10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17437
application/pdf
2038-3460
17437
1
en
Alberto Zanutto
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Jacky Swan, Sue Newell and Davide Nicolini, (eds.), Mobilizing Knowledge in Healthcare. Challenges for Management and Organization, Oxford University Press, 2016
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
10
Book Reviews
2019-07-16
2023-06-26
2019-07-16
2023-10-05
148-150
TS
Alberto Zanutto
2019/07/16
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17437
148
Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento
2038-3460
1
en
150
Jacky Swan, Sue Newell and Davide Nicolini, (eds.), Mobilizing Knowledge in Healthcare. Challenges for Management and Organization, Oxford University Press, 2016
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17437/16287
10
148                                                         Tecnoscienza – 10 (1)

with two central concerns of STS, namely the issues of experimentation
and cooperation. It also provides interesting insights into the manifold
intersections between society, science, art, management studies and the
economy. However, it does not relate any of these lines of thought explic-
itly to STS research, nor did it intend to do so. So STS readers who are
interested in similar issues will have to draw their own conclusions. And,
at least to my taste, the volume is biased towards an applied de-
sign/management/consulting perspective that falls short of a more analyt-
ic discussion and wider references to likeminded discourses in STS and
beyond. Again, I see that this was not the aim of the book and while I
acknowledge the need for such interventions, it is at the same time what
limits its potential insights for me.



                                    ***
   J. Swan, S. Newell and D. Nicolini, (eds.)
Mobilizing Knowledge in Healthcare. Challenges for Management and
Organization, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 288

Alberto Zanutto Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento
Enrico Maria Piras Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento

    The divide between knowing and doing is a central concern in organi-
zational and policymaking debate. In the healthcare sector, where formal-
ized clinical knowledge has become the cornerstone of the Evidence
Based Medicine, filling the gap between research evidences and mundane
practices is the object of several policy-led initiatives. From the perspec-
tive of organizational scholars this gap and the difficulties in addressing is
a fascinating matter of concern. The book edited by Swan, Newell and
Nicolini does not attempt to provide a conclusive answer to this issue.
Rather, editors acknowledge that aiming for a grand unified theory or a
recipe of knowledge translation would be pointless. Instead of attempting
at describing how knowledge translation should be done, the book pro-
poses several empirically-grounded analysis on how it is done in a domain
where several working practices and knowledge domains intersect and
overlap.
    The overarching theme of all essays is the rejection of the model of
linear transfer of knowledge in favour of its ‘mobilization’ which requires
a shift, to put it with the words of the editors, from “accumulation and
transfer of never-ending quantities of new evidence, [to] connections be-
tween people, ideas, and practices”. The analysis of mobilization requires
to be aware of the challenges of the overlapping of organizational, inter-

148
Book Review                                                            149
organizational, professional domains of knowledge and the complexities
in mobilizing such knowledge across the boundaries of the various do-
mains of healthcare are nested in each other. In this perspective,
knowledge mobilization is not the results of managerial decisions but ra-
ther the outcome of the connection of several sites of practices.
    The book is organized around four themes/sections: managerial prac-
tices of knowledge mobilization; organizational capabilities needed for
knowledge mobilization; the networks of professions and practices across
which knowledge is mobilized; and how knowledge travels across space
and time. While each essay can be read separately, the editors are to be
praised for the effort of highlighting the connection among them. Besides
the usual general introduction, each section has its how brief introduction
which guides the reader into a journey.
    A short description of each chapter reveals the richness and breadth
of scope of the book.
    McGivern and colleagues reflect on how managers that wish to pro-
mote knowledge mobilization are influenced by a complex interweaving
of norms, interests, cultural habits of the different professional communi-
ties. Korica and Nicolini address the issue of which practices the top
management puts in place to deal with the uncertainty of knowledge for
the decisions they have to adopt proving an ethnographic account of how
a top manager of an NHS operating unit promotes knowledge mobiliza-
tion in a situated context.
    The second theme, organizational actions that can support knowledge
mobilization, is addressed by Croft and Currie identifying three specific
dimensions of this process: the role of systems, the role of socialization
and that of coordination. The latter in particular appears as the strategic
activity that can improve the mobilization of knowledge in the medical
field given the complexity that characterizes this domain. Reay and col-
leagues discuss the role of the organizational space, considered as the di-
mension constituted by the relations that convey and change in relation to
the knowledge distributed in the network among the subjects and to the
organizational learning that follows.
    The section about networks of professions and practices is opened by
the work of Oborn and colleagues that, through three case studies, inves-
tigate the choices made by stakeholders to balance between creating and
acquiring new knowledge from diverse partners and forms of knowledge
with its exploitation in practice identifying some recurring traits in all
cases. Newell and Marabelli describe the results of a longitudinal study
developed in Canada aimed at understanding how a network of
healthcare facilities set to mobilize the knowledge needed to manage
children with complex health needs. D'Andreta and Scarbrough try to
deepen these aspects by studying the reality of the National Institute of
Health Research, which has a series of centers in Great Britain with
branches in different areas of the country (Collaborations for Leadership


                                                                       149
150                                                         Tecnoscienza – 10 (1)

in Applied Health Research and Care). Following the contribution of the
theory of social networks, they identify the mediation (meeting between
different professional groups) and the closure (presence of small groups
in which it has been possible to incorporate available knowledge and
translate it into health care practices) as the key elements of this dynamic.
    The fourth and last theme addressed by the book aims to explore the
physical spaces that take a part in the mobilization of knowledge. This
last part is introduced by Nicolini and colleagues, discussing the difficulty
that innovations often have in propagating in the organizational fields.
The accounts from the research field describe how patient safety has been
affected by the raising anxiety about the dangers and the reassuring about
the appropriateness of the choices adopted. The section ends with the
contribution of Robertson and Swan with an exploration of health inno-
vation in the commercial field. This chapter uses a case study that is ap-
proached longitudinally to examine how a drug is developed through a
complex network work process that draws on specific knowledge mobili-
zation practices.
    Drawing mainly from the tradition of practice-based approach, the
collection of essays provides a multifaceted perspective at how knowledge
is mobilized in healthcare offering a clear illustration of the impossibility
to reduce it to a simplistic linear transfer from policymakers or managers
down the branches of organizations. Rather, the empirical cases illustrate
how different actors have agency and how policies, institutional condi-
tions, organizational forms, capabilities, and situated practices are all part
and contribute to shape the complex ecology in which knowledge mobili-
zation occurs.
    The richness and variety of points of view offer the readers a perspec-
tive whose relevance cannot be limited to healthcare and which can be
fruitfully applied to other organizational domains in which knowledge is
produced and mobilized. A limit of the book is, in fact, a scant attention
for the role of technologies in mobilizing knowledge in healthcare (with
the exception for the chapter of Oborn and colleagues) or, maybe, to
their role in limiting such mobilization. While exhaustiveness was not the
purpose of the book, it is worth noting that leaving technologies and the
knowledge embedded out of the picture is problematic. Indeed, Evidence
Based Medicine goes hand in hand with the design and adoption of diag-
nostic and therapeutic technologies (not to mention ICT implemented to
foster coordination of different actors across time and space) and such
technologies, far from being neutral tools, are inscribed with programs of
actions, visions, and preferences dictated by designers, vendors, and poli-
cymakers. The analysis of such domains would be important both prag-
matically and, most of all, theoretically. It would be interesting to put to
the test the overall approach developed in the book extending the ecolo-
gy of knowledge mobilization to include the technology companies and
their products. But this would require a book in its own right.


150
