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This paper aims to further our understanding of policy–practice gaps in organizations from an organizational learning perspective. The authors conceptualize and analyze policy–practice gaps in terms of what they label the dual challenge of organizational learning, i.e. the organizational tasks of both adapting ongoing practices to prescribed policy demands and adapting the policy itself to the needs of practice. Specifically, the authors address how this dual challenge can be understood in terms of organizational learning and how an organization can be managed to successfully resolve the dual learning challenge and, thereby, bridge policy–practice gaps in organizations.

This paper draws on existing literature to explore the gap between policy and practice. Through a synthesis of theories and an illustrative practical example, this paper highlights key conceptual underpinnings.

In the analysis of the dual challenge of organizational learning, this study provides a conceptual framework that emphasizes the important role of tensions and contradictions between policy and practice and their role as drivers of organizational learning. To bridge policy–practice gaps in organizations, this paper proposes five key principles that aim to resolve the dual challenge and accommodate both deployment and discovery in organizations.

Because this is a conceptual study, empirical research is called for to explore further and test the findings and conclusions of the study. Several avenues of possible future research are proposed.

This paper primarily contributes by introducing and elaborating on a conceptual framework that offers novel perspectives on the dual challenges of facilitating both discovery and deployment processes within organizations.

This paper aims to investigate the literacy corpus regarding the potential of big data to improve public decision-making processes and direct these processes toward the creation of public value. This paper presents a map of current knowledge in a sample of selected articles and explores the intersecting points between data from the private sector and the public dimension in relation to benefits for society.

A bibliometric analysis was performed to provide a retrospective review of published content in the past decade in the field of big data for the public interest. This paper describes citation patterns, key topics and publication trends.

The findings indicate a propensity in the current literature to deal with the issue of data value creation in the private dimension (data as input to improve business performance or customer relations). Research on data for the public good has so far been underestimated. Evidence shows that big data value creation is closely associated with a collective process in which multiple levels of interaction and data sharing develop between both private and public actors in data ecosystems that pose new challenges for accountability and legitimation processes.

The bibliometric method focuses on academic papers. This paper does not include conference proceedings, books or book chapters. Consequently, a part of the existing literature was excluded from the investigation and further empirical research is required to validate some of the proposed theoretical assumptions.

Although this paper presents the main contents of previous studies, it highlights the need to systematize data-driven private practices for public purposes. This paper offers insights to better understand these processes from a public management perspective.

The paper discusses how the management of a sports and fashion company, which we refer to as NULMA, successfully applied the neo/normative control technology “karma organisation” and gained employee engagement. Whereas other studies have documented employee resistance to organisational cultures when used for managerial control, our case demonstrates resistance to management practices that employees find inconsistent with the dominant karma culture.

The study is based on a six-year longitudinal organisational at-home ethnography conducted by one of the authors using methods of both participant and non-participant observation, semi-structured interviews and collaborative production of secondary data in the case organisation.

While our research shows that management can successfully apply neo/normative control which employees accept and support, we further show that employees mobilise the same values to resist management when it fails to deliver on the commitments and promises of the organisational culture.

The study contributes to the literature on organisational culture and, in particular, neo/normative control by theorising employee resistance as being by “accident”, by which we mean an inherent negative potentiality co-invented and released by managers establishing a “karma organisation”. Our theorising culminates in a discussion of the study’s implications for research and practice.