BEYOND BEST PRACTICES: NARRATIVES OF TECHNOSTRESS IN ITALIAN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

The study of technostress within the Italian public administration invites a shift from the reassuring logic of best practices toward a more critical exploration of organizational errors and drifts that emerge during digitalization processes. Its goal is to uncover the shadow zones of public innovation—those spaces where technology, far from being a neutral tool, becomes an organizational actor capable of generating tension, misalignment, and forms of professional strain. The research is based on a narrative methodology and on in-depth interviews with administrative staff working across multiple public bodies and levels of government. This qualitative approach makes it possible to collect stories, experiences, and representations that reveal the organizational mechanisms underlying technostress. Thematic analysis of the data identified several recurring errors: viewing technology as a purely technical support rather than a social factor; enforcing digital systems through top-down decisions; neglecting data management and governance; relying on non-scalable pilot projects; and underestimating both training needs and issues of equity in access to digital tools. These patterns are synthesized into a “reverse toolbox”—a critical repertoire of bad practices that serves as both a theoretical framework and a practical guide for scholars and public managers. The reverse toolbox is not intended as a prescriptive instrument, but rather as a reflective one, designed to reframe error as a valuable source of organizational learning. In this sense, the study proposes to view error narratives not as evidence of failure but as cognitive and symbolic resources that can help public organizations design more conscious, human-centered, and sustainable innovation processes over time.