Search results

Looks at the 2000 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference held at the University of Cardiff in Wales on 6/7 September 2000. Spotlights the 76 or so presentations within and shows that these are in many, differing, areas across management research from: retail finance; precarious jobs and decisions; methodological lessons from feminism; call centre experience and disability discrimination. These and all points east and west are covered and laid out in a simple, abstract style, including, where applicable, references, endnotes and bibliography in an easy‐to‐follow manner. Summarizes each paper and also gives conclusions where needed, in a comfortable modern format.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how notions of disciplinary power manifest themselves in audit regulatory developments. When it comes to research on the relationship between audit quality and regulation, much of the prior scholarly work has kept to the positivist tradition of quantitative analysis under the guise of “economic rationality”. In contrast, this research takes an interpretive approach to provide an alternate and unique perspective, using motifs of Foucauldian power and control to illuminate the operation of external regulation in a South African setting. The paper examines what may be loosely described as a mandatory whistle-blowing duty imposed on external auditors.

Detailed interviews with some of South Africa's leading corporate governance experts are used to highlight the disciplinary effect of an auditor's duty to bring reportable irregularities to the attention of an independent regulator.

Blowing the whistle on irregularities contributes, not only to increasing the information made available to stakeholders, but to creating a valid expectation of auditors serving the public interest by enhancing a sense of transparency and accountability. Elements of resistance to panoptic-like control are, however, also present suggesting that, in part, the regulation may simply be creating the illusion of active reporting.

The research relies on a relatively small sample of subject experts and does not provide a complete account of regulatory developments taking place in South Africa and abroad. Additional research on the role of whistle-blowing in an external audit setting is needed focusing particularly on similarities and variations in interpretations of reporting by auditors from the perspective of more diverse stakeholder groups.

Mandatory reporting of irregularities by auditors can provided additional useful information for stakeholders and may contribute to demands for more effective reporting by auditors.

Arms-length regulation of the audit profession should not be seen only as a means of improving audit quality and the utility of audit reports. Powerful social forces are also. This research demonstrates how laws and regulations have a potential disciplinary effect on the audit profession that contributes to a restoration of confidence in the audit process after it is best by scandals, even if motifs of power and control are somewhat illusionary.

This research addresses the need for more detailed analysis of precisely how mechanisms of accountability and transparency operate in the broader corporate governance arena. The paper also contributes to the calls for more detailed, context-specific studies of audit. Finally, this paper is one of the first to employ a critical theoretical perspective on audit in an African setting, responding to the need for contextual, methodological and theoretical eclecticism in the area of corporate governance research.

This research aims to examine and understand the rationales and modalities behind the use of disclosure before, during and after a corporate governance scandal involving CPA Australia (CPAA).

Data beyond CPAA's annual reports were collected, such as news articles, media releases, an independent review panel (IRP) report, and the Chief Operating Officer's letter to members. These disclosures were manually coded and analysed through the word counts and word trees in NVivo. This study also relied on Norbert Elias' conceptual tool of power games among networks of actors – figurations – to model the scandal as a power game between the old Board, the press, concerned members, the IRP and the new Board. This study analysed the data to reveal a collective and in fieri power balance that changed with the phases of the scandal.

A mix of voluntary, involuntary, requested and absent disclosures was important in triggering, managing and ending the CPAA scandal. Moreover, communication and disclosure fulfilled a constitutive role since both: mobilised actors, enabled coordination among actors, contributed to pursuing shared goals and influenced power balances. Such a constitutive role was at the heart of the ability of coalitions of figurations to challenge and restore the powerful status quo.

This research introduces to accounting studies the collective and in fieri dimensions of power from figurational theory. Moreover, the research sheds new light on using voluntary, involuntary, requested and absent disclosures before, during and after a corporate crisis.

The purpose of this paper is to bring the discussion on the relationship between management and medicine a step forward by focussing on: first, how the notion of hybrid and hybridity has been used in the literature on healthcare management. Second, the authors have mapped the alternative ways that the concept have been used in order to conceptualize a more specific set of possible combinations of managerial and professional roles in healthcare management. Hybrid management is a topic that ought to be important for training, communication among researchers and for identifying areas of future research: in management, in healthcare reforms, in sociology of professions and in theory of organizations.

The authors provide a systematic literature review in order to map the various conceptualizations of hybrid management. The authors have searched for “hybrid leadership,” “hybrid management” combined with hospitals and health care in a whole range of journals, identified in Google scholar, Academic Search Premier, Academic Research Library and Sage Publication. The authors have also used already existing literature reviews. The search has resulted in more than 60 articles and book titles that have been classified according to whether they make a fit with three alternative ways of conceptualizing hybrid management. The authors are aware that they might have missed some relevant literature but the literature included is quite comprehensive.

In the literature the authors have found three conceptualizations of management. The clinical manager who combines professional self-governance with a general management logic. The commercialized manager who combines professional self-governance with an enterprise logic. The neo-bureaucratic manager who combines self-governance with a neo-bureaucratic logic.

