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The purpose of this paper is twofold: to understand how and why employee attitudes to change might change over time; and to demonstrate what type of research might best capture this change.

The paper brings together three studies of the same organization, conducted at different times by the same researchers.

Employee attitudes to change in the three episodes are portrayed in terms of the assumptions that seem to underpin them. The first episode is characterized by a challenge to the basic assumptions employees have about their work; the second, by a fragmentation of assumptions according to sub-group; and the third, by the confirmation of a new set of assumptions about what work involves.

The paper concludes that fieldwork of a longitudinal nature is something quite rare, and its incorporation into research design needs to move beyond dealing with it through an uneasy combination of retrospection and extended organizational exposure.

The paper provides a rare and valuable account of how employee attitudes to change might change over time. The research design on which it is based, though fortuitous in nature, overcomes a number of the weaknesses of more conventional studies in this area.

The purpose of this paper is to examine race, gender and language concordance in terms of importance to primary care.

The 2003 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Household Component (MEPS) was used. Four distinguishing primary care attributes and selected measures were operationalized primarily from a sample subset that identified a usual source of care (USC): accessibility to USC; interface between primary care and specialist services; treatment decisions; and preventive services received from the USC. Bivariate and multivariate results are reported.

Adjusting for covariates, the following items remained statistically significant: race – choosing primary care physician as USC, USC having office hours, and going to USC for new health problems; gender – choosing primary care physician as USC and USC having office hours; and language – lack of difficulty contacting the USC after hours. However, these items appear to be isolated cases rather than indicators that concordance plays a key role in determining primary care quality. Language barriers/communication issues are the only areas where improvement appears warranted.

While the study has strong accessibility and interpersonal relationship measures, service coordination and comprehensiveness indicators are limited. The analyses' cross‐sectional nature also poses a problem in drawing causal relationships and conclusive findings. Finally, sample size limitations preclude stratified analyses across racial/ethnic groups, an important consideration as the relationships between concordance and quality may vary across groups.

This study indicates that more research is needed in this area to determine future resource allocation and policy direction.

The unique contribution of the study is to suggest that race and gender concordance may not accurately predict primary health care quality.

Under growing public scrutiny of their behaviour, the vast majority of multinational enterprises (MNEs) have been undertaking significant investments through corporate social responsibility (CSR) in order to close legitimacy gaps. The purpose of this paper is to provide a descriptive account of the nature and scope of MNEs’ CSR programmes that have sport at their core. More specifically, the present study addresses the following questions. First, how do Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 firms utilise sport as part of their CSR agendas? Second, how do different industries have different approaches to CSR through sport? And third, can the types of CSR through sport be classified?

Centred on legitimacy theory and exploratory in nature, the study employed a content analysis method, and examined three types of document from each of the FTSE100 firms, namely, annual reports, annual reviews and CSR reports over the ten-year period from 2003 to 2012. In total, 1,473 documents were content analysed, thereby offering a sound representation of CSR disclosure of the FTSE100.

From the analysis, three main streams emerged: “Philanthropy”, “Sponsorships” and “Personnel engagement” with the first showing the smallest growth compared with the other main streams. Findings show the general rise in CSR through sport, thereby demonstrating that the corporate world has practically acknowledged that the sporting context is a powerful vehicle for the employment of CSR.

Previous empirical studies have sought to investigate CSR through sport, yet they have generally suffered from sampling limitations which have, in turn, rendered the drawing of reliable conclusions problematic. Particularly, the lack of an explicit focus on longitudinality is a typical limitation, meaning that no conclusions can be made regarding the trend. The study outlined in this paper offers the most comprehensive longitudinal study of CSR through sport to date, and thus contributes to the increasing volume of literature that examines the application of CSR in relation to the sport sector.

The purpose of this paper is to explore what conversation analysis has to offer when analysing a series of life story interviews aiming to capture how reading and texts are used in a rural working-class man’s identity construction.

The conversation analysis methodology with its explicit focus on embodied social action, activity and conduct in interaction is integrated with a life story approach when analysing and describing the identity constructing processes that take place in life story interview settings.

Through a close and detailed analysis of the interaction between interviewer and interviewee, and by focusing and highlighting the phenomena and identities that are oriented to in the face-to-face interaction here and now (and in relation to there and then), descriptions of the complex and dynamic identity constructing processes that are set into play in the life story interview are possible.

It is argued that the approach has a lot to offer when approaching life story data, and thus is a method that can increase the transparency in life story interview research.

The paper explores the intersection of what is often seen as diametrically opposed forms of analysis: conversation analysis and narrative inquiry.

Megaprojects are symbolic milestones of human history. Most megaprojects are one-of-a-kind endeavors to which traditional project management principles are neither applicable nor suitable, rendering the holistic study of megaprojects especially difficult. There is no systemic framework that can help systematically assess and guide megaprojects and megaproject research. In the absence of such a framework there is a significant risk of bias in planning the projects and the topics researched. The purpose of this paper is to present an ontological framework of megaprojects and discuss how it can help analyze individual megaprojects and synthesize the corpus of megaproject research.

