Business schools inside the academy: What are the prospects for interdepartmental research collaboration?

Established literature about the role of business schools tends towards more parochial concerns, such as their need for a more pluralist and socially reflexive mode of knowledge production (Starkey and Tiratsoo 2007; Starkey et al 2009) or the failure of management’s professionalism project expressed through the business school movement (Khurana 2007). When casting their gaze otherwise, academic commentators examine business schools’ weakening links with management practice (Bennis and O’Toole 2005). Our theme makes a novel contribution to the business school literature through exploring prospects for research collaborations with other university departments. We draw upon the case of UK business schools, which are typically university-based (unlike some of their European counterparts), and provide illustrations relating to collaboration with medical schools to make our analytical points. We might expect that business schools and medical schools effectively collaborate given their similar vocational underpinnings, but at the same time, there are significant differences, such as differing paradigms of research and the extent to which the practice fields are professionalised. This means collaboration may prove challenging. In short, the case of collaboration between business schools and medical schools is likely to illuminate the challenges for business schools ‘reaching out’ to other university departments

Hybrid manager-professionals' identity work : the maintenance and hybridization of medical professionalism in managerial contexts

We examine the ‘identity work’ of manager–professional ‘hybrids’, specifically medical professionals in managerial roles in the British National Health Service, to maintain and hybridize their professional identity and wider professionalism in organizational and policy contexts affected by managerialist ideas. Empirically, we differentiate between ‘incidental hybrids’, who represent and protect traditional institutionalized professionalism while temporarily in hybrid roles, and ‘willing hybrids’, who developed hybrid professional–managerial identities during formative identity work or later in reaction to potential professional identity violations. Questions about willing hybrids' professional identities led them to challenge and disrupt institutionalized professionalism, and use and integrate professionalism and managerialism, creating more legitimate hybrid professionalism in their managerial context. By aligning professionalism with their personal identity, and regulating and auditing other professionals, willing hybrids also position hybrids collectively as elite within their profession

Knowledge mobilization in healthcare organizations: a view from the resource-based view of the firm

his short literature review argues that the Resource-Based View (RBV) school of strategic management has recently become of increased interest to scholars of healthcare organizations. RBV links well to the broader interest in more effective Knowledge Mobilization (KM) in healthcare. The paper outlines and discusses key concepts, texts and authors from the RBV tradition and gives recent examples of how RBV concepts have been applied fruitfully to healthcare settings. It concludes by setting out a future research agend

Government narratives of public management reform:The Case of English Health and Social Care.

This paper analyses public management narratives in three recent UK policy documents proposing reform in health and social care. The analysis identifies the persistence of New Public Management (NPM), Network Governance (NG) and Digital Era Governance (DEG) narratives, while finding narratives of reprofessionalisation to be weak and contradictory. The paper argues that strong master narratives associated with NPM, particularly emphasizing marketization and patient choice, and NG, focusing on collaboration and integration, are enabled and supported by substantial DEG and weak reprofessionalisation sub-narratives. Thus, the paper concludes that public management narratives coexist in a hybridized manner, while raising questions about potential tensions between these narratives, which are glossed over in policy documents. This finding therefore highlights the need for further research exploring the political and rhetorical use of different narratives in public management reform

Strategic Management in Public Organizations: Profiling the Public Entrepreneur as Strategist

Our core argument is that the entrepreneurial school of thought in strategic management as conceptualized by Mintzberg and colleagues holds explanatory value for advancing knowledge about the behavior of public sector organizations, as it does for private firms, albeit with important qualifications when applied to public services: chiefly, the temporal limitation in post for the office-holder of a public organization. After describing our methods, we present qualitative data from a longitudinal case study of strategy making in an European Union (EU) agency, the European Aviation Safety Agency, which has become a key actor globally in civil aviation. Our interpretation of the case suggests the additional usefulness of the entrepreneurial school of strategy, suitably adapted for public agency settings, as an explanatory prism to enlarge the repertoire of conceptual tools for the study of public agencies. Our broader argument is that the field of strategic management may provide theoretical resources for the study of public agencies, provided its theoretical lenses are properly selected and adapted

Epistemic fit and the mobilisation of management knowledge in health care

We discuss the mobilisation of management knowledge in health care, drawing on six qualitative case studies in a diverse range of health care settings. Drawing on theory about management knowledge and practices’ ‘fit’, and emergent theory about ‘epistemic stances’, we explain how cultural/institutional, political and epistemic fit and clashes between the norms, interests and epistemic stances of different communities affected knowledge mobilisation in these settings. We also highlight the key role of knowledge brokers in ‘fitting’ knowledge within contexts as part of their own identity work. Yet we note that knowledge brokers’ ability to mobilise and fit knowledge depended on having a senior role or senior level support, and credibility/legitimacy with dominant communities. We suggest that our novel concepts of ‘epistemic fit’ and ‘fitting’ are useful in explaining the process of knowledge mobilisation, particularly in complex pluralistic health care contexts containing multiple epistemic communities which produce, use and value knowledge in different ways

Personalisation - An Emergent Institutional Logic in Healthcare? Comment on “(Re) Making the Procrustean Bed? Standardization and Customization as Competing Logics in Healthcare”

Abstract This commentary on the recent think piece by Mannion and Exworthy reviews their core arguments, highlighting their suggestion that recent forces for personalization have emerged which may counterbalance the strong standardization wave which has been evident in many healthcare settings and systems over the last two decades. These forces for personalization can take very different forms. The commentary explores the authors’ suggestion that these themes can be fruitfully examined theoretically through an institutional logics (ILs) literature, which has recently been applied by some scholars to healthcare settings. This commentary outlines key premises of that theoretical tradition. Finally, the commentary makes suggestions for taking this IL influenced research agenda further, along with some issues to be addressed

A Call for University-Based Business Schools to “Lower Their Walls:” Collaborating With Other Academic Departments in Pursuit of Social Value

The walls around many business schools remain high, eroding interdisciplinary education and research collaboration that might address some grand challenges facing society. In response, we adopt a public interest perspective and argue business schools should lower their walls to engage with other academic departments to address such grand challenges in a way that engenders social value. We identify forces for lower and higher walls that surround business schools and influence prospects for interdisciplinary collaboration. We highlight examples of successful relationships between business schools and other academic departments, which offer some optimism for a reimagined public interest mission for business schools. Finally, we draw out some boundary conditions to take a more contingent view of possibilities for such interdisciplinary collaboration encompassing business schools

A Call for University-Based Business Schools to “Lower Their Walls:” Collaborating With Other Academic Departments in Pursuit of Social Value

The walls around many business schools remain high, eroding interdisciplinary education and research collaboration that might address some grand challenges facing society. In response, we adopt a public interest perspective and argue business schools should lower their walls to engage with other academic departments to address such grand challenges in a way that engenders social value. We identify forces for lower and higher walls that surround business schools and influence prospects for interdisciplinary collaboration. We highlight examples of successful relationships between business schools and other academic departments, which offer some optimism for a reimagined public interest mission for business schools. Finally, we draw out some boundary conditions to take a more contingent view of possibilities for such interdisciplinary collaboration encompassing business schools