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This study aims to contribute to an increased understanding of intra-organizational city brand resistance by identifying and discussing different types of counter-narratives emerging from the political and administrative arenas.

The empirical material consists of secondary data as well as six in-depth semi-structured interviews with Danish mayors and city managers in three different municipalities in Denmark.

Intra-organizational counter-narratives differ from inter-organizational counter-narratives but resemble a number of issues known from extra-organizational resistance. Still, significant differences are found within the political arena: lack of ownership, competition for resources and political conflicts. Lack of ownership, internal competition for resources and distrust of motives play an important role within the administrative arena. Mayors are aware of the needs for continued political support for branding projects but projects are nonetheless realized despite resistance if there is a political majority for it.

This study points to the implications of city brand resistance and counter-narratives emerging from the “inside” of the political and administrative arenas in the city, here defined as “intra-organizational counter-narratives”.

It is suggested that politicians and municipality staff should be systematically addressed as individual and unique audiences and considered as important as citizens in the brand process.

So far little attention has been paid to internal stakeholders within the municipal organization and their impact on the city branding process approached from a narrative perspective.

The article proposes three prerequisites to authentic leadership by school principals: self‐knowledge, a capacity for moral reasoning, and sensitivity to the orientations of others.

A conceptual framework, based on research on the valuation processes of school principals and their strategic responses to ethical dilemmas, is used as a practice grounded approach to describing authentic leadership and the acquisition of moral literacy by school leaders.

Four motivational bases for administrative decision making are described: self‐interest/personal preferences, rational consensus, rational consequences, and trans‐rational ethics/principles. The achievement of self‐knowledge, capacity and sensitivity to others can be best achieved in professional settings through strategies of personal reflective practice, and sustained dialogue on moral issues and the ethical dilemmas of educational practice.

Principals need the capacity to discriminate actual intentions, within themselves and among others. This is not moral relativism, nor is it value absolutism. It is critical thinking and moral literacy.

Several resources are provided as tools for principals and scholars to use in support of developing these capacities within themselves and amongst others.

Democratic leadership processes are desirable for schools not only because they reflect socially mandated ethical commitments to collective process. They can be professionally justified as a necessary approach to leading schools effectively in the increasingly culturally diverse communities and a world transformed by the effects of technology and the forces of globalization. Rational professional justifications for democratic leadership in schools include the nature of the school leadership role, the social contexts of the communities, as well as an ideological social mandate. A body of existing theory and research is used to illustrate that rational processes prevail as the primary influences on decision‐making by educational leaders. The appropriateness of rationalized democratic processes for schools is demonstrated by discussing the findings of recently completed research on school‐based interactions between school principals and parent advocates engaged in negotiating the educational needs of students with exceptionalities. Parent advocates were found to intentionally use democratic process to promote value confrontations and conflicts as a deliberate strategy aimed at transforming attitudes and practices in school administration specific to special education processes.

This paper seeks to explore critical factors that may obstruct or advance integration efforts initiated by the clinical management following a hospital merger. The aim is to increase the understanding of why clinical integration succeeds or fails.

The authors compare two cases of clinical integration efforts following the Karolinska University Hospital merger in Sweden. Each case represents two merged clinical departments of the same specialty from each hospital site. In total, 53 interviews were conducted with individuals representing various staff categories and documents were collected to check data consistency.

The study identifies three critical factors that seem to be instrumental for the process and outcome of integration efforts and these are clinical management's interpretation of the mandate; design of the management constellation; and approach to integration. Obstructive factors are: a sole focus on the formal assignment from the top; individual leadership; and the use of a classic, planned, top‐down management approach. Supportive factors are: paying attention to multiple stakeholders; shared leadership; and the use of an emergent, bottom‐up management approach within planned boundaries. These findings are basically consistent with the literature's prescriptions for managing professional organisations.

Managers need to understand that public healthcare organisations are based on competing institutional logics that need to be handled in a balanced way if clinical integration is to be achieved – especially the tension between managerialism and professionalism.

By focusing on the merger consequences for clinical units, this paper addresses an important gap in the healthcare merger literature.

The processual ordering branch of symbolic interaction has long recognized the importance of rhetoric and power to the social constitution of reality. However, little systematic effort has been devoted to probing their intertwined effects in the public policy arena.

The purpose of this paper is to employ the processual ordering perspective to examine the dramaturgical styles used in shaping public policy – expressed in terms of the “public administration” and “realpolitik” forms of rhetoric – among contending political factions as they negotiate mental health public policy. A latent content analysis of the minutes of key U.S. congressional debates, augmented with secondary archival material from the press is employed. It is concluded that both forms of rhetoric play a role in shaping public mental health policy and that both factions modify their rhetorical form as the debate progresses. Those modifications strengthen the position of one faction while weakening that of the other. Theoretical implications are discussed.

We did not wake up one day and decide to develop an edited book on charter and autonomous school leadership. It actually happened because we both seem to have these serendipitous moments in which random events come together. As educators working for the Division of Adult Career Education for Los Angeles Unified School District, we observed what we perceived as inequities of a monolithic, bureaucratic school district in its treatment of the education of our “at-risk” youth. We believed that there must be more authentic leadership providing improved educational outcomes for these students underserved by the current one size fits all system. In our minds, moving away from the classroom into the administrative arena seemed to make sense if we were to effect change in the current landscape. What better way to garner more authentic leadership than to become leaders ourselves? We decided to return to school to get our administrative credential and a masters in Educational Leadership. Little did we know this one seemingly small decision would have such amazing results.

Technology is increasingly shaping and changing business. The notion of change continues to flourish and is multinational in scale. Zane K. Quible's 7th edition of Administrative Office Management: An Introduction focuses on what office managers actually do on the job. Today, managers in companies are most concerned with effective means of assuring their survival. Quible, of Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, updated his book to include technological advances, which are changing every day. Executives and managers must keep up with technology in order to survive. The book is written in an easy‐to‐read style with illustrations and other aids throughout. Quible's intention is to introduce administrative office management functions as the process of planning, organizing, and controlling all the information‐related activities of an organization, as well as the function of leading or directing people to attain the objectives of that organization. His book emphasizes theoretical concepts involving the systems approach to the management of people, resources, and information and provides practical applications.

After reviewing the logic and basics of Environmental Conflict Resolution (ECR), this article analyzes the praise for and criticisms of ECR. This article acknowledges the initial successes in the 1970s and 1980s that led to a major period of expansion for ECR, and continues today, but argues that it must do a better job of proving itself. That is, proponents must conduct more rigorous assessments of its utility under different conditions and invest in data collection that goes far beyond present efforts. The article concludes by reviewing the challenges and opportunities facing ECR in the twenty-first century. Singled out for attention is the need for scholars and practitioners to understand ECR interventions as targeted at aggregate rather than dyadic relationships, as complex systems embedded in even larger complex systems, as time-extended phenomena, and as ripe for evaluation for their impact on substantive environmental outcomes.

This article considers the recent emphasis on the importance and value of citizen participation, involvement, and engagement in local government and how active participation extends to public budgeting. The inclusion of citizen participation in local government budget processes challenges the traditional budget discourse between managers and representatives. Active citizen participation provides valuable comments and insight as well as complexity and challenges to administrative processes. This article discusses the themes, opportunities, techniques and strategies developed in this symposium to expand citizen participation in public budgeting. Continued discussion and innovation in active citizen participation in budgeting is encouraged.