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The purpose of this paper is to lay out how advanced practitioner development occurs in New Zealand primary health care settings. The paper specifically focuses on mechanisms occurring across policy creation and in practice leading to successful role development.

The authors applied a realist approach involving interviews, document review and field log observations to create refined theories explaining how successful development occurs.

Three final mechanisms were found to influence successful advanced practitioner role development: engagement in planning and integrating roles; establishing opportunities as part of a well-defined career pathway; and championing role uptake and work to full scopes of practice.

This research focuses on one snapshot in time only; it illustrates the importance of actively managing health workforce change. Future investigations should involve the continued and systematic evaluation of advanced practitioner development.

The successful development of advanced practitioner roles in a complex system necessitates recognising how to trigger mechanisms occurring at times well beyond their introduction.

Potential candidates for new roles should expect roadblocks in their development journey. Successfully situating these roles into practice through having a sustainable and stable workforce supply provides patients with access to a wider range of services.

This is the first time a realist evaluation has been undertaken, in New Zealand, of similar programmes operating across multiple sites. The paper brings insights into the process of developing new health programmes within an already established system.

The New Ways of Working (NWW) initiative was launched in 2004 to build a more flexible and skilled mental health workforce. This paper explores the journey through inpatient care under a new acute care team (ACT) model, piloted in Mersey Care NHS Trust as part of the redesign of services under the NWW. Fourteen service users were interviewed face‐to‐face, using an interview schedule of open‐ended questions administered by service user and carer interviewers. Service user perspectives on the admission process and inpatient care were reported as predominantly negative. Service user perspectives on the discharge process and aftercare were reported as predominantly positive. The need for clear and unambiguous care pathways, adequate information, good communication, and to have continuity of care and positive relationships with staff emerged as key themes.

This article is based on the recently published report, Managing Sickness Absence in the Police Service: A Review of Current Practices, which was commissioned by the Home Office and the Health and Safety Executive. It aims to use this to inform approaches to reducing the number of days lost to ill health in the police forces in England and Wales.

The research involved focus groups and interviews with over 300 police staff and officers in a representative sample of seven police forces. The report is based on an in‐depth analysis of absence management in the case study forces and presents the views of all levels of staff.

The findings identify the clear themes and issues that are vital for the effective management of absence in the police forces, but these insights are also clearly relevant to all organisations.

The key messages from the research are that absence management requires a mix of approaches to support the vast majority who are genuinely sick and to deter the small minority whose absence is not health‐related. A good clear absence policy is essential but not sufficient. It must be supported by reliable data that are presented in an understandable format. Wider issues also need to be considered, such as the actual causes of absence so that appropriate solutions are provided. The key player in all this is the line manager who must be confident in their role, well trained and capable of using their discretion in managing their staff who are absent.

The paper identifies the clear themes and issues that are vital for the effective management of absence in the police forces which can also be applied to other organisations.

As cyber-attacks continue to grow, organisations adopting the internet-of-things (IoT) have continued to react to security concerns that threaten their businesses within the current highly competitive environment. Many recorded industrial cyber-attacks have successfully beaten technical security solutions by exploiting human-factor vulnerabilities related to security knowledge and skills and manipulating human elements into inadvertently conveying access to critical industrial assets. Knowledge and skill capabilities contribute to human analytical proficiencies for enhanced cybersecurity readiness. Thus, a human-factored security endeavour is required to investigate the capabilities of the human constituents (workforce) to appropriately recognise and respond to cyber intrusion events within the industrial control system (ICS) environment.

A quantitative approach (statistical analysis) is adopted to provide an approach to quantify the potential cybersecurity capability aptitudes of industrial human actors, identify the least security-capable workforce in the operational domain with the greatest susceptibility likelihood to cyber-attacks (i.e. weakest link) and guide the enhancement of security assurance. To support these objectives, a Human-factored Cyber Security Capability Evaluation approach is presented using conceptual analysis techniques.

Using a test scenario, the approach demonstrates the capacity to proffer an efficient evaluation of workforce security knowledge and skills capabilities and the identification of weakest link in the workforce.

The approach can enable organisations to gain better workforce security perspectives like security-consciousness, alertness and response aptitudes, thus guiding organisations into adopting strategic means of appropriating security remediation outlines, scopes and resources without undue wastes or redundancies.

This paper demonstrates originality by providing a framework and computational approach for characterising and quantify human-factor security capabilities based on security knowledge and security skills. It also supports the identification of potential security weakest links amongst an evaluated industrial workforce (human agents), some key security susceptibility areas and relevant control interventions. The model and validation results demonstrate the application of action research. This paper demonstrates originality by illustrating how action research can be applied within socio-technical dimensions to solve recurrent and dynamic problems related to industrial environment cyber security improvement. It provides value by demonstrating how theoretical security knowledge (awareness) and practical security skills can help resolve cyber security response and control uncertainties within industrial organisations.

