whether the expert’s version of the method would fit the introduction
programme or discussing it with the language teachers:
Despite it being one of the most important things about this introduction
programme, we had not really thought through how to do the communicative
Norwegian teaching […]. We knew very well that (teaching Norwegian) is not
our profession, not our competency […], but we really fell in love with the
expert. […] However, we had not reflected on whether the language teachers
would be allowed by him to use books. Actually, we did not know about that at
all. (2)
Finally, the teachers’ resistance was being taken into consideration by the
project leader, and the whole project team could start to discuss how to
operationalise the communicative approach in a way that better suited the
teachers’ experiences and needs.
It should be noted here that neither the principal of the Adult Education Centre
nor the Norwegian language teachers were against communicative teaching.
They were just concerned that the method conveyed by the expert was too
time consuming and that it was ill-suited for the mixed group of participants in
this introduction programme. This leads us to another tension identified during
the interessement phase.
Interessement 2: Who Should Be the Target Group for the New
Introduction Programme?
From the start, the project leader argued that the new introduction programme
should be available for any refugee woman with an interest in cooking,
regardless of her proficiency in Norwegian language and regardless of
whether or not she was literate (acquainted with the Latin alphabet). This mix
of participants was seen as a problem by the Norwegian teachers because,
according to them, their teaching would either be too elementary for the
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women with the highest educational level or much too complicated for those
who were illiterate. Worse, the teachers argued that with these broad inclusion
criteria, any illiterate women would remain illiterate, as there would not be
enough time to teach them the basics. The principal of the Adult Education
Centre described this problem as follows:
I tried to explain this early on […], but my objections were overruled: There
should have been specific criteria for being eligible for the programme […] But
everyone can join, everyone from the highly skilled to the illiterate. You know,
that is a strange lumping together. The language teachers found this too
tough, right? Because there are [participants] who do not speak Norwegian at
all and others who speak Norwegian quite well. Some are educated, while
others have never touched a pencil! (4)
In line with this, one of the language teachers explained as follows:
When you put illiterate individuals who have not learned the alphabet [together
with participants who are literate], then you deprive them of their rights, right? I
feel that we are preventing some of the participants from excelling. I have tried
to confront [the Refugee Integration Office] with this. Well, we all have […] We
found that the participants did not get what they were entitled to. That was our
biggest frustration. (6)
Despite this feedback from the Adult Education Centre employees, the project
leader, even in the second interview in spring 2020, insisted that it was crucial
to continue to include illiterate and literate women in the same class:
Yes, we have faced resistance from the language teachers and even from the
expert and the researchers regarding whether we should include illiterate
women in classes. However, to include illiterate women is important to us [the
Refugee Integration Office], and we will not give up on this. (2)
This position on the part of the project leader made it difficult for the Adult
Education Centre to contribute to redefining the how of the innovation project.
Enrolment: Whose Project Is It Anyway?
According to Callon (1986), enrolment entails the clear identification and
assignment of a set of interdependent roles to actors who accept them. For
the innovation project under scrutiny, this process was not completed.
Moreover, the project leader did not establish a common understanding of
whose project the new introduction programme was: Was the project a joint
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collaborative project between the Refugee Integration Office and the Adult
Education Centre as equal partners (egalitarian) or was it solely a Refugee
Integration Office project to which the Adult Education Centre should be happy
to contribute (hierarchical)? This tension existed from the very beginning of the
project. The principal of the Adult Education Centre explained:
So much was already developed before we were involved in this. That is not
good. It would have been better to involve the Adult Education Centre from the
very start […] I mean, some of us have been in this game for quite some time,
and we have a lot of experience from different projects, so had we been
listened to from the very start, it would have facilitated implementation, and we
could have taken ownership of the project, which would have been important.
(4)
This perception of the Adult Education Centre employees that they were not
truly accepted by the Refugee Integration Office as equal partners in the
project was echoed by the language teachers. Seemingly, all the involved
Adult Education Centre employees had an egalitarian understanding of the
collaboration project’s structure. As one of them explained:
We, the teachers, don’t feel like we are part of the project. We show up, we
carry out our job, and then we leave again. If we had been invited to the
project team at an earlier stage, it could have been different because then we
could have developed this whole thing together. […] It is so obvious that this is
a ‘Refugee Integration Office Project’. It is the Refugee Integration Office that
owns it, and this is what will be written in the history books. (6)
These views were to a large extent confirmed by the project leader, as
illustrated by the following quote:
The Adult Education Centre was invited on board at an early phase, but it is
obvious that we (the Refugee Integration Office) were in the driver’s seat.
