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This paper contributes to a deeper understanding of front-line service workers’ experience of the worker–client relationship. It is based on a series of in-depth interviews with non-professionally affiliated workers in new front-line roles in UK mental health services. The findings cover three main areas: worker motivation and orientation; the nature of the worker–client relationship; and the role played in the relationship by the structure of work and relationships with colleagues. Evidence is found to support the use of the framework of Korczynski (Sociology, 43, 2009), but the research also suggests ways in which each of the framework's elements might be developed. It is argued that the idea of ‘caring’ is in need of refinement; that worker–client relations should not be seen solely in terms of client sovereignty and that a focus on the technical organisation of work can only go some way towards providing an understanding of the worker experience.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to look at the role relational coordination might play in understanding the relationship between high-performance work systems (HPWS) and organizational performance. Design/methodology/approach Research was conducted in a large financial services provider in Pakistan. Across 120 branches of the bank, data on relational coordination and on the practices making up HPWS were obtained from employees by means of a questionnaire survey. Data on branch-level performance were obtained independently of this, from the bank itself. Findings Analysis shows relational coordination to be a mediating variable between HPWS and branch performance. Relational coordination is also a mediating variable for each of the three component parts of HPWS: ability-enhancing, motivation-enhancing and opportunity-enhancing HR practices. Practical implications These results have important implications from two points of view. From the point of view of relational coordination, they show how the concept might apply in a previously under-researched sector, and also how relational coordination might act as a mediator for HR practices other than those aimed directly at enhancing employee opportunities. Breaking down HPWS into its component parts suggests that individual employee ability and motivation might also play a role. Originality/value This suggests that the ability-motivation-opportunity model needs to place greater emphasis on opportunity, and also that more account needs to be taken of the structural aspect of work – in particular, the degree of interdependence.

Recent workforce reforms have led to the widespread expansion of non-professionally affiliated (NPA) support and assistant roles within UK public services. Research into these roles has been confined to a limited range of settings, with a focus on the consequence of change for professional workers. This article explores the emergence of ‘co-production’, whereby NPA workers contribute alongside the professional in a distinct, complementary way. Findings are drawn from semi-structured interviews with front-line workers and managers within the context of mental health workforce reform. The results build a picture of NPA working life characterised in part by autonomy and responsibility. At the same time, NPA workers rely on colleagues for support and are subject to being used indirectly by professionals. Contextual influences are considered. The conceptual implications of the analysis are brought out, both for the NPA role itself and for the broader issues involved in front line service work.

Background: This paper examines the introduction and operation of a number of support roles in mental health services. This is done in the context of concerns about the effectiveness of CMHTs.\ud \ud Aims: Three questions are addressed: the degree to which concern for the work of consultant psychiatrists informed the introduction of the new roles; what the reforms implied for the work of the psychiatrist and those in new roles; and the impact of any changes on the operation of CMHTs.\ud \ud Method: Data were collected as part of a national-level evaluation. The main means of collection was the semi-structured interview.\ud \ud Results: The study shows: that reform was underpinned by concerns about the workload of psychiatrists; and that while in principle the responsibilities of the psychiatrist were to be distributed across other team members, those in new roles felt themselves to be isolated.\ud \ud \ud Conclusions: Despite the intentions of policy, the creation of the new roles did little to extend the idea of distributed responsibility in CMHTs.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is twofold: to understand how and why employee attitudes to change might change over time; and to demonstrate what type of research might best capture this change. Design/methodology/approach – The paper brings together three studies of the same organization, conducted at different times by the same researchers. Findings – Employee attitudes to change in the three episodes are portrayed in terms of the assumptions that seem to underpin them. The first episode is characterized by a challenge to the basic assumptions employees have about their work; the second, by a fragmentation of assumptions according to sub-group; and the third, by the confirmation of a new set of assumptions about what work involves. Research limitations/implications – The paper concludes that fieldwork of a longitudinal nature is something quite rare, and its incorporation into research design needs to move beyond dealing with it through an uneasy combination of retrospection and extended organizational exposure. Originality/value – The paper provides a rare and valuable account of how employee attitudes to change might change over time. The research design on which it is based, though fortuitous in nature, overcomes a number of the weaknesses of more conventional studies in this area.

