The role of information systems in influencing and enabling organisational design is widely acknowledged. Yet limited attention is paid to the theoretical legitimacy and conceptual basis of IS-enabled organisational change i.e., business engineering. In this paper we review business engineering’s reference disciplines critically: process-based organisational design, IS development, and IS evalu...

This chapter reflects on ongoing research in SMEs in the manufacturing and service sectors. It contrasts different approaches to the issue of preparedness from an organisational and social perspective, in two cases where new enterprise-wide business processes were implemented and integrated in different settings. In both cases, the emergence of new systems presented a huge challenge to companie...

PURPOSE The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how a change management perspective contributes new understandings about music therapy implementation processes. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH Narrative inquiry, ethnography, and arts-based research methods were used to explore the experiences of 12 music therapists who developed new services in healthcare settings. These experiences were inte...

Although the potential of IT to bring about radical organisational change has been much heralded, many such re-engineering efforts are overtly or covertly resisted and result in failure. Here we adopt Lewin’s well-known change framework supplemented by concepts from Actor Network Theory in order to explore the dynamics of resistance to change. The implementation of “electronic government” in a ...

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the micro effects of performance measures introduced in England to control hospitals, following the changing context in the policy directing the delivery of healthcare introduced by the Labour Government. The legislative framework established in 1999 reflected a discontinuity in the way that hospitals are controlled in this country. Design/methodology/approa...

In 1990 a decision was made to merge the Port Kembla (160 beds) and Wollongong (290 beds) Hospitals into the Illawarra Regional Hospital and to change the traditional functional management structure to one of product line institute management, with medical officers as part-time clinical directors. This transformation in health care management had been occurring in other sections of the Illawarr...

Introduction This working paper explores the problem of contingency in corporate communications using theoretical contributions in the field of organisational communication. The central argument presented here is that contingency in corporate communications cannot be reduced because of the unpredictability of human behaviours or future events. On the contrary, individual risk perceptions are re...

This paper presents the empirical findings of a case study of communities-of-practice networks in a previously privatised research laboratory in the information technology sector. The communities-of-practice studied were formed by scientists undertaking research in the fields of intelligent systems and artificial intelligence. The context of this study is particularly complex, with an organisat...

This article examines the impact of organisational changes in UK elite sport on the professional relations among and between different healthcare providers. The article describes the processes by which demand for elite sport healthcare has increased in the UK. It further charts the subsequent response within medicine and physiotherapy and, in particular, the institutionalisation of sport-specif...