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Purpose – To assess labeling and social control of clients in contemporary mental health care organizations.

Methodology/approach – Fifteen months of observation in two multiservice mental health care organizations, interviews with workers and clients, and analysis of organizational documents.

Findings – The organizations used a variety of organizational labels, both official and informal, which served distinct purposes in organizational life and which did not always agree in their construction of the client. Official mental illness diagnosis was a bureaucratic label, while informal labels determined the types of social control to which clients were subjected. Clients who were informally labeled severely mentally ill were subject to integrative social control, while exclusionary social control was applied to those informally seen as not being severely mentally ill. Unlike in classic studies of mental health care, looping processes, in which client behaviors are viewed as symptoms, do not reliably predict the types of labels or social control applied to clients.

Implications – It is important for a sociology of diagnosis to contextualize official diagnosis in the repertoire of organizational labels applied to clients in mental health care, recognizing that it plays a limited but important role in organizational life. Informal labels, which at time conflict with official diagnosis, play a more prominent role in the management of everyday organizational life.

The academic and management literature offers an abundance of techniques for helping organizations improve their performance. Generally, though, these techniques have not been subjected to rigorous, evidence-based evaluation or have been tested in practice over time. The purpose of this paper is to describe a longitudinal study into the effectiveness of the High Performance Organization (HPO) Framework at a social care and rehabilitation organization.

The HPO Framework was applied at LIMOR in the Netherlands. The longitudinal nature of the study consisted of conducting an “HPO diagnosis” twice at the organization, in 2012 and 2015. In the second diagnosis, the effectiveness of the interventions the organization undertook to address the recommendations originating from the first HPO diagnosis was also measured.

The study aimed to discover whether the HPO Framework was a suitable improvement technique with which to increase the performance of a social care and rehabilitation organization in a sustainable way. The results showed that it was used to ward off and contain the negative effects of external turbulent developments, and thereby helped LIMOR to perform better than comparable organizations.

As a longitudinal study of the workings and effects of the HPO Framework at a social care and rehabilitation organization, this study is the first of its kind. Moreover, it addresses two gaps in the current literature, by contributing longitudinal evidence to the body of knowledge on improvement techniques, specifically in the non-profit sector, and by adding insights on the practical workings of the HPO Framework in a non-profit context, specifically the social care and rehabilitation sector.

The purpose of this study is to develop a map for the holistic business process management (BPM) diagnosis in order to guide the choice of techniques that encompass all dimensions of the business process.

The design science research method was used, with the elaboration of seven steps to project solutions to empirical problems: (1) identification of the problem, (2) awareness of the problem, (3) definition of expected results, (4) design and development, (5) demonstration, (6) evaluation of artifacts and (7) communication. These steps were organized in different analyzes: descriptive, experimental and observational. The descriptive analysis comprised steps one to three (identification of the problem, awareness of the problem, definition of expected results) and made use of the systematic literature review procedure for proposing artifacts. The experimental analysis comprised steps four to five (design and development, and demonstration), where the consultation with specialists' procedures and then the Delphi procedure for the construction of the artifacts were carried out. In the observational analysis, steps six (evaluation of artifacts), where two case studies were performed, and step seven (communication), in which the map for the holistic BPM diagnosis was presented were carried out.

The article systematizes the BPM diagnostic techniques scattered throughout the literature and relates how these techniques relate to dimensions. A map for the holistic BPM diagnosis is generated containing 21 techniques and 9 dimensions, with 45 relationships between these techniques and tools. Another aspect is that the map shows that in BPM promotion projects, techniques are not restricted to any specific phase of the life cycle.

Professionals can use the map to form a blend with selected techniques and use them for holistic BPM diagnosis according to the skills and other resources of the project team.

The map developed is innovative because it relates a set of consolidated techniques for each dimension of the process to provide the holistic diagnosis for the organization. It is important to highlight that these techniques and dimensions were scattered in the literature.

The paper's aim is to provide the reader with an example of the application of Beer's viable system model (VSM), to present the crucial steps of analyzing and improving a complex organization on the basis of Beer's approach, and thereby to demonstrate the value of viewing an organization cybernetically for managerial purposes.

Based on Beer's VSM, as a first step, a diagnosis of the underlying organizational subsystems of the Swiss Youth Hostel Association has been undertaken on the basis of interviews and an analysis of relevant written sources. Based on this evaluation of the organization's viability, suggestions for improvement have been derived in a second step.

Diagnosis shows that the VSM offers a useful, innovative, and effective reference framework for analyzing the organizational structure of an organization from a multidimensional, cybernetic perspective, on the strength of which managers can cope more efficiently and substantially with complexity.

The paper offers an example of the process of applying Beer's practicable framework to managerial tasks, helping them comprehend their organizations from a cybernetic view as viable systems, thus enabling them to deal with internal and external complexity more effectively and efficiently. It accordingly shows how diagnosis based on this framework can reveal organizational strength and weaknesses on the one hand and act as a makeshift for redesigning system structure on the other hand.

