Scaling the castle walls: the affective, relational and attentional labour of innovation in the public sector

Official URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14759551.2026.2710710

This paper explores the situated experience of innovation by managers in the UK National Health Service. We develop the concept of expressive production to theorise the agency enacted by actors who must innovate within systems that simultaneously demand and resist innovation. The concept is grounded in a longitudinal qualitative study of 23 middle and senior managers leading innovation projects, read through Franz Kafka’s The Castle as a sensitising text. We propose that expressive production operates through three modes of labour: (1) affective labour, through which managers regulate disappointment and cynicism, to sustain workable purpose when institutional support proves hollow; (2) relational labour, through which they cultivate networks to create pathways through bureaucratic opacity; and (3) attentional labour, through which they protect cognitive and temporal space against the pull of operational busyness. We contribute to scholarship on inhabited institutions and public sector innovation by foregrounding the maintenance of the self within bureaucratic constraint.