Organisation Studies

Although leadership has been studied extensively, most research has focused on the political and military spheres. More recent work has also examined the role of leadership in sectors such as manufacturing and technology, both areas where it is essential to encourage and nurture innovation. Yet, in the health sector, where innovation is now high on the policy agenda in many countries, there is a paucity of research on how leadership can foster a culture of innovation. In this perspective, written for those seeking to foster innovation in the health sector, we offer a narrative synthesis approach of eight theories and concepts that have been empirically shown to support innovation through all phases of the innovation process.

Background: Nowadays, health systems are generally acknowledged to be complex social systems. Consequently, scholars, academics, practitioners, and policy-makers are exploring how to adopt a complexity perspective in health policy and system research. While leadership and complexity has been studied extensively outside health, the implications of complexity theories for the study of leadership in healthcare have received limited attention. We carried out a scoping review of complex leadership (CL) in healthcare to investigate how CL in healthcare has been defined, theorised and conceptualised and to explore how 'CL' has been applied in healthcare settings. Methods: We followed the methodological steps proposed by : (1) specifying the research question, (2) identifying relevant studies, (3) study selection, (4) charting the data, (5) collating and summarizing the findings, and (6) reporting the results. We searched using Medline, Psychinfo, Wiley online library, and Google Scholar. Our inclusion criteria were: publication type (peer reviewed articles, theses, and book chapters); phenomenon of interest: complex leadership; context: healthcare and period of publication: between 2000 and 2016. Results: Our search and selection resulted in 37 papers (16 conceptual papers, 14 empirical studies and 7 advocacy papers). We note that empirical studies on CL are few and almost all research reported by these papers was carried out in the North (mainly in USA and UK). We found that there is some variation in definitions of CL. Furthermore, the research papers adopt mostly an explorative or explanatory approach and do not focus on assessing effectiveness of CL approaches. Finally, we found that the majority of researchers seem to adhere to the mathematical complexity perspective. Conclusion: Complexity concepts derived from natural sciences may not automatically fit management of health services. Further research into how social complexity theories may offer researchers useful grounds to empirically test CL theories in health settings is warranted. Specific attention should be paid to the multi-layered nature of leadership.

Sustainability Performance is a popular word for firms, which is highlighted for competitive advantage. Firms present their initiatives through various forms of quantitative reporting highlighting their efforts towards balancing the economic, social and environmental objectives. Many reporting metrics have been developed though this has not been standardized so far. Measurement metrics of firm performance in terms of sustainability varies within researchers and organizations based on evaluation objective. This paper makes an effort to understand sustainability through ancient and current literature, firm performance and growth. It also compiles the metrics for sustainability performance, tries to modify and add few more possible parameters for measurement while focusing on value based approach and proposes new set of metrics for performance measurement.

This paper proposes a new theoretical concept, corporational determinism, to describe narratives by which digital media corporations are presented as the main or only agency informing socio-technical change. It aims to unveil how digital media corporations employ such narratives to reinterpret the past of digital media, to underline their leading role in present societies, and to show their ability in predicting and shaping the future. Drawing on examples of digital media corporations such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, we argue that corporational determinism helps companies to market more effectively their products and to build stronger claims in support of their right to inform debates and decisions about the governance of digital technologies. Critical media scholarship should counteract the narratives of corporational determinism with more sophisticated approaches that underline the role of a wider range of actors in media change.

As a response to anthropogenic ecological problems, a group of organisation scholars have acknowledged the importance of ecocentric theorising that takes materiality and non-human objects seriously. The purpose of this article is to examine the philosophical basis of ecocentric organisation studies and develop an ontological outline for ecocentric theorising in the Anthropocene. The paper identifies the central premises of ecocentric organisations from the previous literature, and complements the theory with a set of ontological qualities common to all objects. The study draws on recent advances in object-oriented and ecological philosophies to present three essential qualities of objects, namely autonomy, uniqueness, and intrinsicality. The paper discusses how these qualities are critical in reclaiming the lost credibility and practical relevance of ecocentrism in both organisational theory and the sustainability sciences in general. To organise human activities in a sustainable manner in the new geological era, a new ontology is needed that not only includes materiality and non-humans in the analysis, but also leads to an ecologically and ethically broader understanding of ecospheric beings and their relationships.

