Purpose – Mainstream health economics labours under a misleading understanding of the nature of the topic area and suffers from a concomitant poverty of thinking about theory and method. The purpose here is to explore this critical position and argue that health economics should aspire to...

Purpose – This paper seeks to explore a critique of the limitations of mainstream leadership research and publications and offers a critical management analysis through drawing on a feminist reading of leadership in organizations. Design/methodology/approach – There has recently been...

Purpose – To explore the issues surrounding the falling rates of MMR vaccination following the publication of a controversial study by Wakefield et al. Design/methodology/approach – In order to take a fresh look at the MMR crisis, the Greek tragedy, Antigone , was used as a “strong plot”...

Purpose – It is commonplace to talk of the UK's National Health Service (NHS) as having its inception in 1948 in an Act of Parliament which brought together many hundreds of widely dispersed organisations into one, new organisation, “the” NHS. This paper aims to challenge the concept of...

Purpose – To introduce the articles in this special issue, discussing emotion in the in health‐care organisations. Design/methodology/approach – Discusses such topics as what makes health care different, editorial perspectives, how health care has explored emotion so far, and the impact of...

Purpose – To describe the meaning of emotion. Design/methodology/approach – Describes how emotion has recently become a popular concept for discussion, but it is not often recognised that human beings are, in essence, meaning‐creating creatures and that emotion is one of the forms of...

Purpose – Workers in institutions that deal with loss and bereavement need to be aware of factors that can negatively influence their capability to work effectively. This paper aims to outline the risk factors and details some approaches to remedying the situation. Design/methodology/approach...

Purpose – This paper aims to evaluate the literature on emotional labour in the health‐care sector and the benefits and costs of such performance for both the carer and the patient. The aim is to develop a new health care model of emotional labour that has implications for health‐care...

Purpose – To examine the literature on employee morale and to construct a model of this area pertaining to nurses. This framework seeks to present morale in a holistic manner, illustrating the causal factors that influence nursing morale, the changes that occur in morale when these input...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand the centrality of emotion, and how that emotion both created and contributed to meaning, in the communication of health professionals who worked in a regional pilot program for cancer screening. Design/methodology/approach – As the third...