Thanks for a great 2017, and welcome to what will be a fantastic 2018. On behalf of the Editorial Board, we would like to take this opportunity to thank all our submitting authors, reviewers, reade...

In an increasingly globalised world, discussions about the unfettered mobility of capital, people, information and ideas are contrasted by debates about regulation of work and employment. Given the...

Institutional logics have been the focus of researchers' interest as a means of comparing and contrasting groups within organizations and their influence and impact on each other. The findings often suggest that these groups may collaborate, compete, comingle or coexist. The interest for researchers is how such interaction between logics takes place and what the final outcome of their interaction is. But not all logics compete or collaborate in the ways suggested. This article examines how one logic dominates to the detriment of another during a merger between two government departments. Two questions underlie this research into merging institutional logics: how does a logic uphold its dominance when confronted by an alternative or competing logic and what is the wider influential institutional context?

This paper is a reply to Carter et al.’s response to an earlier paper of ours in this journal on the subject of teamworking under Lean in the UK public services . Our reply covers the following issues which Carter et al. have raised: the literature we used to structure our findings; the way in which we used concepts such as autonomy and teamworking; our research methods and approach; how Carter et al.’s newly available data on teamworking might be interpreted; and how data drawn from an official employee attitude survey might best be understood. On the basis of this, we conclude that Carter et al.’s paper fails to meet its objectives. On some things, the authors are simply wrong; on others, they grossly misrepresent our position; on still others, their interpretations are, at best, highly questionable.

Internationalisation and globalization have led to significant changes to work and employment dynamics, with demands for more sustainable management, procedural control, institutional governance, and political accountability. Against this background, there is renewed attention to regulation, with questions about its terms, nature and quality, as well as its role in shaping the employment relationship. An important concern for international and comparative human resource management (I/CHRM) is understanding the impact of these changes on arrangements and structures within and between countries, and the role of regulation as part of new frameworks to manage work and people. Regulation sits at the centre of competing demands between economic and social concerns, which can be seen both as complementary and as irreconcilable so there are challenges to theorise and empirically map the complexity of these tensions. The article outlines key issues related to the regulation of work and employment that are relevant to the field of I/CHRM, discussing the changes to dynamics, processes and structures, and the tensions that concern the field. The article calls for more comprehensive insight into the theoretical links between regulation and I/CHRM, as well as more empirical evidence of their interplay in different contexts. It concludes by suggesting that engaging with the paradoxes and ambiguities related to different competing agendas of regulation of work and employment, and exploring these in relation to different social actors within and across geographies is a significant step in advancing research in this area.

The long-running UK debate over the relationship between employment relations and economic performance is examined. Its four phases are identified as: British worker question, British economic miracle, ‘what do unions do?’ and Human Resource Management (HRM) and performance. Change in the terms of debate is observed. Important common threads are identified. Recommendations for future research are made.

Organizational Memory Studies (OMS) is limited by its managerialist, presentist preoccupation with the utility of memory for knowledge management. The dominant model of memory in OMS is that of a storage bin. But this model has been rejected by psychologists because it overlooks the distinctly human subjective experience of remembering, i.e. episodic memory. OMS also fails to take account of the specific social and historical contexts of organizational memory. The methodological individualism that is prevalent in OMS makes it difficult to engage with the rapidly expanding sociological and historical literature in social memory studies, where a more social constructionist approach to ‘collective memory’ is generally favoured. However, for its part social memory studies derived from Maurice Halbwachs neglects organizations, focusing primarily on the nation as a mnemonic community. From a critical perspective organizations can be seen as appropriating society’s memory through corporate sites of memory such as historical visitor attractions and corporate museums. There is scope for a sociological and historical reorientation within OMS, drawing on social memory studies and focusing on corporate sites of memory, such as The Henry Ford museum complex, as well as the mnemonic role of founders and beginnings in organizations. Taking a social constructionist, collectivist approach to social remembering in organizations allows connections to be made between memory and other research programmes, such as organizational culture studies.

