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This article explores the lived experience of change drivers involved in a whole-hospital re-engineering programme. As these drivers were not a select management group, but included staff from all organization levels, this illustrates a `dispersed responsibility' model of change implementation. Other research suggests that many public and private sector organizations may similarly be blurring demarcations between change `drivers' and `driven'. The findings from this study indicate that, despite the pressures and unpredictabilities of strategic change, there can be significant personal development, and career benefit, for those in driving roles. Human resource management issues concerning the appointment, support, career progression and retention of change drivers may thus become critical.

The first aim of this paper is to bring empirical evidence from an atypical organizational setting to the debate surrounding the currency of business process re‐engineering, which some commentators have dismissed as a damaging "fad". The second aim is to suggest how the process orientation advocated by re‐engineering can facilitate a creative visualization of organizational process and a participative approach to redesign. The paper is based on the experience of an acute teaching hospital seeking to reduce patient delays affecting the work of the operating theatres department. The project began towards the end of 1994, was overseen by a hospital steering committee, was conducted by a small internal project team (with researcher as member), and was based initially on a process mapping exercise. The elective surgical in‐patient process (one of the hospital's "core processes"), from referral to discharge, was mapped using the knowledge of project team members, interview and survey data from 39 respondents, informal discussions with over 50 other hospital staff, and from a photo‐documentation and photo‐elicitation procedure. Interviews, survey questionnaires, informal discussion and the photo‐elicitation sessions were also used to develop a wide series of recommendations from staff with respect to redesigning the patient process and reducing theatre delays.

Using select practice variables from Rothman's typology of models of community organization, this case study of the Massachusetts Community-Based Public Health Consortium analyses potential sources of conflict in collaborations between academic institutions and community coalitions. Based on different socialization experiences and organizational expectations, the goals, assumptions, basic change strategies, salient practitioner roles, conceptions of the client population, and client roles of the respective organizations were found to differ between these two partners and to be a source of chronic, unproductive tensions in consortium deliberations. The article concludes with recommendations for facilitating the development of more mutually trustworthy academic-community linkages to achieve public health promotion goals. These recommendations include (1) developing a greater awareness of the respective kinds of assumptions academic and community partners are likely to bring into new partnerships and (2) developing a more highly integrated model of community-based public health that capitalizes on the strengths of both the social planning and locality development approaches.

The results of an exploratory study of the reasons and motivations young adolescents from different social backgrounds become involved with drugs are presented. The results are based on interviews with ninety-five eighth-grade students, roughly equally divided between white, middle-class students and black, low-income students. The analysis identifies three themes upon which students from these different backgrounds may be differentiated with respect to their decision-making processes about illegal drug use: different motivations; different experiences and feelings about various institutions in our society; and different attitudes regarding the efficacy of social norms. The implications of these findings for future drug prevention program efforts are discussed.

The article reviews three cycles of drug use that have appeared in American history since the founding of our nation. Periods of greatly expanded drug use have followed each of our major national crises: the American Revolution, the Civil War and the Sixties. It is argued that drug use during these periods came to symbolize an independent, antinomial character ideal. After two to three decades of extreme proliferation, each of these periods has then been followed by a period in which drug use has been condemned and abstinence proffered as an exemplary character ideal. During these periods, drug use symbolized the excesses of individualism and the neglect of the commonweal. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of this analysis for the current period.

"Most researchers in organization and management studies stick to two or three traditional research methods like surveys and interviews. Sticking with the familiar is seen as a safe bet, and innovation is discouraged by academic incentives and rewards. But research participants are now suffering from 'survey fatigue', and using the same old methods runs the risk of generating the same old findings. This book describes twelve unconventional methodologies in organization and management research. These include unconventional research settings and data sources, unconventional research designs and data collection methods, unconventional analytic approaches, and designs and methods that exploit new technology developments. The aim is to encourage dialogue and experimentation with regard to the development of innovative, unconventional approaches to organization and management research. Several commentators have criticized the way in which research methods have become more formulaic, and have argued for greater diversity in research approaches. The methodological perspective that the we adopt shapes our interpretation of the information that we gather. Different methods generate different kinds of information, leading to different ways of understanding the phenomena that we are investigating. Our methods influence our styles of theorizing, ways of thinking and reasoning, and forms of writing and reporting research. This book will be of value to academic researchers in organization and management studies, Doctoral candidates, and Masters students on MBA and similar programmes."--

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- Foreword -- Acknowledgements -- Part 1 Back to the future -- 1 Buried in the 1970s -- To work smarter -- Early work design theory and practice -- Tavistock and socio-technical systems -- Herzberg, Hackman, and job enrichment -- 2 Surfaced in the 1980s -- The new strategic imperatives... -- ...require new work organization strategies -- The roots of high performance -- 3 Managing change -- The nature of the process: the two stories -- The pursuit of 'excellence' -- Part 2 The Digital experience -- 4 Digital's achievement culture -- Digital Equipment Corporation -- The values -- The values in practice -- 5 Stuffing modules -- The 'front to back' philosophy -- The modules manufacturing process -- 6 Competitive organizational design -- Management objectives -- Product and organizational design change -- 7 Pain and rewards -- The education programme -- The pain of change -- Progress review -- 8 Transient structures -- Product focus -- In and out of the business -- 9 The high performance experience -- Managers in pain -- Builders in autonomous groups -- Training and rewards -- Part 3 The wider relevance -- 10 The consequences -- Three years on - the follow up -- The new management role -- The business implications -- 11 Large scale organizational change -- Managing the process -- The perpetual transition management model -- 12 The management lessons -- Theory and practice - guidelines -- In praise of the multinational? -- Appendix: Research methods -- Bibliography -- Index

The field of organizational research displays three trends: widening boundaries, a multiparadigmatic profile, and methodological inventiveness. Choice of research methods, shaped by aims, epistemological concerns, and norms of practice, is thus also influenced by organizational, historical, political, ethical, evidential, and personal factors, typically treated as problems to be overcome. This article argues that those factors constitute a system of inevitable influences and that this contextualization of methods choice has three implications. First, it is difficult to argue that methods choice depends exclusively on links to research aims; choice involves a more complex, interdependent set of considerations. Second, it is difficult to view method as merely a technique for snapping reality into focus; choices of method frame the data windows through which phenomena are observed, influencing interpretative schemas and theoretical development. Third, research competence thus involves addressing coherently the organizational, historical, political, ethical, evidential, and personal factors relevant to an investigation.