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This paper looks at the current portrayal of emotion in healthcare as delivered within formal organisational settings, notably the UK National Health Service (NHS). Its purpose is to set out some examples of the problems and suggest new ways of conceptualising issues that will assist healthcare organisations in gaining a better understanding of the role of emotion and its impact, using appropriate examples. Developing understanding of the location of emotion and its differing constructions indicates that interdisciplinary and interpersonal boundaries differentiate interpretations of emotion, often for instrumental purpose as examples drawn particularly from the Public Inquiry into Paediatric Cardiology at Bristol Royal Infirmary (The Kennedy Report) demonstrate. The privileging of rationality over emotion as part of the dominant paradigm within the healthcare domain is shown to affect outcomes. However, the boundaries between organisations and individuals are changing, so are the location, access, technologies and timing of activities, and these are reconstructing healthcare organisation and the patient's experience of healthcare at both rational and emotional levels. It is suggested that in healthcare it is the patients’ journey through their lives (the macro context), as well as their individual encounters with the system at different times of need (the micro context), that iteratively constitute the construction of the emotional terrain. The conclusions drawn could have wider implications for the development of emotional understanding, across organisations that are subject to similar changes.

As reported in Volume 1 of Research on Emotions in Organizations (Ashkanasy, Zerbe, & Härtel, 2005), the chapters in this volume are drawn from the best contributions to the 2004 International Conference on Emotion and Organizational Life held at Birkbeck College, London, complemented by additional, invited chapters. (This biannual conference has come to be known as the “Emonet” conference, after the listserv of members.) Previous edited volumes (Ashkanasy, Härtel, & Zerbe, 2000; Ashkanasy, Zerbe, & Härtel, 2002; Härtel, Zerbe, & Ashkanasy, 2004) were published every two years following the Emonet conference. With the birth of this annual Elsevier series came the opportunity for greater focus in the theme of each volume, and for greater scope for invited contributions. This volume contains eight chapters selected from conference contributions for their quality, interest, and appropriateness to the theme of this volume, as well as four invited chapters. We again acknowledge in particular the assistance of the conference paper reviewers (see the appendix). In the year of publication of this volume the 2006 Emonet conference will be held in Atlanta, USA and will be followed by Volumes 3 and 4 of Research on Emotions in Organizations. Readers interested in learning more about the conferences or the Emonet list should check the Emonet website http://www.uq.edu.au/emonet/.

Céleste M. Brotheridge is a professor of organizational behaviour with the Départment d'organisation et ressources humaines in the École des sciences de la gestion at the Université du Québec à Montréal. She completed her PhD in organizational behavior and research methods at the University of Manitoba. Dr. Brotheridge publishes and conducts research primarily in the areas of burnout, emotions, and bullying in the workplace. She is the chair of the Organizational Behaviour Division of the Administrative Sciences Association of Canada and a member of the editorial boards of the International Journal of Stress Management and the Journal of Managerial Psychology.

Purpose – This chapter discusses the difference between a product strategy and a platform strategy, relying on examples from the history of Apple and Microsoft in personal computers and other devices as well as Sony and Japan Victor Corporation in videocassette recorders.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter begins with a review of how the term “platform” has been used in the management literature and defines an industry-wide platform (as compared to an in-house company product platform) as a foundation technology (or service) that brings multiple parties in a market together for a common purpose. An industry-wide platform can generate powerful network effects between the platform and complementary products and services that make the platform increasingly valuable. Apple, with the Macintosh computer, and Sony with the Betamax VCR as well as other products, such as the Walkman media player, are examples of firms that developed excellent products but followed a product-first strategy and ended up losing in these markets or becoming niche players. They paid relatively little attention to opening up their technology to outside firms and cultivating an ecosystem of partners. Apple changed in the early 2000s with the iPod and iTunes, and then the iPhone and iPad, and has risen from near bankruptcy to become an enormously valuable and profitable platform leader.

Findings – Historical examples suggest that, in a platform market, the winner is not the firm with the best product, but rather the firm with the best platform – that is, the foundation technology or service that is most open to outsiders and which stimulates development of the most compelling complements.

Originality/value – This result extends the literature's understanding of platform strategy.

Theories of platform strategy and adoption have been largely derived from studies of their application in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector. These platforms vary in openness, with the model of open source software providing the best-known exemplar for open platforms.

This exploratory field study examines the degree to which nine attributes of ICT platforms are applicable to open platforms in biotechnology. Using a combination of interview and secondary data, it identifies three patterns of such biotechnology platforms – IP commons, hackerspaces, and crowdsourced patient registries – and the degree to which these nine attributes apply. It shows the impact of ICT platforms and open source software on open source approaches to biotechnology, and how the latter are affected by the technical, legal, and institutional differences between information technology and biotechnology.

Instead of open source software platforms organized around modular interfaces, complements, ecosystems, and two-sided markets, this study instead suggests a model of open source knowledge platforms which benefits from economies of scale but not indirect network effects. From this, it discusses the generalizability of the ICT-derived models of open source platforms and offers suggestions for future research.