Recovering the Performative Role of Innovations in the Globasl Travel of Healthcare Practice. Is there a Ghost in the Machine?
Additional information
Authors
Nicolini D.,
Mengis J.,
Meacheam D.,
Waring J.
Type
Book chapter
Year
2016
Language
English
Abstract
This chapter discusses the global travel of practices with reference to the international
patient safety movement, focusing on a specific approach to incident investigation
(Root Cause Analysis or RCA for short). We assess how knowledge of the technique was
mobilized, from the United States to Australia, the United Kingdom and beyond. We
argue that the mobilization and world spanning circulation of this set of practices was
sustained and facilitated by the construction of an “anxiety-reassurance” package. This
package worked to support the mobilization of the approach through, first, raising
public and professional anxiety about pre-existing management practices around
patient safety, and second, creating reassurance by proposing a new management
solution to solve this problem. Playing together these two seemingly opposite discourses,
the innovation generated a wave of interest and urgency that it then rode and
that allowed rapid globalization. Below we show how this powerful “package” actively
translated the new approach in the sense of both circulating and profoundly reconfiguring
it. We suggest that a focus on the innovation as a well-oiled piece of discursive
machinery helps us “unpack the black box,” and understand the active role of innovations
in fueling their own translation. This without reverting to the old idea that
innovations are “diffused.”
Book
Mobilizing Knowledge in Healthcare
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Start page number
19
End page number
35
Keywords
Innovation, Sociology of Translation, Root Cause Analysis, Performativity
