BACKGROUND It is now recognized that many minor surgical procedures can be appropriately performed in a general practitioner setting; the government has introduced a list of minor operations, for which it is prepared to pay a limited fee, and it is now time to see whether this service can be expanded. AIM To demonstrate that a group of general practitioners (GPs) with a particular interest in...

There is an enormous literature on the concept of class that consists mostly of debates about which properties should be included in the concept. The result is a variety of class schemes and arguments that center around which class scheme is most appropriate for capturing the class structure of modern society. Dahrendorf (1959) argues that classes should be identified with authority relations. ...

Within organizations, there are typically limits to leaders’ authority. This paper explores how organizations are structured in the face of such constraints. Many organizational phenomena can be understood as due to leaders’ desire to bolster the “legitimacy” of their authority. Examples include: above-market-clearing wages, merger decisions, bureaucratic organization, and rejection of overqual...

Cloud computing is a popular buzzword in the IT industry, and promoted as a concept that will afford organizations scalable computing resources from external providers on a pay-per-use basis. With the minimization of in-house IT infrastructures, organizations have been promised sizable cost savings and reduced administrative hurdles, making it an attractive outsourcing proposition for non-IT en...