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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how service managers perceive their service prior to, and following the delivery of a cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) anger management group for individuals with an intellectual disability.

Telephone interviews were conducted with seven service managers, before and after a CBT group intervention. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and analysed using thematic analysis to identify common and/or contrasting themes.

Before the intervention took place managers observed a lack of consistency in how their staff dealt with challenging incidents and the serious consequences these incidents had for service users as well as staff. They spoke about the importance of multi-disciplinary working and good quality staff selection, support and training. After the group intervention managers commented on a positive “spilling-out effect” whereby the whole organisation was influenced by the intervention, a greater willingness on the part of service users to talk about their problems, and an increased confidence in the staff members who had co-facilitated the group work.

The implications of the themes raised are discussed and recommendations for further research are suggested.

This research provides a unique contribution of managers’ views and insight into how hosting a CBT group intervention impacted on their wider services.

This chapter contributes to the field of educational standardisation by critically discussing the recent preoccupation with social and emotional abilities as performance standards in education policies and curriculum. The chapter is philosophical-theoretical in scope and sheds light on standardisation of social and emotional abilities through the different theoretical layers of the Foucauldian notion of governmentality. By bringing the writings of the late Foucault to the fore, I will argue that the power structures imbued in social and emotional standards are not merely oppressive and vertical structures of subjection, but can also be seen as enabling, relational and productive means for subjectivation. Thus, although social and emotional standards certainly can be seen as governmental measures in the production of a flexible, diligent, self-managing workforce, ensuring the kind of transferable non-cognitive skills that are so much needed in the knowledge economy, educators can ambiguously also construct public spaces for political-ethical self-creation and resistance in context of these ‘standards of the self’.

This article explores the concept of ‘risk’ that is both an epistemological tool and major facet of “late modernity” (Delanty, 1999). During the 1970s, the use of the notion ’risk’ was mainly confined to ‘natural sciences’, when the concept was used to analyse and improve the ‘security’ of technological systems (Giddens, 1990). According to Delanty (1999) it was not until the 1980s and 1990s that social science based ‘disciplines’ discovered the importance of the topic in relation to changes affecting modern society. In particular, the disciplinary development of Sociology, for example, has discovered ‘risk’ as one of the important aspects of neo‐liberalism and modernity (Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1990; Luhmann, 1993; Delanty, 1999). Sociological conceptions of risk are rapidly changing the role of social science (Delanty, 1999). For example, Delanty (1999) claims that there are studies on epistemology or legitimation of risk knowledge. The conflict between sociologically informed concepts of ‘risk’ and the more traditional, probabilistic calculations of risk represent a contest of competing social philosophies and visions about the future development of human and financial resources, relationship between economic growth and environmental protection, role of government and individuality, and projections and visions about the future it can be argued. A sociologically informed understanding of risk illustrates the interconnectedness of an “ageing population,” social policy and social life. From this perspective, risk is more than a calculation of costs and benefits, it is a theoretical mechanism for weighing different sets of political orientations which impinge on the positioning of individuals and populations.

Recent years have witnessed an increasing number of cities develop strategies. The discourse of strategic management has become an obligatory point of passage for many city managers. This paper starts by posing an ostensibly simple question: why do cities need strategies? The commonsensical answer to the question is: because cities compete with each other. This paper aims to problematise the seemingly natural link between cities, competition and strategy. It also aims to explore the role that calculative practices play in creating city league tables that, in turn, function as the a priori condition that generates competition between cities.

This paper is interdisciplinary and draws on the related disciplines of accounting, organization theory and strategy. The argument unfolds in four steps: first, it briefly provides some theoretical background for analysis and relates it back to strategizing and accounting as a calculative practice; second, it scrutinizes league tables as an a priori of competition; third, it discusses the implications of the argument for city management and critical accounting; finally, it concludes with a discussion of the power effects of those calculative practices that shape strategizing in cities through the production of competition.

