Patient engagement has gained increasing prominence within academic literatures and policy discourse. With limited developments in practice, most extant academic contributions are conceptual, with initiatives in the National Health Service (NHS) concentrating at macro- rather than at...

The activities of misbehaving customers represent a significant problem for organizations across diverse sectors and industries. Customer misbehavior signifies behavior within the exchange setting that deliberately violates the generally accepted norms of conduct in such situations. The core aim...

A central doctrine of NPM requires the adoption of commercial management techniques to address the espoused goals of saving money and improving collaboration and service co-ordination. This article examines the evidence base for NPM mergers and uses study data to explain how two ingrained...

This Special Issue of Social Science & Medicine investigates the potential for positive inter-disciplinary interaction, a ‘generative dance’, between organization studies (OS), and two of the journal’s traditional disciplinary foundations: health policy and medical sociology. This is both...

This paper combines resources from the organization studies and sociology literatures to advance understanding of institutional change processes in healthcare that emerge from the professionalization projects of occupations. Conceptually, we introduce a model that combines the ‘archetype’...

As national health systems pursue the common goals of containing expenditure growth and improving quality, many have sought to replace autonomous modes (systems) of physician control that rely on initial professional training and subsequent peer review. A common approach has involved extending...

This article introduces the qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) method, provides a detailed description of an early application in US public management research and draws lessons from the experience. In methodological terms, we show that QCA requires coding decisions that influence outcomes...