Purpose – This paper has two purposes: one is to analyse how the policy of freedom of choice emerged and was formed in the Swedish health care discourse; the second is related to how free choice influences the discourse in health care and how subjects are formed within the field, i.e. what the...

Purpose – In the last five years more and more scholars have drawn on insights from the complexity sciences as a way of understanding the process of managing and organising in the NHS differently. This paper aims to describe working methods derived from the theory of complex responsive...

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to critique extant nursing research on nursing practice environments by juxtaposing it with critical sociological perspectives on nurses' work and to propose an alternative paradigm for future research based on these perspectives....

Purpose – Implementing information and communication technologies (ICT) is often mentioned as a strategy that can foster public involvement and responsibility in health. The purpose of this paper is to provide a better understanding of the possibilities and issues afforded by the social uses...

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the attitudes of managers and employees to high performance work practices (HPWS) in a medium sized rural Australian hospital. Design/methodology/approach – The study consists of two stages. Stage one involved a qualitative investigation consisting of...

Purpose – The Scottish Parliament has recently formed Community Health Partnerships (CHPs), in which health and social care providers come together within a unified organisational framework. This paper aims to assess the extent to which employees identify with their profession and whether...

Purpose – This paper aims to explore hospital consultants' social identification, in terms of perceptions of their position in society, the salient targets for their social identification and how this appears to influence their perceptions of management activities and change....

Purpose – The paper aims to analyse how the medical profession, the pro‐competition organisation, and the rural community have responded to the rural doctor shortage with reference to international medical graduates (IMGs) as reported in Australian newspapers. Design/methodology/approach –...

Purpose – This paper's aim is to identify existing and developing new concepts of organization, management, and leadership at a large European university hospital; and to evaluate whether mixed qualitative‐quantitative methods with both internal and external input can provide helpful views...

Purpose – The aims is to consider the political and ethical challenges involved in conducting ethnographic managerial/organisational behaviour research within the highly regulated health and social care context, in light of the emergence of more stringent “ethical approval” policies and...