Edinburgh Napier University

  This thesis investigates the process of adoption of management innovation in an organisational setting. It is based on primary research that explores and discusses in depth the introduction of a Knowledge Management programme (labelled ‘Knowledge Working’) within a distributed public sector agency in Scotland. The author was an employee of the organisation for a period of six years between the period 1999 and 2008. She latterly held the role of Knowledge Analyst and was a member of a task force recruited to implement Knowledge Working within the organisation.
The primary research that this work addresses is: What is the process of adoption of a management innovation in an organisational setting? A qualitative case study strategy generates an account of the process of adoption through three phases (initiation; implementation; and outcomes), the episodes within each phase, and decision-making across all phases. Qualitative material covering a longitudinal timeframe (1995-2008) were collected for data analysis. These derived from electronic sources and participant observations assigned to an adoption timeline. The coding of the data facilitated the identification of phases and episodes of the management innovation under scrutiny. These were then analysed with reference to the extant literature.
The study makes four contributions to knowledge. Three interrelated models (a model of decision-making; a combined adoption-decision-model; and a task force adoption-decision model) are theoretically significant because, to date, no attempt has been made: (1) to model decision-making for the process of adoption of management innovation (in general), or Knowledge Management; (2) to combine two of Rogers’ (2003) separate models (an innovation-adoption model and an innovation-decision model); and (3) to model decisions to consider when adopting task forces (in general), and those for implementing Knowledge Management.