An ontology framework of megaproject is developed by deconstructing the symbolism and purpose of megaprojects into respective dimensions and their categories. The ontological framework is then used to map the extent literature on megaproject to identify the dominant themes and gaps in the state-of-the-research.

The megaproject research has predominantly focused on select stakeholders (builders, governments, and communities), translation stages (implementation and conceptualization), and sublime (mostly economic). Other aspects of megaprojects have received little or no attention.

The paper presents an ontological framework to holistically capture the symbolism and sublime of megaprojects. The framework is complete, expansive, and grounded, yet simple, parsimonious, and innovative. It is a tool for decision makers more than a formal ontology readable by machines.

The purpose of this paper is to look at the role relational coordination might play in understanding the relationship between high-performance work systems (HPWS) and organizational performance.

Research was conducted in a large financial services provider in Pakistan. Across 120 branches of the bank, data on relational coordination and on the practices making up HPWS were obtained from employees by means of a questionnaire survey. Data on branch-level performance were obtained independently of this, from the bank itself.

Analysis shows relational coordination to be a mediating variable between HPWS and branch performance. Relational coordination is also a mediating variable for each of the three component parts of HPWS: ability-enhancing, motivation-enhancing and opportunity-enhancing HR practices.

These results have important implications from two points of view. From the point of view of relational coordination, they show how the concept might apply in a previously under-researched sector, and also how relational coordination might act as a mediator for HR practices other than those aimed directly at enhancing employee opportunities. Breaking down HPWS into its component parts suggests that individual employee ability and motivation might also play a role.

This suggests that the ability-motivation-opportunity model needs to place greater emphasis on opportunity, and also that more account needs to be taken of the structural aspect of work – in particular, the degree of interdependence.

This paper argues that Bruno Latour’s work on translation provides an alternative to dominant anthropocentric, individualistic and managerial approaches in career studies by considering careers as precarious effects of networks instead of the implicit assumption of individual strategic career actors in extant career research paradigms.

The article first compares the three main current approaches to studying careers – structural functionalist, interpretivist and critical – illustrated by three exemplary empirical studies. Subsequently, three concepts from the sociology of translation that are relevant for the study of careers are introduced: career making as translating interests, careers as effects of networks and career action as dislocated and overtaken. Taken together, these three concepts allow us to conceive of careers as practices performed by human and nonhuman actors. Finally, an example from an ethnographic case study in the field of contemporary art illustrates how a Latourian approach can be used.

Latour’s work on translation provides conceptual and methodological tools to investigate career processes and practices in an era of unpredictability.

The paper introduces Bruno Latour’s work on translation to the study of careers.

The adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) and digitization of health data over the past decade is ushering in the next generation of digital health tools that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to improve varied aspects of health system performance. The decade ahead is therefore shaping up to be one in which digital health becomes even more at the forefront of health care delivery – demanding the time, attention, and resources of health care leaders and frontline staff, and becoming inextricably linked with all dimensions of health care delivery. In this chapter, we look back and look ahead. There are substantive lessons learned from the first era of large-scale adoption of enterprise EHRs and ongoing challenges that organizations are wrestling with – particularly related to the tension between standardization and flexibility/customization of EHR systems and the processes they support. Managing this tension during efforts to implement and optimize enterprise systems is perhaps the core challenge of the past decade, and one that has impeded consistent realization of value from initial EHR investments. We describe these challenges, how they manifest, and organizational strategies to address them, with a specific focus on alignment with broader value-based care transformation. We then look ahead to the AI wave – the massive number of applications of AI to health care delivery, the expected benefits, the risks and challenges, and approaches that health systems can consider to realize the benefits while avoiding the risks.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the technological change under development linked to the convergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and digital transformation (DT) from the perspective of a scientific mapping in a context marked by the occurrence of an unexpected event that accelerated this process such as the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and its variants.

The study was developed under the longitudinal scientific mapping approach and considered the period 1990–2021 using as a basis the descriptors DT and IoT. The steps followed were identification and selection of keywords; design and application of an algorithm to identify these selected keywords in titles, abstracts and keywords using terms in Web of Science (WoS) to contrast them; and performing a data processing based on the journals in the Journal Citation Report during 2022. The longitudinal study uses scientific mapping to analyze the evolution of the scientific literature that seeks to understand the acceleration in the integration of technology and its impact on the human factor, processes and organizational culture.

This study showed that the technologies converging around IoT form the basis of the main DT processes being experienced on a global scale; furthermore, it was shown that the pandemic accelerated the convergence and application of new technologies to support the major changes required for a world with new needs. Finally, China and the USA differ significantly in the production of scientific knowledge with respect to the first eight followers.

The knowledge gap addressed by this study is to identify the production of scientific knowledge related to IoT and its impact on DT processes at the scale of individuals, organizations and the new way of delivering value to society. This knowledge about researchers, institutions, countries and the derivation is multiple indicators allows improving decision-making at multiple scales on these issues.