2016 Volume 15 Issue 9 Pages 469-488
Ferlie, Fitzgerald, Wood, and Hawkins (2005) focused on the health care organization as one of the professional organizations, and conducted research on 8 innovation cases. As a result, they found the reason why innovations cannot spread in a professional organization: there are social boundaries and cognitive boundaries between professionals and the community of practice that they have made. In addition, innovations sometimes cannot cross the boundaries. Ferlie et al. (2005) has strong influence on subsequent researches, though in fact there are issues which are yet to be explained or could be explained differently. These leads to further studies. Besides, although Ferlie et al. (2005) did very well in comparing cases while carrying out qualitative studies, there are still defective factors in their case study.
