Infrastructuring for co-production: a learning perspective on health promoting services among senior citizens

This chapter examines organisational learning that took place in a Danish case about co-production of rehabilitation activities in the ‘Lung Network’, a network involving a municipality employee, a digital communication platform, and a group of senior citizens, who live with various lung conditions such as Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. Co-production is presently gaining a foothold in research as well as in practice and has become a key term in the Danish public sector. Currently, initiatives have been undertaken to support local communities as means to realise healthcare policies. In these endeavours, co-production takes place at the intersection of professionals’ and citizens’ commitments. However, despite the increased interest in co-production opportunities for organisational learning in these processes they are sparsely accounted for in the literature. Drawing upon pragmatist theorizing on organisational learning, this study attempts to mitigate this lack. We examine tensions and processes of negotiation that arise from citizens’ and new technology’s participation in the municipality’s organisation of rehabilitation services. Inspired by the concept of infrastructuring, the analysis focuses on how sociomaterial re-arrangements are enacted and imagined in the case. The analysis shows how the potential temporal-spatial extension of the Lung Network, enabled by the platform, affects participants’ commitments to their joint practice in three respects:1) how activities in the Lung Network are organised; 2) the content of activities; and 3) the purpose of the Lung network. The chapter contributes by empirically showing how this extension in commitments creates tensions and uncertainties as the sociomaterial and technological conditions are negotiated, and argues that by virtue of these (creative) tensions, co-production processes pose a potential for organisational learning.