Looks at the 2000 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference held at the University of Cardiff in Wales on 6/7 September 2000. Spotlights the 76 or so presentations within and shows that these are in many, differing, areas across management research from: retail finance; precarious jobs and decisions; methodological lessons from feminism; call centre experience and disability discrimination. These and all points east and west are covered and laid out in a simple, abstract style, including, where applicable, references, endnotes and bibliography in an easy‐to‐follow manner. Summarizes each paper and also gives conclusions where needed, in a comfortable modern format.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the plausibility and criticality of two methods of evaluating the implementation of a new government policy within a public service organisation, and to examine the power relations revealed in each evaluation and the social realities of the membership.

Two contrasting approaches to research, based on different theoretical perspectives, were undertaken simultaneously to provide a critical account of an organisation, and its membership, undergoing an externally imposed transformation to improve child protection procedures. The first involved the use of mainly quantitative methods in the form of government sponsored social surveys. Data were triangulated with organisational inspection outcomes. The second method comprised a critical ethnographic evaluation undertaken through discourse analysis in the organisation.

Bottom-up agency rather than top-down structural change is the main influence on policy implementation in child protection. Critical discourse analysis provides a more plausible and credible analysis of the dynamics of organisational change and power relations than surveys.

This research poses new questions over the value of quantitative surveys as opposed to ethnographic methodologies in representing organisational practices.

The concept of workforce agility has become increasingly popular in recent years. However, defining it has sparked much discussion and ambiguity. Recognizing this ambiguity, this paper aims to inductively develop a behavioral taxonomy of workforce agility.

The authors interviewed 36 experts in the field of agility and used concept mapping and the critical incident technique to create a behavioral taxonomy.

The authors identified a behavioral taxonomy consisting of ten dimensions: (1) accepting changes, (2) decision making, (3) creating transparency, (4) collaboration, (5) reflection, (6) user centricity, (7) iteration, (8) testing, (9) self-organization, and (10) learning.

The authors’ research contributes to the literature in that it offers an inductively developed behavioral taxonomy of workforce agility with ten dimensions. It further adds to the literature by tying the notion of workforce agility to the performance literature.

The authors’ results suggest that it might be beneficial for companies to take all workforce agility dimensions into account when creating an agile culture, starting agile projects, integrating agility into hiring decisions or evaluating employee performance.

This paper uses an inductive approach to define workforce agility as a set of behavioral dimensions, integrating the scientific as well as the practitioner literature on agility.

Through a survey of 200 employees working in five of the thirty establishments analysed in previous research about the microeconomic effects of reducing the working time (Cahier 25), the consequences on employees of such a reduction can be assessed; and relevant attitudes and aspirations better known.

For decades organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) has been of interest to scholars and practitioners alike, generating a significant amount of research exploring the concept of what citizenship behavior is, and its antecedents, correlates, and consequences. While these behaviors have been and will continue to be valuable, there are changes in the workplace that have the potential to alter what types of OCBs will remain important for organizations in the future, as well as what types of opportunities for OCB exist for employees. In this chapter we consider the influence of 10 workplace trends related to human resource management that have the potential to influence both what types of citizenship behaviors employees engage in and how often they may engage in them. We build on these 10 trends that others have identified as having the potential to shape the workplace of the future, which include labor shortages, globalization, immigration, knowledge-based workers, increase use of technology, gig work, diversity, changing work values, the skills gap, and employer brands. Based on these 10 trends, we develop propositions about how each trend may impact OCB. We consider not only how these trends will influence the types of citizenship and opportunities for citizenship that employees can engage in, but also how they may shape the experiences of others related to OCB, including organizations and managers.

The purpose of this paper is to review the evidence about the factors shaping the police workforce, commissioned by the Scottish Police Authority and Scottish Institute for Policing Research.

The paper uses the theory of strategic fit to assess the available evidence relating to reshaping the police workforce and brings together the most relevant recent reviews of police organisations and empirical studies on these issues. The use of the theory enabled the strategies that have been adopted by police agencies in recent years to be evaluated in relation to the current political and economic environment.

The authors find that here is considerable uncertainty and while there has been previous discussion on the benefits of larger or smaller forces there is not robust evidence that a particular force size is optimal for either efficacy or efficiency, although very small forces may struggle in some ways. There is also mixed evidence about whether increasing police organisation resourcing to allow more officers to be employed reduces crime levels, and there is a relative lack of evidence about the impact this has on the other areas of community life in which police are involved.

There are major weaknesses in research relating to police organisational reform: there is no accepted theory of police reform, no accepted method as to how such a reform should be evaluated nor have there been any comparative studies of earlier police civilianisation programs (Braithwaite, Westbrook and Ledema, 2005).

Previous work on this topic often focuses on which organisational structure – whether in terms of workforce mix or size – is most efficient or effective. This research takes an alternative perspective and argues for a shift in the research agenda to take account of the friction involved in processes of organisational change, both in order to build a stronger research understanding of these important aspects of change and to more effectively inform policy. The paper provides a basis for the development of theories for understanding police reform in general – and workforce restructuring in particular – alongside appropriate methods for researching it.