Scenarios and counterfactuals are two types of modal narrative. Modal narratives concern themselves with contingency and determinism: with questions of possibility and necessity. While scenarios are future-oriented, focused on what might yet be, counterfactuals are narratives of what might have been. Despite this fundamental temporal difference, consideration of the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of modal narratives as a genre enables us to elucidate some critical issues concerning scenarios as a foresight methodology. In particular, the scenario literature has tended to avoid extended discussion of its implicit assumptions concerning causation, necessity, possibility and contingency. By confronting the modal nature of foresight methodologies more explicitly, the futures community may begin to lay more secure philosophical foundations for their deployment.

PurposeThis paper seeks to identify and define the genre of corporate history within the pervasive historical discourse produced by and about organizations which tells the past of an organization across a multiplicity of texts: published works – commissioned and critical accounts, academic tomes and glossy coffee‐table books – as well as web pages, annual reports and promotional pamphlets.Design/methodology/approachThe approach takes the form of systematic reading of historical narratives for 85 mainly British and US companies from the Fortune Global 500. For these companies, a search was carried out for US printed sources in the British Library and a survey was conducted of historical content in web pages.FindingsFrom extensive reading of the historical discourse, recurrent formal features (medium, authorship, publication, paratext and imagery) and elements of thematic content (narrative, characters, cultural paradigms and business success), which together define the genre of corporate history, have been identified. Such a definition provides competence in the reading of historical narratives of organizations and raises questions regarding the role of history in organizational identity, memory and communication. In conclusion it is argued that the interpretation of corporate history cannot be reduced to its promotional function for organizations.Research limitations/implicationsThe list of the formal features and thematic content of corporate history detailed here is by no means exhaustive. They are not variables, but signs, which, in various combinations, compose the narrative and signify the genre.Practical implicationsIt seems likely that coffee‐table books will increasingly replace academic commissioned histories, with consultants professionalizing the discourse and formalizing the genre of corporate history.Originality/valueThe genre of corporate history has hitherto been neglected in organization theory, where the linguistic turn has led to a preoccupation with talk as text. The use of genre to analyse corporate history represents a textual turn to literary organizational texts as text.

PurposeImposed change at work can present individuals with ambiguous events about which they experience ambivalence in their interpretation of meaning. This paper seeks to examine the dimensions of ambivalence as defined by Piderit among a group of managers in the public sector.Design/methodology/approachThe research is based on a group of 20 Band 11 senior managers responsible for collecting tax and between them covering the UK in a business restructured into a large business group. The authors adopted a qualitative approach involving semi‐structured interviews seeking to uncover individual accounts of imposed change, allowing subjects to reflect on their experience of change and its meaning to them.FindingsThe findings suggested that long‐service civil servants and private sector managers draw on their previous experience to interpret the changes they experience, giving rise to different perceived ambiguity between rhetoric and reality. Each group either comes to terms with ambiguity by interpreting the meaning of change to fit in with their expectancies of change, or, in one case, do not reconcile the change which then becomes a point of resistance.Practical implicationsThe case highlights the need for change agents to understand the full complexity of employee attitudes. Not only can a variety of attitudes be identified, but each set of responses can be understood in variety of ways.Originality/valueThe devil in the detail of imposed change offers both researchers and managers of change a significant source of information about likely individual and group responses to imposed change at work. Piderit's framework offers three dimensions of ambivalence which clarify different individual responses to imposed change.

