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The purpose of this paper is to explore the merger of two large State departments and the cultural change program orchestrated by the Human Resources (HR) department. This study reveals the instrumental role played by some managers who accelerated the cultural change process through utilising formal and informal agencies of change in their management roles.

The paper explores a two‐year investigation of a major State organisation trying to reshape the culture and values of the organisation after a politically determined merger. This paper reviews the context for this change process, the associated concepts from the literature, and adapts Gidden's Structuration Theory to provide a model of manager action during the change process that may also be used to explore subsequent change practices.

The findings from the sequenced phases of data collection provide new evidence from a strategic HR perspective of the multiple ways managers act to embed a culture change for the emerging organisation.

The subsequent discussion centres on the diverse roles played by managers in the new disjointed and often dysfunctional culture to develop unified cultural change with their staff, with the change process being modelled in terms of Structuration Theory.

The paper uses the findings from an empirical study to indicate the agencies of change that managers can employ during organisational change processes. By doing so it provides both a pragmatic model for managers of change and through the typology of manager agencies of change makes an addition to the existing theoretical frameworks of change management.

Features a case study of a major bank which aimed to achieve corporate transformation and a dramatic improvement in service quality. The links between service quality, customer satisfaction and corporate profitability in UK banking are outlined in order to set in context the many quality improvement initiatives undertaken by UK retail banks in recent years. Business process re‐engineering has proved to be the most popular of service quality initiatives but most have been limited to single processes rather than corporate transformation as portrayed in the case study. The five‐year corporate transformation programme focuses on employee communications, the redesign of work, recruitment and reward processes and the introduction of consumer research‐based national quality standards. The bank was rewarded for its efforts, coming top for three consecutive years in the Which? service quality surveys and, according to its own data, which contributed to a rise in customer satisfaction and customer retention at a time of declining employee satisfaction. Future developments in service quality segmentation and a working definition of service quality are proposed.

Several years ago, North Carolina State (NC State) University Libraries technical services department, Acquisitions & Discovery (A&D), merged acquisitions, cataloging, and electronic resources management functions and staff. One intended outcome for the merger included integrating and distributing electronic resources management across all staff positions whereby staff would be trained to manage a larger portion of the life cycle for print and electronic resources. The benefits of a life cycle approach for both print and electronic resources included better staff understanding of resources; staff ownership of packages; and improved staff follow-through, consistency, and ability to troubleshoot. Key positions were reimagined to support this effort. This included the creation of a staff package manager role in the serials unit to provide oversight of e-journal packages, distribute work to staff, and create and maintain an information dashboard (the Electronic Resources Hub) for staff as well as for other stakeholder departments across the libraries. The monographs unit has recently adopted a similar integrated approach to manage NC State's growing collection of e-books. This chapter will outline A&D implementation of two package management models, one for serials and one for monographs; describe the associated tools and technologies used for support; and discuss lessons learned. Benefits will be discussed to illustrate how other libraries might transform their electronic resource management operations by using a package management strategy.

This article aims to report on the configuration of the integrated Support and Wellbeing Worker (SWB) role in an innovative Gwent Frailty programme from 2009 until 2011.

The health and social care Gwent Frailty programme used a configuration approach by adopting “frailty” as its unifying theme across the seven agencies involved. In order to configure this role, the Frailty Workforce Group (FWG) identified three tasks; staff engagement, identifying the SWB worker training needs, and scoping the employment options for the new role.

For others facing the same challenges there are three key principles. The first is that having a unifying concept underpinned by the commissioned “Happily independent” study legitimately enabled the FWG to deliver on its three tasks identified by the Frailty Board. The second was that time spent on early staff and trade union engagement gave positive messages about their value within the role configuration. Finally, that developing an integrated role meant that core training and development had to be consistent so that registered staff were confident they could delegate safely.

The number of articles on developing an integrated support worker role in health and social care is sparse. The value of this article is that it reports on the configuration of an innovative new integrated health and social care role working with frail people. This was based on what older people wanted from services in order to be “happily independent”.

The purpose of this paper is to document the long‐term, transformational change strategies that the authors are using to create a new Library at Macquarie University.

The strategies are explained using the metaphor of a journey, with a roadmap, or guiding principles, the milestones reached and next steps for the future. They are also discussed in the context of University and Library strategic planning and with reference to the concepts emerging from Library 2.0 discussions.

During 2005/2006 the authors transformed the design of jobs and structure to build a more flexible Library that is agile, resilient, informed, connected, successful and responsible. These changes are being implemented during 2006/2007, supported by extensive training and new approaches to planning, team building, performance monitoring and governance. Two significant changes are being made. One is the construction of a new library building to reaffirm the centrality to research and learning. Also, strategies to maximise the visibility and use of physical resources in this new environment are being implemented. A new technical architecture to underpin all of the activities is being designed.

The aim in creating a new Library is to make the services client‐centric rather than library‐centric.

The New Library: The People’s Network and other recent government initiatives have set out a new direction for public library services in Britain. The aim is to create “hybrid” libraries, combining existing book lending and information services with extensive ICT access. With the new technology will come enhanced roles in information, learning support and reader development. Management of change theory emphasises the effects of introducing change in one area on the whole of the organisation. If this theory is applied to public libraries, significant “knock on” effects can be expected. Some examples are taken from the practical experience of Bury Libraries.

A demographic time bomb is ticking in many school jurisdictions. Up to 70 per cent of present leaders in the private and public sectors will retire within the next five to ten years as the “baby boomers” move on. While succession planning has become a major initiative in the private sector, leadership succession in education tends to hew to old paths. Where are new educational leaders to come from? How should their succession be orchestrated? The traditional source of succession at the secondary level, the department headship, is no longer an attractive route for many teachers. Many potential leaders do not perceive the role of principal or assistant principal in a positive light. These roles are increasingly being associated with managing the standards/standardization agenda with which many professionals profoundly disagree. While it is premature to declare a leadership crisis in education, it is not too early to call on policy makers to attend to the growing need for succession planning at all levels in education. Based on an examination of change over times in four schools in Ontario, this article addresses issues of leadership succession in education and, more precisely, examines the influence of principals’ succession on the principals themselves and their schools.

The post‐1990 health reforms in health and social care have resulted in quasi‐markets, centralized funding and an acceptance of top‐down managerialism.The analysis of contracting within the public sector has focused on the extent to which the market has affected equity, access and choice for users ‐ but it has also had a tremendous impact on staff, staff morale and their relationships. Whilst policy makers demand joint practice in order to deliver continuous care, the market culture has resulted in competitive or depressed behaviour amongst professional managers and support staff. The bureaucratic public administrations were criticized for reinforcing rigid departmentalization and a stagnant culture ‐ the contracting environment and reductionist performance management (NPM and managerialism) appear to be having a similar blocking effect on those staff developing new relationships and working beyond establishment boundaries. This paper outlines what are perceived to be the barriers to social transformation in health and social care services, as relayed by those actively engaged in building bridges across professions and agencies. The research input is based on a mid‐stream ESRC Management Innovation Project.

The Albert R. Mann Library at Cornell University has created a working electronic library and has made significant changes in services and staff responsibilities to address users' evolving needs. This article presents an overview of these changes, after discussing the development of electronic libraries at Mann and elsewhere. The increased usage that Mann's collections have received as the electronic library has been developed is also described.