Like, we wrote the applications, we got the funding […]. So, well, in that
sense, we were never really equal partners, right? In a way, we were the ones
leading the project. (2)
The project leader added that the project idea had been launched in her
organisation and that, before sending the applications for funding, it was
discussed several times whether to invite the Adult Education Centre to join as
a partner. The project owner positioned the Refugee Integration Office as the
lead partner in the project and stated that they could have chosen to
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collaborate with another education centre. The Refugee Integration Office thus
saw the project as hierarchically structured. They saw themselves as leading
the project and considered the Adult Education Centre a client rather than an
equal partner. The project owner said:
In a way, we were in a client–supplier relationship with them, and we could
make specific demands regarding Norwegian education. We were never
obliged to purchase [the teaching of Norwegian language] from them. (1)
As far as we can tell from our analysis of the interviews, the Adult Education
Centre and the Refugee Integration Office had diverging logics related to what
being involved in this ‘collaboration project’ entailed. Thus, the Refugee
Integration Office viewed the collaboration process as hierarchical and
positioned themselves as the main driver with de facto decision-making
power. The Adult Education Centre, on the other hand, thought the
collaboration project should have been egalitarian between ‘equal partners’
and tried to act accordingly.
Discussion
While extant research tends to cast collaboration as harmonious (i.e., that
collaboration per se often leads to positive outcomes), as this article
highlights, in addition to requiring engagement in collaboration and a shared
overarching goal, innovation projects need all relevant actors to have a mutual
understanding of the project logic; that is, whether collaboration should be
hierarchical or egalitarian. Without this, tensions are likely to arise.
Callon (1986) characterises innovation processes as having four phases:
problematisation, interessement, enrolment and mobilisation. Problematisation
involves the translator defining a problem, proposing a solution and striving to
create alliances in which she or he becomes the natural facilitator. In the
project under scrutiny, according to the project leader, the problem was the
poor results of the traditional introduction programme and the solution was to
develop a new introduction programme building on the participants’
qualifications (empowerment), a new pedagogical model (communicative
teaching approach) and a social enterprise that could provide real-life work
experience. The project leader recruited supporters within her own
organisation, motivated a team of researchers to join the process, obtained
funding to finance the pilot project from various sources and enrolled the Adult
Education Centre to deliver the language component of the programme.
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However, the project leader failed to ensure that the Adult Education Centre
employees shared her understanding of what the problem was; that is, why
the new introduction programme was necessary in the first place. Therefore,
although the Adult Education Centre and the Refugee Integration Office
shared a common understanding of the overarching goal of the new
introduction programme, the Adult Education Centre did not agree with the
problem as defined by the project leader.
Second, to succeed with interessement, the project leader had to convince the
actors in the network of her viewpoints (Callon, 1986). However, while the
project leader established her problematisation of how to realise the project,
she did not invite the employees of the Adult Education Centre to voice their
opinions. Thus, the Refugee Integration Office alone conducted the
preplanning and application process, with few meetings organised between
the project leader, programme coordinator and Norwegian language teachers
in the first 18 months of the introduction programme. Consequently, there
were a lack of opportunities for the implementing actors to discuss emerging
issues, such as suitable criteria for participant selection and how to shape the
teaching approach and programme content. No forum through which
dissidence could be acknowledged and potentially solved was ever
established. As a result of the lack of structures for collaboration, the Refugee
Integration Office avoided critical input and reinforced a power imbalance.
Thus, while it was well known that the Adult Education Centre teachers and
principal had reservations about the teaching approach (the how) and target
group (for whom), at no time over the course of this study were these issues
openly discussed. The resulting situation was considered so challenging for
the first set of language teachers that they decided to leave the project after
one year. A new set of language teachers was subsequently recruited, but still
no structure for collaboration was established. It was only later, with the
intervention of the COVID-19 pandemic, that the disagreements between the
Refugee Integration Office and Adult Education Centre began to be openly
discussed in digital meetings.