In most analyses of hybridity in management and organization the notion of hybrid has been used in a rather superficial way. By mapping the various uses of hybrid in the literature and suggest how a professional logic may be combined with a set of alternative logics of management the authors provide a platform for developing the concept of hybrid management into a more useful tool for analyses of changes in healthcare management.

The potential for including patients in implementation processes has received limited attention in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to explore the different roles adopted by 63 patients that emerged during and after four participatory quality improvement interventions, and the nature of their impact upon implementation processes and outcomes.

A cross-case ethnographic comparison of Experience-based Co-design in two clinical pathways in two UK NHS Trusts.

Two key themes emerge from the data. First, the authors found a range of different roles adopted by patients within and across the four projects; some were happy to share their experiences, others also helped to identify improvement priorities alongside staff whilst others were also involved in developing potential solutions with the staff who had cared for them. A few participants also helped implement those solutions and became “experts by experience” through engaging in the whole co-design process. Second, in terms of the impact of patient engagement with the co-design process whilst the changes championed by patients and carers were often small scale, as co-designers patients provided innovative ideas and solutions. Through their involvement and contributions they also acted as catalysts for broader change in the attitudes of staff by providing a motivation for wider organisational and attitudinal changes.

The research was conducted in two clinical pathways in two NHS trusts. However, the findings complement and add to the growing body of knowledge on experience based co-design.

Patient engagement is likely to require support and facilitation to ensure that patients can play a meaningful role as partners and co-designers in service improvement and implementation. Different roles suited particular individuals, with participants stepping in and out of the co-design process at various stages as suited their needs, capacities and (albeit sometimes perceptions re) skills. In this context, facilitation needs to be sensitive to individual needs and flexible to support involvement.

Patients and carers can play active roles in service improvement, particularly where the approach facilitate active engagement as co-designers.

Analysis of the role patients and carers in implementation and improvement.

Discusses how downsizing has been associated with the move towards lean working in organisations and with having negative consequences for employees. Considers the extent to which downsizing is lean and mean drawing on an extensive review of the available literature. Concludes that downsizing is rarely lean since it usually takes the form of quantitative changes in employment rather than qualitative changes in the process of managing. Evidence also suggests that downsizing usually has an adverse effect on both employees who leave and those who remain with the organisation. Yet this meanness is not inevitable since it depends partly on the extent to which human resources issues are considered.

Presents 31 abstracts, edited by Johanthan Morris and Mike Reed, from the 2003 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, held at Cardiff Business School in September 2003. The conference theme was “The end of management? managerial pasts, presents and futures”. Contributions covered, for example, the changing HR role, managing Kaizen, contradiction in organizational life, organizational archetypes, changing managerial work and gendering first‐time management roles. Case examples come from areas such as Mexico, South Africa, Australia, the USA, Canada and Turkey.

In forensic mental health wards, patients spend more time with healthcare assistants (HCAs) than qualified nurses. Despite this, there is no universally utilised standardised HCA training. The purpose of this paper is to assess the HCAs’ experiences in the HCA role in order to better understand how to build on the HCA role to ensure safe practice, and enhance staff well-being.

HCAs working on low and medium secure NHS forensic mental health units were recruited through purposive methods. HCAs engaged in a semi-structured interview, with questions surrounding their support needs, clinical decision making and perception of risks in the role. Template analysis was used, applying an a priori template based on the existing literature to interview transcripts.

The participants described the HCA experience to be defined by two master themes: “HCA factors” and “organisational factors”. HCAs valued a holistic patient view which prized patients’ experiences. The participants described a lack of role clarity which may be defined through ward expectations and professional experience.

HCAs seek a holistic view of the patient; however, some overlooked patient offences in order to do their job. Future research should address how looking past offences impacts security and HCAs’ well-being long term.

The major purpose of this paper is to answer the overarching questions of how multinational corporations (MNCs) address the multiple institutional logics of accountability and pressures of the field in which they operate and how the dominant logic changes and shifts in response to such pressures pre- and post-disaster situation.

In-depth interpretive textual analyses of multiple longitudinal data sets are conducted to study the case of the Fundão dam disaster. The data sources include historical documents, academic articles and public institutional press releases from 2000 to 2016, covering the environment leading to the case study incident and its aftermath.

The findings reveal how MNCs' plurality of and, at times, conflicting institutional logics shape the organizational behaviors, actions and nonactions of actors pre-, peri- and post-disaster. More specifically, the predominance bureaucracy embedded in the state-corporatist logic of the host country before a disaster allows the strategic subunit of an MNC to continue operating while causing various forms of environmental damage until a globally visible disaster triggers a reversal in the dominant logic toward the embrace of wider, global, emergent social and environmental accountability.

This paper contributes to discussions regarding the need to explore in depth of how MNCs respond to multiple institutional pressures in practice. This study extends the literature concerning disaster accountability, state-corporatism and logic-shifting by exploring how MNCs respond to the plurality of institutional logics and pressures over time and showing how, in some cases, logics not only reinforce but also contrast with each other and how a globally exposed disaster may trigger a shift in the dominant logic governing MNCs' responses.