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Achieving high performance in an organization is a complex business. Most approaches are too piecemeal, unidimensional or iatrogenic. Healthy working is an approach to managing performance that attempts to overcome these problems by aiming, in a holistic manner, to harmonize those factors which affect, either separately or jointly, individual physical, mental and emotional health and individual and organizational performance. The approach is based on a set of values and a series of steps. The first step has to be establishing an information base‐line – the four key indicators. A survey was undertaken by PBS to establish the availability and usefulness of data in NHS organizations; summarizes some of the issues raised. Although a worryingly small number keep useful data or produce useful information, much can be done in making critical links if available data is fully used.

Describes a distinctive model of managerial leadership which proposes an integrated framework of ideas and skills of potential application to any leadership situation – and has been devised from literature sources and tested in a number of national and international workshops. Discusses the concepts of transformational leadership and transactional management. Relevant macro factors consist of a number of components from which a range of capabilities, or skill sets, may be derived. Concludes with an outline programme format which suggests how these capabilities may be acquired and developed by managers who aspire to leadership.

Argues that, for the National Health Service to be effective and efficient and give a good quality service, the personnel function is crucial and must therefore receive adequate investment. Suggests that the NHS can learn a lot from “leading edge” organizations, which give priority to husbanding their human resources.

While the need for leadership in health care is well recognised, there is still the need to better understand how leadership contributes to improving healthcare services. The body of knowledge concerning improvement has grown significantly in recent years, but evidence about links between leadership and health services improvement remains poor, especially within the UK National Health Service. It remains unclear how and why leadership is important to service improvement, and how leadership development can optimise service improvement.This paper describes a study commissioned by The Health Foundation, exploring the links between leadership behaviours reported by clinicians and managers in NHS organisations and their service improvement work. The study highlights leadership behaviours that appear to be positively associated with NHS improvement work. This paper provides insights into which aspects of leadership are used for different types of improvement work and considers lessons for leadership development.

This chapter is a journey into the ontological significance of place in consideration of the Atlantic Tasmanian salmon industry and its challenges to the ethical discourse around the social license to operate (SLO) beyond the oxymoron of a name. It centres the discourse around the salmon itself. A once totem animal, responsible for the balance of Canada’s abundant ecosystem, now reduced to a mere source of protein, manipulated, and commodified by Tasmania’s ‘big business’ and against the SLO of Flanagan’s ‘Toxic’. It applies Ortega y Gasset’s mid-twentieth century solution to the problem of our western disconnection from place to the current neoliberal political framework. This welcomes an inclusive dialogue with kinship structures of the Mi’kmaq peoples reflected also in the ontological narrative of the First Nations people of Tasmania. This multidisciplinary journey necessitates a concept of the SLO founded upon ethical responsibility and a cultural license if it is to genuinely hold to account the corporate sovereign.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and explain the change process in Northern Ireland policing through an analysis of temporally bracketed change phases and key change delivery themes ranging from 1996 to 2012.

The research approach adopted is process based, longitudinal and multi-method, utilising “temporal bracketing” to determine phases of change and conjunctural reasoning to unravel the systematic factors interacting over time, within the case.

The paper identifies and temporally brackets four phases of change: “Tipping point”; “Implementation, Symbolic Modification and Resistance”; “Power Assisted Steering”; and “A Return to Turbulence”, identifies four themes that emerge from RUC-PSNI experience: the role of adaptive leadership; pace and sequencing of change implementation; sufficient resourcing; and the impact of external agents acting as boundary spanners, and comments on the prominence of these themes through the phases. The paper goes on to reflect upon how these phases and themes inform our understanding of organisational change within policing organisations generally and within politically pressurised transition processes.

The contribution of the paper lies in the documentation of an almost unique organisational case in an environmentally forced change process. In this it contains lessons for other organisations facing similar, if less extreme challenges and presents an example of intense change analysed longitudinally.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and discuss possible future pathways of the Finnish science, technology and innovation (STI) system. The paper sketches three speculative pathways for the Finnish STI system.

Theoretical considerations behind the pathways are based on analyses of the determinants and behaviour of small open economies, their innovation systems and governance. The empirical background of the paper is in the current trends of the Finnish economy and STI system. The analysis of pathways is based on three dimensions: institutionalized policy environment and economy, domestic interest groups and policy and STI institutions and funding. Changes in these dimensions are analysed by paying special attention to two variables: the position of the nation state and the general economic development.

The first future pathway outlined is based on an optimistic view by setting Finland on the basis of past success factors as an European and global STI hotspot. The second pathway is based on the assumption that the Finnish STI system will be increasingly subordinated to international structures and decision-making. The third one is geared around the assumption that the Finnish STI system will be dominated by industries.

While Finland has been seen as a European showpiece of innovation since the early 2000s, currently the country’s national economy and STI system are undergoing a critical period. The paper sheds light on this transformation and its potential future outcomes and attempts to raise debate on the options policy makers may face in the increasingly complex global environment in small countries.

The paper introduces potential future avenues for the Finnish STI system and provides a contribution to the debate of the future of small countries’ STI systems and innovation policies by emphasising the limited space of the STI policy choices and how the development paths and space for policy making evolve from the interaction of socio-economic factors between domestic and wider international context.

Discusses an exploratory study of the impact of NHS reforms on the management of staff. Argues that “management” has moved from a view that staff should be provided with a secure and comfortable working environment to “labour” being viewed simply as a factor of production. The result seems to be an unprecedented sense of alienation among significant numbers of NHS staff. Proposes possible ways forward. The first focuses on the “means”, accepting that the “ends” of the NHS will, for the foreseeable future, be dominated by the market. The second examines more closely the market‐driven, business “end” or purpose and challenges the unitary view of the NHS Trust as a coherent business entity. Beyond these short‐ to medium‐term responses, concludes that a return to a somewhat more flexible and less hard‐edged human resources philosophy is a longer‐term investment as the labour market tightens and skilled staff become scarcer in the later 1990s.

THE interval between the Library Association Conference and the printing of THE LIBRARY WORLD is too brief for more than a series of impressions of it. Comment is probably preferable in our pages to mere record. The Association is publishing in the next few weeks all the papers that were read and, as we hope, the substance at least of the unwritten contributions. In this second particular reports in recent years have been lacking. A report that merely states that “Mr. Smith seconded the vote of thanks” is so much waste of paper and interests no one but Mr. Smith. If Mr. Smith, however, said anything we should know what it was he said. What we may say is that the Conference was worthy of the centenary we were celebrating. The attendance, over two thousand, was the largest on record, and there has not been so large a gathering of overseas librarians and educationists since the jubilee meeting of the Library Association at Edinburgh in 1927. So much was this so that the meeting took upon it a certain international aspect, as at least one of the non‐librarian speakers told its members, adding that it was apparently a library league of nations of the friendliest character. It followed that an unusual, but quite agreeable, part of each general session was devoted to speeches of congratulation and good‐will from the foreign delegates. All, with the possible exception of the United States, dwelt upon the debt of their countries in library matters to the English Public Libraries Acts and their consequences. Even Dr. Evans, in a very pleasant speech, showed that he had reached some tentative conclusions about English librarianship.