Callon’s (1986) enrolment phase refers to the assignment of defined and
interdependent roles to actors of an innovation project. Importantly, these
actors must also accept these roles. As our data suggest, however, enrolment
was not truly carried out in the project under scrutiny. First, it was not specified
whether the new introduction programme was an egalitarian collaboration
project or a Refugee Integration Office–led project. In the applications, the
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project was represented as a collaboration between two public sector
organisations. In reality, however, the project was run predominantly as a
Refugee Integration Office project. These challenges prevented the process
from reaching the mobilisation phase.
A Lack of Structures for Collaboration
Our data demonstrate that the development and implementation of the new
introduction programme lacked clear structures for collaboration. This may
partly explain why the tensions presented and analysed in this article persisted
over time. As suggested in the extant literature, structures for collaboration
should be developed to enable the collaborating partners to agree on
important issues, such as why the project is being implemented, what roles
each actor plays, what knowledge and skills they can bring to the table and
how to manage dissidence among the collaborating partners (Torfing, 2016).
The role of the leader is crucial to address potential barriers and
disagreements. As has been illustrated, if these are not addressed, they may
foster challenges.
The lack of structures for collaboration and continued inattention to Adult
Education Centre employees’ concerns regarding the teaching approach and
target-group composition (a mix of illiterate and literate participants in the
same class) led to the withdrawal of the first two Norwegian language
teachers from the project. Despite this, the project leader remained
enthusiastic about the initial project ideas; however, for this project, being an
‘enthusiastic leader’ (Magnussen, 2016) was not enough to create and sustain
a strong collaborative innovation environment.
As the project leader explained, her conviction that the why, how, for whom
and by whom were ‘obvious’ meant she did not discuss these with the Adult
Education Centre employees. In addition, the project owner talked about the
Adult Education Centre as a ‘service provider’ that could be exchanged with
another partner if necessary. The two public sector organisations involved in
this innovation project thus held different project logics. The Refugee
Integration Office regarded and implemented the project as a hierarchical
collaboration, with them in the driver’s seat. Conversely, the Adult Education
Centre assumed they would be equal partners in the project with the Refugee
Integration Office. According to our informants, these diverging
understandings and their implications were never openly discussed. It should
be noted, however, that the principal of the Adult Education Centre did not
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initiate any meetings between the leader of the Refugee Integration Office and
herself to address these issues.
We would like to note that we do not view Callon’s theoretical model as the
only relevant theoretical framework that can shed light on our data.
Additionally, we have not used his framework in a normative way (e.g., to
suggest that following his model ensures success). Rather, Callon’s
perspectives have been used in this article as a useful tool to highlight the
possible opportunities and pitfalls of the innovation project under scrutiny.
What Happened to the Social Enterprise?
The ‘International Cuisine’ social enterprise was one area on which all
collaborating partners could agree. Its intentions were to empower participants
by offering real-life experience, create value for the community by educating
future workers for a local labour market and, ideally, reduce the share of
refugees depending (entirely) on welfare benefits. While our data suggest the
social enterprise operated primarily as a catering firm in which the participants
prepared food while using their mother tongues or body language, all involved
partners, including the participants, agreed that the social enterprise served as
a meaningful arena for language and practice education.
Conclusion
This study highlights that although collaborative innovations are often
portrayed as harmonious, sharing the overarching goal of an innovation
project is not sufficient to prevent tensions from arising. The innovation project
studied in this article included an ‘International Cuisine’ social enterprise.
Although representing a form of organisational hybridity, the social enterprise
was never a source of tension for the key actors of this project. However, as
elaborated, a number of other tensions did emerge.
Our results indicate that it is important for the innovation process to openly
discuss and agree on what ‘collaboration’ means in a project. Moreover, to
realise an innovation project and deal with emerging tensions, it is crucial to
address and clarify why innovation is being realised, how to operationalise
such innovation, for whom the innovation is targeted and whose innovation
project the project is. Additionally, it could be useful to conceptualise the
innovation process as including the phases defined by Callon (1986); that is,
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problematisation, interessement and enrolment. Should disagreements arise,
our findings highlight the importance of an engaged project leader who can
create and implement clear structures for collaboration through which existing
and potential tensions can be identifies, discussed and overcome. Finally, it is
important to include all relevant actors in important decisions, which here
included the teaching approach to be used and the composition of the target
group.
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