This paper presents a review of recent survey-based research looking at the contribution of teamwork to organizational performance. In particular, it focuses on empirical studies in which both teamwork and performance are directly measured in a quantitative way. The paper begins by identifying four interrelated dimensions of teamwork effectiveness: attitudinal, behavioural, operational and financial. The first two represent transmission mechanisms by which organizational performance can be improved. The latter two provide direct measures of organizational outcomes. The review shows that teamworking has a positive impact on all four dimensions of performance. It also reveals that, when teamwork is combined with structural change, performance can be further enhanced. The paper concludes by highlighting some important research gaps that future studies could address. ispartof: International Journal of Management Reviews vol:10 issue:2 pages:127-148 status: published

This article uses the 1998 UK Workplace Employee Relations Survey to address two main issues: whether a relationship between teamworking and performance can be said to exist; and, if it can, how that relationship might be explained. For the first of these we construct a variable that measures the extent of teamworking within an establishment. This is found to be positively and significantly related to productivity and financial performance. To address our second main issue we examine the idea that the key factor in performance is the degree of teams' decision-making autonomy. We look at this by constructing a measure of teamworking intensity. This is found to be positively and significantly associated with productivity and quality levels. Taken alongside other studies, these results are used to suggest that, in looking at the teamworking-performance relationship, the focus of attention should be on the structural properties of teams rather than the individual team members' experiences of work.

Organizations are increasingly being called to account for their history. In particular, German and non-German companies have been called to account for their relations with the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. Organizations are not only accountable for past activity, but also for previous, often misleading, historical accounts of their behaviour. Thus we are interested in how an organization deals with historical accounts of its past, and how this reflects its culture. Therefore we draw upon concepts from organizational culture studies, and specifically Martin's three perspectives of culture as integration, differentiation, and fragmentation. We take the illustrative case of Bertelsmann, the German publishing company. Revelations of its record under the Nazis, when it published anti-semitic literature, were brought to light by Hersch Fischler in 1998, when Bertelsmann was in the process of taking over Random House. These revelations jarred with the company's image of corporate social responsibility and undermined the company legend, which alleged that it had an impeccable record, and had even been closed down for opposing the Nazis. The Bertelsmann case highlights the dilemmas involved in organizations invoking their past. Debate over the Holocaust has highlighted the dilemmas of truth and relativism in representations of history. The Bertelsmann case highlights similar dilemmas for organizational culture perspectives.

Our study contributes towards a burgeoning literature that argues organizational performance is heavily influenced by what happens in the middle of the organization, rather than at the top. Examining the UK National Health Service, our study develops the work of Floyd and Wooldridge (1992, 1994, 1997, 2000). It utilizes role theory to conceptualize changing experiences of middle managers in organizations as a role transition. Associated with this are problems of role conflict and role ambiguity (Biddle, 1979, 1986; Biddle and Thomas, 1966; Kahn et al., 1964, 1966). Our study illustrates that there are limiting factors to a more strategic role for middle managers associated with the professional bureaucracy context. However, role conflict and ambiguity can be mediated by a socialization process, which values incoming identity and personal characteristics (Van Maanen and Schein, 1979).

In terms of its implications for work and production, studies of teamworking have generally relied on concepts of autonomy and flexibility. An in-depth, qualitative case study of the UK Inland Revenue reveals a form of teamworking in which both autonomy and flexibility play little part. It is argued that teamworking in this case is best conceptualized by giving greater weight to interdependence. In particular, teamworking in the Inland Revenue works through the outcome interdependence engendered by the emphasis on the team’s work targets. This form of teamworking is given the name ‘target-based teamworking’. Certain aspects of the nature of production appear to encourage this form of teamworking. More generally, the case promotes interdependence as a means of understanding teamworking, and suggests that the key to this understanding is an analysis of the relationship between interdependence and autonomy.

