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On September 25, 1980, Kraft, Inc., and Dart Industries Inc. merged to form Dart and Kraft. At the time, it was one of the largest mergers in U.S. history.

The long-term financial stability of hospital systems represents a “grand challenge” in health care. New ownership forms, such as private equity (PE), promise to achieve better financial performance than nonprofit or for-profit systems. In this study, we compare two systems with many similarities, but radically different ownership structures, missions, governance, and merger and acquisition (M&A) strategies. Both were nonprofit, religious systems serving low-income communities – Montefiore Health System and Caritas Christi Health Care.

Montefiore's M&A strategy was to invest in local hospitals and create an integrated regional system, increasing revenues by adding primary doctors and community hospitals as feeders into the system and achieving efficiencies through effective resource allocation across specialized units. Slow and steady timing of acquisitions allowed for organizational learning and balancing of debt and equity. By 2019, it owned 11 hospitals with 40,000 employees and had strong positive financials and low reliance on debt.

By contrast, in 2010, PE firm Cerberus Capital bought out Caritas (renamed Steward Health Care System) and took control of the Board of Directors, who set the system's strategic direction. Cerberus used Steward as a platform for a massive debt-driven acquisition strategy. In 2016, it sold off most of its hospitals’ property for $1.25 billion, leaving hospitals saddled with long-term inflated leases; paid itself almost $500 million in dividends; and used the rest for leveraged buyouts of 27 hospitals in 9 states in 3 years. The rapid, scattershot M&A strategy was designed to create a large corporation that could be sold off in five years for financial gain – not for health care integration. Its debt load exploded, and by 2019, its financials were deeply in the red. Its Massachusetts hospitals were the worst financial performers of any system in the state. Cerberus exited Steward in 2020 in a deal that left its physicians, the new owners, holding the debt.

How do we write from the sensory body in ways that can convey the lived experience of the researcher and the researched, which can allow other researchers to make sense of their lived experience as well? What alternative writings could transform disembodied academia through dialogue and relational reflection? The aim of this chapter is to reflect on the value of the researcher’s embodied reflexivity in academic writing. More specifically, this chapter explores the ways in which we can write differently about organisational phenomena by experiencing aesthetic moments in the field. To accomplish this, I share examples of the aesthetic moments that I, as a researcher, experienced while undertaking three ethnographic projects: a study on professional dance, a study on academic motherhood and a study on female-canine companionship. This chapter identifies three aspects that allow the researcher to experience aesthetic moments – namely, appreciating sensory cues, writing ‘in and from the flesh’ and allowing vulnerability to flourish. Paying attention to the social micro-dynamics that exist between researchers and research phenomena and addressing the analytically marginalised experiences of researchers, therefore, allows for developing academic writing practices in more reflexive and sensory-appreciative directions.

There can be little doubt that the risk and fluctuation of demand taken on by employers has been increasingly passed onto employees. We are witnessing a fragmented contract of rules largely determined by employers, for employers. Here the conventional form of employment relations is non-unionism and the management of employees through Human Resource Management (HRM). This chapter critically reviews the underlying assumptions underpinning the rise of HRM, not least its unitarist undercurrent, narrow emphasis on performance and limited incorporation of multiple stakeholders. The chapter then uses Amazon as an exemplary case to illuminate these dynamics in practice and to offer a critical review of what constitutes a meaningful and successful organisation in this new era of work. The chapter concludes by detailing prospects for redress and institutional experimentation, including via technological platforms.

This chapter considers how observers can effectively and safely engage with unethical organizational behaviors. Engagement methods need to be aligned with the situational contexts of specific cases. Micro-level individual, meso-level organizational, and macro-level environmental contextual obstacles to effective and safe engagement are considered. Five types of observer ethics engagement methods are considered in the context of specific cases and contextual obstacles. Engagement methods considered are as follows: (1) evocation and framing of dialogic engagement as consistent with the identity, vision, and values of the organization; (2) win–win incentive and ethics networking methods; (3) internal and external whistle-blowing methods; (4) if the observer is in a position of organizational power, top-down forcing methods; and (5) linking of observed unethical behaviors with strong external social movements.

This paper seeks to investigate the role of social capital in facilitating the entry of new business ventures into service networks.

The empirical work is undertaken via case study‐based research, featuring three service businesses, each entering and operating in a different marketplace.

Results show that new service businesses are not necessarily able to draw on existing social capital in order to enter a business network and build relationships with potential customers and suppliers.

Future empirical work should re‐examine the distinctions between the role and nature of social capital for new service businesses.

The paper suggests how the new service entrepreneur might invest personal resources in networking to initiate relationships and build a network of customers and suppliers.

The paper presents the little researched area of networking and relationship initiation as a means of developing social capital for new service businesses.

This paper explores the reasons why consumers choose wine over other alcoholic beverages, with a focus upon the beliefs held by consumers towards the behaviour of wine drinking. The research findings show that attitudes are somewhat more predictive of the intention to drink wine than perceived social pressure. Nevertheless, both attitudinal and normative elements are required to adequately explain wine consumption. Despite the fact that the issue of health figured prominently amongst the salient beliefs identified in the qualitative phase of the research, the subsequent quantitative research found that drinking wine because of its purported health benefits was not a significant attitudinal or behavioural factor. Drinking wine because it provides ‘a variety of tastes and flavours’ and because it ‘goes well with food’ was found to be significantly more important. The results suggest that efforts to actively promote awareness of the health benefits of wine drinking may have limited value.