The paper contributes to the practical application‐oriented understanding of Beer's VSM for managerial purposes by giving an example of how it applies to a complex organization, showing how a VSM‐based diagnosis reframed the perspectives of managers in the organization under study.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a model for conducting an organizational assessment/diagnosis.

The model provides practitioners with a method to identify the breakdown(s) in the organizational system that is motivating a significant number of individuals to manifest dysfunctional organizational behaviors.

When organizational systems are dysfunction, stress levels increase among employees. Following increased stress, individuals create a contagion group that, if not addressed, can interfere with achieving the organization's mission.

The information is readily applied to real‐world settings for those who are facing dysfunction within organizations and has repeated been successful.

This paper provides a perspective on consulting with dysfunctional organizations that combines the expertise of psychologist and business consultants. It provides information to those in the working in the field and academics seeking new models to test.

The purpose of this study is to help managers in their constant quest to create and implement new sources of competitive advantage and ways to achieve sustainable high performance to become a high performance organization (HPO) – defined as an organization that achieves financial and non-financial results that are exceedingly better than those of its peer group over a period of five years or more to by focusing in a disciplined way on issues of genuine importance to the organization. One way to become an HPO is by applying the HPO Framework, which has been validated in multiple countries and shown to indeed help organizations to improve their performance. However, a change approach for implementing the HPO Framework that is valid in different contexts has not been developed to date. Such an approach is important as change initiatives suffer from a high failure rate.

The goal of this research was to identify an appropriate change approach for implementing the HPO Framework. A theoretical framework for an HPO change initiative was constructed, which subsequently was tested at an organization undergoing a transformation to become an HPO.

The results show that the theoretical approach in practice was indeed useful at the case company. A continuous rate of change is needed to implement a corporate-wide change strategy that will enable the organization to constantly adapt to the demands of its business environment. The scale of the transformation differs for each HPO change initiative, depending on the results of the HPO diagnosis. Directly after the HPO diagnosis and at the beginning of the HPO transformation, a planned approach predominates; conversely, while maintaining the HPO, the emergent approach predominates.

This study is relevant by enabling managers to learn the essentials of a change approach for creating an HPO in the present-day business environment. Based on these essentials, managers can start to develop a change approach that is appropriate for creating their own HPO.

The theoretical relevance of this paper is that, although much literature exists concerning approaches for organizational change initiatives, no change approaches specifically designed for creating an HPO can be found in the literature. This paper provides such an approach.

This paper aims to revisit the viable system model (VSM) discussing it from both the theoretical and the empirical standpoints, and ascertaining its relevance for organizational governance.

A combination of theoretical and empirical components is used: introduction to theory and critique on the one hand; case studies and a large sample empirical study on the other.

The VSM has proved to be a powerful means of governance for organizations in turbulent times. It conveys a durable, reliable knowledge. This has been corroborated in both case studies and a large-scale empirical study.

Application of the model under study can activate a huge potential for the improvement of organizations.

This contribution tests the VSM in an unseen fashion – qualitatively and quantitatively. The results suggest that a high confidence in the model is justified. It conveys to managers and leaders an unconventional, superior approach to both diagnosis and design of their organizations.

The field of organization development is fragmented and lacks a coherent and integrated theory and method for developing an effective organization. A 20-year action research program led to the development and evaluation of the Strategic Fitness Process (SFP) – a platform by which senior leaders, with the help of consultants, can have an honest, collective, and public conversation about their organization's alignment with espoused strategy and values. The research has identified a syndrome of six silent barriers to effectiveness and a dynamic theory of organizational effectiveness. Empirical evidence from the 20-year study demonstrates that SFP always enables truth to speak to power safely, and in a majority of cases enables senior teams to transform silent barriers into strengths, realign their organization's design and strategic management process with strategy and values, and in a few cases employ SFP as an ongoing learning and governance process. Implications for organization and leadership development and corporate governance are discussed.

It is clear from work carried out in psychotherapy and family therapy, that individuals and families get stuck because an impasse develops between a conscious desire for change and an unconscious desire to avoid change. The authors consider how this can apply to groups and organisations. It is assumed that organisations are living organisms with conscious and unconscious processes. Five different ways in which organisations “get stuck” are identified and the interventions appropriate to each particular organisation blockage are described.

Since the 1970s, French researchers have elaborated a theoretical framework built around the concept of organizational identity. This theoretical framework integrates concepts from several research disciplines, including sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis, and history. Although this approach focuses primarily on improving the understanding of the internal functioning of organizations, the approach also helps marketing professionals who are responsible for managing organizational image and organizational communications. The diagnosis of an organization's identity permits marketing executives to interpret the symbolic products produced by the organization, even though these symbolic products may not have been designed in a rational or deliberate manner. Reviews the principal concepts and methods elaborated over the last 20 years by researchers working in this perspective, emphasizing the importance of these ideas for marketing specialists. Describes recent developments in identity theory based on the sociological theory developed by Pierre Bourdieu. Presents an original diagnostic methodology ‐ socioanalysis.