Hybridization as practice: clinical engagement with performance metrics and accounting technologies in the English NHS
Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal
ISSN: 0951-3574
Article publication date: 31 August 2021
Issue publication date: 9 March 2022
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to investigate the hybridization practices that medical managers engage with to promote accounting and performance measurement in the hybrid setting of healthcare. In doing so, the authors explore how medical managers enact and become practitioners of hybridity.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors adopt a practice lens to conceptualize hybridization as an emergent, situated practice and capture the micro-activities that medical managers engage with when they enact hybridity. The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with medical managers, business managers and coding professionals and collected documents at an English National Health Service (NHS) hospital over the course of five years.
Findings
The findings accentuate two emergent practices through which medical managers instill hybridity to individuals who are hesitant or resistant to hybridization. Medical managers engage in equivocalizing and de-stigmatizing practices to broaden the understandings, further diversify or reconcile the teleologies of clinicians in non-managerial roles. In doing so, the authors signal the merits of accounting in improving care outcomes and remove the stigma associated to clinical engagement with costs.
Originality/value
The study contributes to hybridization and practice theory literature via capturing how hybridity is enacted in practice in a healthcare setting. As medical managers engage with and promote accounting information and performance measurement technologies in their practice environment, they transcend professional boundaries and hybridize the professional spaces that surround them.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the National Institute for Health Research and the Health Services Research Centre for the financial support of the project, which enabled the authors to gather empirical data, and some of which are employed in this paper. The authors also wish to express their gratitude to Sue Llewellyn and Sven Modell for their insightful feedback on various drafts of the paper. The authors further benefited from the helpful comments of the participants, when earlier drafts were presented at the 9th APIRA conference in Auckland, New Zealand (2019) and the 42nd EAA Annual Congress in Paphos, Cyprus (2019). The views expressed remain, solely, those of the authors.
Citation
Begkos, C. and Antonopoulou, K. (2022), "Hybridization as practice: clinical engagement with performance metrics and accounting technologies in the English NHS", Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Vol. 35 No. 3, pp. 627-657. https://doi.org/10.1108/AAAJ-12-2019-4333
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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