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The purpose of this paper is to describe the origins of today's new office concepts, focusing on the emergence of mobile and flexible working practices in the 1960s and 1970s. Thereby it intends to add a sense of historical awareness to the ongoing debate about the work environment.

The historical description is based on literature study, looking at research reports, design handbooks and depictions of office life in popular culture such as movies and advertisements.

The paper demonstrates that today's “new ways of working” are by no means new. It shows that the concepts of mobile offices, paperless offices, videoconferencing and flexible workplaces all originate from the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s. It also shows that these concepts were far from mainstream, standing in stark contrast to the rigidity and conservatism of everyday office life at the time.

This paper is the first result of a larger historical analysis of the recent history of the work environment. Further historical research will add to the presented insight in the evolution of office concepts.

The paper's insight into the historical development of office concepts can help workplace strategists to make better, more careful forecasts of future workplace trends.

Whereas most literature on the office concept tends to look at novel ideas and future developments, this paper looks back at the recent past. It discusses early workplace experiments that have been largely ignored, or remained unidentified, in much of the discourse on new ways of working.

Sustainable Accommodation for the New Economy (SANE) is a two‐year EC‐funded research programme considering the combined impact of the new economy on people, process, place and technology to identify new ways of accommodating work. Its focus is on the creation of sustainable, collaborative workplaces for knowledge workers across Europe, encompassing both virtual and physical spaces. The key operational goal of the project is to develop a unified framework for the design of sustainable workplaces in Europe. This multidisciplinary framework will generate designs that will allow distributed organisations to take full advantage of coming advances in location‐independent computing and ubiquitous networking SANE will broaden the range of workplace design parameters to include consideration of degrees of privacy and relations between physical and virtual spaces. By embracing considerations of public and private space, the workspace environment model developed will locate the office environment in the wider context of the sustainable urban development and the regeneration of European cities. This paper describes the work currently being undertaken by the SANE project’s Space Environment Modelling work package, which is led by DEGW. This work package focuses on the architectural aspects of the human environment in organisational settings. Other key theoretical packages are Human Environment Modelling, which examines communications and interaction in physical and virtual environments, and Processes and Tools, which will examine current and likely future technology tools and processes to support the distributed workplace.

The issue of responsibility and accountability is central to the development of New Ways of Working (NWW), and has also been central to the concerns that members of some professions have expressed about it. Clarity about who is responsible for what, and who is accountable to whom, is particularly important when there are new types of worker roles in the team, and when existing workers are working in a different way or extending their role. NWW emphasises the appropriate distribution of responsibility and team decision‐making, which together are designed to promote patient safety. Distributing responsibility and accountability does not mean diluting or diffusing it; this model supports all workers being responsible for the standards of their own practice, and moves away from the ill‐defined, and perhaps unrealistic, notion of the doctor being ultimately responsible for all patients.The National Workforce Programme has worked with a wide range of stakeholders, including professional regulators and employers, to produce guidance on responsibility and accountability. This guidance is currently in draft form and will be published on the New Ways of Working website (www.newwaysofworking.org.uk) as soon as the final version is published.

This study provides a comprehensive framework of adaptation in triadic business relationship settings in the service sector. The framework is based on the industrial network approach (see, e.g., Axelsson & Easton, 1992; Håkansson & Snehota, 1995a). The study describes how adaptations initiate, how they progress, and what the outcomes of these adaptations are. Furthermore, the framework takes into account how adaptations spread in triadic relationship settings. The empirical context is corporate travel management, which is a chain of activities where an industrial enterprise, and its preferred travel agency and service supplier partners combine their resources. The scientific philosophy, on which the knowledge creation is based, is realist ontology. Epistemologically, the study relies on constructionist processes and interpretation. Case studies with in-depth interviews are the main source of data.

It is all too easy in the hectic world of business to get too involved with the day‐to‐day managing of processes and events. When this happens it is difficult to see the wood for the trees and the automatic pilot syndrome takes over. This does not suggest that you do not know what you are doing ‐ on the contrary you are probably as switched on to whatever activity you are managing as anyone could be. What you could be missing, however, is the explanation as to why you are doing it. If this sounds familiar to you, what might be needed is a detached period from your work. By this I mean stay on the high ground for a while so you can get an overview of what you are doing and, more importantly, why you are doing it. How many managers, I wonder, get the opportunity to question what they are doing? If you allow yourself to slip into complacency then you and your organization will soon lose competitive advantage.

Several studies have recently documented projects of organizational transformation and modernization which, commonly clustered under the umbrella term “New Ways of Working” (NWoW), simultaneously entail material, technological, cultural and managerial dimensions. Academic contributions, however, have paid little attention to the mechanisms allowing such projects to progressively become legitimized in organizational discourses and practices. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the distinctive features of the legitimation process underlying the implementation of NWoW projects.

This paper relies on a longitudinal, three-year analysis of a large insurance company. Data were collected through qualitative methods including semi-structured interviews (48), periods of observation (3 months) and document analysis (78).

The paper develops a grounded and integrative framework of legitimation processes underlying “NWoW” change projects. The framework emphasizes four decisive operations of translation in “NWoW” design and implementation: translating material constraints into strategic opportunities; translating strategic opportunities into a quantitative business plan supported by the top management; translating compelling discourses around “NWoW” into an organizational machinery; and translating a transformation project into discourses of unequivocal success, conveyed by legitimate spokespeople within and beyond the organization.

Besides contributing to the understanding of a managerial fashion, which has received little academic attention so far, the paper also offers an original integrative framework to account for legitimation processes that combines two theoretical approaches – the sociology of translation and research on institutionalist work.

This article describes the processes undertaken to implement change in East Lancashire adult mental health services through New Ways of Working. The views of users, carers and staff of the services at the start of the project are described, and an overview offered of the development work that took place to support the change. Barriers to change are also described.

The field of Organization Development and Change (ODC) is facing the same tensions as those confronting humanity more broadly: how to build a sustainable future. There is an urgent need to preserve the viability of our species by changing our relationship to the natural environment and slowing the ravages of climate change and the degradation of the earth's resources. Simultaneously, technology advances are changing our lives, work, institutions, and culture in unpredictable ways. Social upheaval and geopolitical tensions are exposing deep fissures in values, preferences, and beliefs about what constitutes a just society and how to govern. The development needed for a sustainable future must enable us to operate in ways that are fundamentally different from the status quo – not just increase our effectiveness in the way we currently operate.

ODC will have to recontextualize its methodologies and frameworks that currently focus primarily on individual organizations to deal with the complexity and urgency of the challenges humanity is facing. In this Reflection, we consider some of the tensions and key questions that ODC faces: What does, and might, sustainable development mean in a globally intertwined world where divisions at both the macro and micro levels reflect conflicting interests, tensions, and fundamentally different aspirations for the future? How do ODC methodologies and frameworks need to change to help develop sustainable ecosystem level transformation cutting across hierarchies, institutions, geographies, and cultures? How does ODC need to design itself to operate differently with different outcomes? We suggest some possible next steps forward in addressing these tensions.

This paper reports the results of a three-year-long research on business relationships, relying on qualitative data gathered through multiple-case study research of four focal companies operating in Australia. The industry settings are as follows: steel construction, vegetable oils trading, aluminum and steel can manufacture, and imaging solutions. The research analyzes two main aspects of relationships: structure and process. This paper deals with structure describing it by the most desired features of intercompany relationships for each focal company. The primary research data have been coded drawing on extant research into business relationships. The main outcome of this part of the research is a five construct model composed by trust, commitment, bonds, distance, and information sharing that accounts for all informants’ utterances about relationship structure.