This paper argues that city strategizing is best understood as a set of complex responses to a new competitive arena, one rendered visible through calculative practices, manifested through city rankings. The paper makes five key contributions: one, league tables reduce qualities to a quantifiable form; two, league tables create an order amongst an heterogeneous ensemble of entities; three, league tables stimulate the very competition they claim to reflect; four, once competition is accepted, individual players need a strategy to play the game; and five, league tables have important power effects that may result in unintended consequences.

The paper contributes to understanding how calculative practices relate to strategy; it explores the organizational environment in which city managers strategize; in addition, it discusses the problem of civic schizophrenia.

The paper seeks to open up an agenda for studying city management, strategy and accounting.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the implications that Power’s book had to the author’s research in public sector auditing.

In this paper, the author reflects and debates the inspiration that Michael Power’s book The Audit Society had on the author’s own research.

The author finds that this book had a significant influence on how he succeeded theorizing his studies on auditing, and how he could contribute to the audit literature. It is stunning how the book succeeded in synthesizing audit research, encouraging scholars to understand auditing as a social practice, i.e. how auditing can be theorized using various social science theories and how the book also appealed to broader social science.

This paper is a reflection that covers around a 20-year period with potential mis-representations of how exactly sequences of actions and thoughts were.

This paper helps to clarify how it is that audit operates and influences everyday life of persons involved with auditing.

This paper casts doubts as to what actions are carried out in the name of audit and that audit is not just a value free activity but involved with political agendas.

The originality of this paper is that it fleshes out how a seminal book can have significant implications on how research is carried out.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how strategic, patient-centred communication plays a part in the discursive management of expectations posed to patients and healthcare organizations.

The paper provides an analysis of four documents collected as part of an ethnographic case study regarding “The Perspective of the Patient” – a Danish Hospital’s patient-centred communication programme. Mapping methods inspired by Grounded Theory are used to qualify the analysis.

The paper shows that strategic patient-centred communication addresses both a care-oriented approach to the patient and deploys market perceptions of patients. Market and care is seen as co-existing organizing modes that entail expectations to the patient. In the communication programme the patient is constructed in six information-seeking patient figures: affective patient; target group patient; citizen with rights; patient as a competent resource; user as active partner; and consumer. As a result, the patient-centred communication programme renders the patient as a flexible figure able to fit organizational demands of both care orientation and market concerns.

This study contributes to qualitative research in organizational health communication by combining two subfields – patient-centredness and health communication – in an empirical study of how market and care are intertwined in a patient-centred communication programme. The argument goes beyond the prevalent prescriptive approaches to patient-centredness and healthcare communication, instead providing a critical analytical perspective on strategic communication and patient-centredness and showing how expectations are posed to both patient and organization.

In the 1990s, European social democrats coalesced around a set of principles often referred to as the third way – characterised by prudent economic governance, a slimmer public sector, ‘productive’ welfare services and attraction to inward investment. Third way proponents perceived fairness as supporting opportunity rather than redistributing welfare. On the way to the late 2000s, their sense of direction was lost. The final phase, one might argue, ended with the 2008–2009 financial crisis. Henceforth, the challenge for the Left concerned how to define a social democracy with less revenue and limited scope for expanding public services, while reaching out to the so-called left-behinds through better jobs and a renewed sense of common purpose.

Jeremy Corbyn and Emmanuel Macron represent two distinctly different attempts at forging a new way forward from the impasse. During Corbyn's tenure as a leader (2015–2020), Labour carved out space by moving leftwards on key economic policies while proffering communitarianism as the antidote to globalised capitalism. Across the English Channel, Macron's new party, La République En Marche, sought to generate a new form of politics that had clear similarities with the centrism of third way social democracy, supplemented by an emphasis on social dialogue and enhanced European integration as a strategy for harnessing globalisation.

Corbynism and Macronism represent two distinct attempts at centre-left renewal, both personalised yet evolving on the back of mass movements. This chapter summarises the trajectory of both in terms of ideological content and organisational change and asks what lessons they convey about the future of social democracy in the twenty-first century.