Our study examines the interaction of human resource policies and practices with the implementation of teamworking. Put simply, do certain human resource policies and practices support the implementation of teamworking? Do certain human resource policies and practices work against the implementation of teamworking? It utilizes an illustrative case from the UK public sector – the Inland Revenue, the UK tax assessment and collection agency – to address the research question. The case of the Inland Revenue gives support to the argument that it is necessary to identify and understand the differences between a variety of forms of teamworking. With the variation in forms of teamworking that are implemented, there may be variations in the human resource management context. In short, a contingency approach to the interaction of the implementation of teamworking with human resource policies and practices may be appropriate. In the case, teamworking was implemented to facilitate the introduction of a new tax regime...

The paper meets a need for more context specific empirical research in this area. Subject to medical group power, the three cases studied suggest that MIS/IT enhances the role of middle managers since it is they who are best placed to ‘synthesise’ information from MIS/IT for executive management.

Studies of teamworking suggest that, for it to be successful, fundamental changes must take place in many aspects of an organization’s structure and operations. This study of the Inland Revenue reveals that only in a few aspects does its operation of teamworking follow this model. The range of work is little changed; employees exercise little in the way of new skills; they appear reluctant to adopt responsibility for the work of others; and the performance management system operates on the basis of individual performance. Nonetheless, teamworking appears to work in the Inland Revenue. It does so by having a team rather than an individual allocation of work, and by encouraging individual identity with the team target. This suggests that, although a limited version of teamworking exists, this might be all an organization needs. Thus what is needed is a more sophisticated understanding of teamworking, its objectives, and the relationship between the two.

Despite the importance of the relationship between the HR function and linemanagement (see Guest, 1987; Store y, 1992), there appears to be a lack of understandingof the process of enhancing the willingness and ability of line managers to take onresponsibility for HR issues. It is towards plugging this re s e a rch gap that this case studycontributes. Speci® c a l l y, it focuses on middle-level line managers and their involvementin the management of human re s o u rces in an NHS hospital trust. Using a frameworkdrawn from the strategic management literature (Floyd and Wooldridge, 1992, 1994,1997), it examines their involvement in realising strategic change in the HR area andthe organisational conditions that frame this. The study suggests that, in theirrelationship with the HR function, middle managers may enjoy signi® cant involvementin bringing about strategic change ± beyond merely implementing the strategydetermined by the HR function; the relationship is one of partnership. To facilitate this,middle managers should be allowed to cross functional boundaries within theo rganisation, there should be signi® cant investment in their development, HR strategyshould consist of broad themes rather than tight prescription and the HR functionshould operate alongside middle-level line managers.

This introductory chapter looks at the antecedents, the nature and the various dimensions of'teamworking'. Teamworking is drawing on a variety of traditions, which has resulted in a number of different types and designs of teams. It is necessary to keep all dimensions in mind in order to reach a historically informed judgement of the current forms of teamworking and their shortcomings. Variants of teams need to be analysed by employing a multidimensional framework - teamworking will be more appropriate in some settings than in others. This caution, which had been an aspect of sociotechnical systems thinking from its inception, is shared by all the papers selected for this special issue.

The concern of this paper lies with empowerment of middle managers in a community health trust. It considers the impact of traditional structures and cultures upon the level of decision which middle managers are empowered to make. The conclusion reached is one which suggests that the level of discretion available to middle managers was one of making task‐orientated decisions rather than decisions about strategic change. However, even this was compromised by financial constraints and by “best practices” imposed by the personnel function.

The concept of culture promised to make organization studies more historical and to provide theoretical relevance for business history. This promise has not been fulfilled. The conventions at various levels of organizational culture studies prevent them from becoming more historical, and the conventions of business history make it difficult to engage with the concept of culture. Corporate culturism imposes a narrative structure that privileges the role of founders in history. Similarly, corporate sponsorship reinforces the tendency for business historians to endorse the unity and continuity of corporate cultures. The influence of economics in business history reduces culture to a residual variable and subordinates narrative to economic models. Organizational symbolists are suspicious of narrative, which they associate with founder-centred corporate culturism. Instead, ethnographies emphasize verisimilitude and the subjective experience of the author at the expense of verifiable historical narratives. Business historians adopt an objective stance that allows them to write definitive company histories, but makes it difficult to engage with the subjectivism and relativism of organizational symbolism or the scepticism of post-modernism. Unlike organizational culture studies, post-modernism in history is identified with a return to narrative. A serious engagement with organizational culture studies might engender the much-needed critical reflex in business history. We use the rare examples of historical deconstruction in organizational culture studies (Boje 1995) and of deconstruction in business history (Church 1996) to highlight the differences between the two discourses. We argue that a more historical approach in organizational culture studies and a more reflexive engagement with the concept of culture in business history would facilitate the deconstruction of founder-centred narratives of corporate culture.

