Systematic Heterogeneity in the Adaptation Process of Management Innovations: Insights from the Italian Public Sector

In this chapter, the authors investigate how the best practices approach “diffused” in the Italian public sector. They show that despite the lack of a clear original model or a strong brokering agency - and the considerable changes this management innovation went through in its arrival in Italy - the result was not complete idiosyncrasy. Rather, clear adaptation patterns and systematic heterogeneity emerged. They argue that the bottom-up emergence of such patterns can be explained by paying attention to the very nature of the public-sector field. They use these findings to develop a framework that accounts for the convergence/divergence of adaptation patterns in the “diffusion” of management innovations based on power relations between innovation brokers and adopters.