Assessing and Filling the Gap as a New Mode of Governance, Lessons from a Preliminary Study carried out in the Cosenza’s Public Prosecutors’ Office

In all European countries courts and public prosecutor offices have been undergoing a long and comprehensive process of reform, target several different components of their organization and management. This phenomenon can be explained as the outcome of two combined forces: an increase demand of justice and a pressure from the international and supranational institutions. Accordingly, innovation has become a major issue in the judicial sector. Despite the attention devoted to it, much less effort has been made to comprehend the mechanisms that make organizations innovative. To what extent is leadership important? How may different organizational cultures facilitate or create obstacles to innovation? And to what extent can innovation be implemented through a top down approach in a peculiar organization, such as a judicial office? This article tells the story of a case study on a public prosecutors’ office located in the South of Italy. The pilot study has been framed and conducted as both normative and empirical in its own nature. Moreover, it represents a case study with a certain number of policy effects, as it turned into a roadmap which was adopted by the judicial office to improve its own organization and human resource management. This is the first study carried out in Italy using such methods with the objective to: a) describe the implementation of organizational innovation (in this respect there had already been a study of the General Registry Office), b) map intra-organizational routines and inter-connections between administration and the General Registry Office and between the GRO and the criminal records Office etc; c) Identify skills to adapt and learn skills from daily routines and execution of specific tasks, as they are done in all public sectors.