The sense of services in a globalizing public sector

This paper represents an attempt to explore in a qualitative way how the microstructure of public private innovation networks in public services (ServPPINs) can be understood. The paper uses the concepts of sensemaking and weak cues from the sensemaking literature to explain how these ServPPINs manage to take care of development and change (Weick 1979, 1995). The proposal, which is explored in the case-study is that the impact of ServPPINs is not to create radical new innovations, but to take a series of small actions and thereby potentially react to small cues. Attention of the paper is, however, focused on “formalization” as one way to handle these sensemaking processes across organizational boundaries, and the paper tries to map different elements of this formalization process.