Ulrich's recent influential claim is that the personnel function needs to be seen in terms of its multiple roles. This paper aims to deepen this kind of analysis in two ways: by focusing on specific areas of personnel work and by looking at the processes - in particular, the relationships with other organizational actors - through which these roles are assumed. A case study of the personnel function in a UK health service trust examines three areas: local pay, competence-based recruitment and skill mix. In looking at the development of the function's role in each of these, the analysis concentrates on its relationship with middle-level operational managers. The case reveals differences in perception between the personnel function and the middle managers, and shows how the relationship between the two groups shapes the role the function takes on in each of the areas examined.

The characteristics of the largest British manufacturing firms are analysed in order to argue that the form of organization adopted at corporate and plant level by such firms is distinctive. The first part of the paper looks at the characteristic kinds and types of productive activities that the largest British firms undertake. It is then suggested that there is a distinctive pattern of organization for production at plant level, described as the ‘new flexible firm’, the features of which are formally set out. The new flexible firm have some key features which help to make sense of an emerging pattern of workplace industrial relations in manufacturing. The way this new form of organization at plant level utilizes labour contradicts rather than supports the expectations of some analysts about the importance of human resource management.

In the late 1980s, the idea of Japanization dominated debates about the restructuring of production, work and industrial relations in this country. There was, of course, some evidence to support the Japanization thesis; yet, even at the time of the strongest influence, there were indications that it did not describe what was happening very well. It now seems much more plausible to argue that British manufacturing companies were on a distinctive trajectory of development, which has only passing similarities to Japanese patterns of organization.

The deskilling/reskilling controversy within the labour process debate is considered within the context of the implementation of Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM). Effective implementation of CIM is shown to require an appreciation of the social and organizational issues associated with organizational change. As such the deskilling/reskilling issue is worthy of analysis within the CIM context and aspects of the labour process debate are examined. The effects of technological change on the skills of shopfloor oerators and supervisors are examined by analysing two dimensions of skill, technical complexity and discretion or autonomy. The paper concludes that the outcomes of technical change are framed by managerial perceptions and consequent decisions on how technology should be implemented in terms of work organisation.

Study of the integration of operations through the application of computer technologies has focused on the manufacturing sector. In looking at the difficulties found in operating these technologies, increasing emphasis is being placed on their organizational aspects. These have been examined in depth by Ebers and Lieb, who concentrate on the social processes in implementation and the effects of reducing organizational slack. Applies this framework to the integration of information systems in a UK hospital. Examines the effects of integration: the new system is circumvented and organizational slack is redistributed as well as removed. Shows the importance of the cultural differences underlying the social processes between those introducing and those using the system, as well as within each of these groups. The framework of analysis provided by Ebers and Lieb thus proves to be quite robust. Concludes that our concern should not be computer‐integrated manufacturing but computer‐integrated operations.

The disputes between sociologically informed organization theory and organizational economics revolve around the relative importance of efficiency and power. The concepts of efficiency and power are clarified in this paper, with distinctions being made between subjectivist and essentialist versions of efficiency, and between institutional and processual perspectives on power. Economists have largely ignored sociologists' discussions of power. It is argued that if path dependency is allowed for then organizational economics may well be compatible with an institutional view of power. The main theme of the paper is that efficiency is no less of an ‘essentially contested concept’ than power.