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Reengineering has rapidly become the business buzzword of the early 1990s. This examination of the reengineering phenomenon sets out to consider the extent to which it is a new model for organizational change and offers some suggestions as to why it appears to have become so popular. It disputes some claims to novelty and internal coherence and argues that explanations for reengineering's popularity might be sought through an externalist rather than an internalist account. That is, that its popularity might best be explained not by considering the uniqueness or 'inherent' rationality of the ideas involved, an 'internalist' account, but rather through the ways in which the purveyors of reengineering manage, in and through their accounts, to construct a series of sympathetic 'resonances' or compatibilities, an 'externalist' account. These are construed to exist between their ideas and popular opinion, or zeitgeist, and also between the novelty of the ideas and the cultural antecedents.

While gender-related inequalities at work remain common, examples of their elimination, though rare, do exist. This paper provides an empirical examination of the acquisition of equal pay by women in the Post Office between 1870 and 1961. Using the dual theoretical axes of strategic action and structural constraint, it focuses upon the collective action of social groups, and the structural constraints within which they acted. Arguing that structure and action cannot be isolated from each other except for heuristic purposes, it concludes that men were the primary inhibitors of equal pay, and politically buttressed market forces its crucial promoter.

This book offers a new insight into leadership in the public sector: It describes public leadership as a form of collective leadership in which leaders from a range of public, private and voluntary organisations share a common aim in improving the life of communities. It examines the current focus on public service reform and highlights the impact that performance targets have had on leadership. The importance of the role of the individual leader is acknowledged, but it argues that this role is not to provide the answers but to ask intelligent questions in tackling wicked issues that undermine well being. The book explores the experience of reform across the sector and sets some tough challenges for government, public institutions and their leaders. It will be of benefit to all who are interested in what the future holds for public services and prompts a different way of thinking about leadership.

Whereas many constructivist and feminist approaches to the social study of technology share an antipathy to technological tietenninism, they offer an insufficiently radical critique of technolagy. Three main problems in "anti-essentialist" critiques of techno logical determinism are identified, all of which mean that such critiques remain committed to a form of essentialism. These characteristics recur in many recent feminist arguments about technology, illustrated by the example of reproductive technologies. To overcome weaknesses in political radicalism based on anti-essentialism, it is necessary to move to a "past-essentialist" approach. The unwillingness to do so is shown to be based on unfounded objections to "excessive" relativism.

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to consider a challenge to an occupational jurisdiction in the British police. Historically, street cops have defended the importance of operational credibility as a way of sustaining the value of experience, and inhibiting attempts to introduce external leaders. This has generated a particular form of policing and leadership that is deemed by the British Government as inadequate to face the problems of the next decade.


Design/methodology/approach
The project used the High Potential Development Scheme of the British police to assess the value of operational credibility and the possibilities of radical cultural change. Data are drawn from participants on the program, from those who failed to get onto the program, and from officers who have risen through the ranks without access to a fast-track scheme.


Findings
Most organizational changes fail in their own terms, often because of cultural resistance. However, if we change our metaphors of culture from natural to human constructions it may be possible to focus on the key point of the culture: the lodestone that glues it together. Operational credibility may be such a cultural lodestone and undermining it offers the opportunity for rapid and radical change.


Research limitations/implications
The scheme itself has had limited numbers and the research was limited to a small proportion of the different categories outlined above.


Practical implications
If we change our metaphors for culture and cultural change – from natural to constructed metaphors – (icebergs and webs to buildings), it may be possible to consider a much more radical approach to organizational change.


Originality/value
Most assessments of cultural change focus on those charged with enacting the change and explain failure through recourse to natural metaphors of change. This paper challenges the convention that cultural change can only ever be achieved, if at all, through years of effort.

This paper revisits Meindl et al's (1985) 'romance of leadership' thesis and extends these ideas in a number of inter-related ways. First, it argues that the thesis has sometimes been neglected and/or misinterpreted in subsequent studies. Second, the paper suggests that romanticism is a much broader and more historically rich term with wider implications for leadership studies than originally proposed. Arguing that romanticism stretches beyond leader attribution, we connect leadership theory to a more enduring and naturalistic tradition of romantic thought that has survived and evolved since the mid-18thcentury. Third, the paper demonstrates the contemporary relevance of the romanticism critique. It reveals how the study of leadership continues to be characterized by romanticizing tendencies in many of its most influential theories, illustrating this argument with reference to spiritual and authentic leadership theories, which only recognize positive engagement with leaders. Equally, the paper suggests that romanticism can shape conceptions not only of leaders, but also of followers, their agency and their (potential for) resistance. We conclude by discussing future possible research directions for the romanticism critique that extend well beyond its original focus on leader attribution to inform a broader critical approach to leadership studies.