In recent years, the healthcare sector has adopted the use of operational risk assessment tools to help understand the systems issues that lead to patient safety incidents. But although these problem-focused tools have improved the ability of healthcare organizations to identify hazards, they have not translated into measurable improvements in patient safety. One possible reason for this is a lack of support for the solution-focused process of risk control. This article describes a content analysis of the risk management strategies, policies, and procedures at all acute (i.e., hospital), mental health, and ambulance trusts (health service organizations) in the East of England area of the British National Health Service. The primary goal was to determine what organizational-level guidance exists to support risk control practice. A secondary goal was to examine the risk evaluation guidance provided by these trusts. With regard to risk control, we found an almost complete lack of useful guidance to promote good practice. With regard to risk evaluation, the trusts relied exclusively on risk matrices. A number of weaknesses were found in the use of this tool, especially related to the guidance for scoring an event's likelihood. We make a number of recommendations to address these concerns. The guidance assessed provides insufficient support for risk control and risk evaluation. This may present a significant barrier to the success of risk management approaches in improving patient safety.

This article explores the significance of contemporary celebrity businesswomen as role models for women aspiring to leadership in business. We explore the kind of gendered ideals they model and promote to women through their autobiographical narratives, and analyze how these ideals map against contemporary postfeminist sensibility to further understand the potential of these role models to redress the under-representation of women in management and leadership. Our findings show that celebrity businesswomen present a role model that we call the 'female hero', a figure characterized by 3Cs: confidence to jump over gendered barriers, control in managing these barriers, and courage to push through them. We argue that the 'female hero' role model is deeply embedded in the contemporary postfeminist sensibility; it offers exclusively individualized solutions by calling on women to change themselves to succeed, and therefore has limited capacity to challenge the current gendered status quo in management and leadership. The article contributes to current literature on role models by generating a more differentiated and socially-situated understanding of distant female role models in business and extending our understanding of their potential to generate sustainable and long-term change in advancing gendered change in management and leadership.

Background: There is a well-recognized need for greater use of theory to address research translational gaps. Normalization Process Theory (NPT) provides a set of sociological tools to understand and explain the social processes through which new or modified practices of thinking, enacting, and organizing work are implemented, embedded, and integrated in healthcare and other organizational settings. This review of NPT offers readers the opportunity to observe how, and in what areas, a particular theoretical approach to implementation is being used. In this article we review the literature on NPT in order to understand what interventions NPT is being used to analyze, how NPT is being operationalized, and the reported benefits, if any, of using NPT.

The 2017 prevalence of obesity among children (age 5-17 years) in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is 13.68%. Childhood obesity is one of the 10 top health priorities in the UAE. This study examines the quality, frequency, sources, scope and framing of childhood obesity in popular social media and three leading UAE newspapers from 2014 to 2017. During the review period, 152 newspaper articles from three leading national newspapers-Gulf News, The National and Al Ittihad-met the eligibility criteria for this study. There were 57 Facebook posts, 50 Twitter posts, 14 posted YouTube videos, and 13 Media releases on related to childhood obesity between 2014 and 2017. Childhood obesity was consistently problematized, primarily in health terms, but was not strongly linked to socioeconomic and geographical factors. Childhood obesity was framed as being predominantly influenced by individual and parental behaviours more frequently (n = 76) compared with structural or environmental factors such as the roles of the food and beverage industry (n = 22). Unlike findings from studies with adult obesity, articles advocating individual behavior changes to address childhood obesity were relatively few (n = 29). Social media may be an effective way to help children overcome obesity, in part through online interaction with health care providers and health conscious obese peers. Areas for improvement in social media use to reduce childhood obesity prevalence in UAE include enhancing public engagement with social media posts on childhood obesity, as reflected in the numbers of Likes and Retweets or Shares.

Deadline for submissions: April 1st 2019

As an organizational species, political parties seem to face impending extinction. No matter what yardstick we use to measure their vitality, political parties currently display an undeniable image of terminal crisis. Party membership is approaching rock bottom in most corners of the world, particularly in countries like France and the UK where less than two percent of the population are registered as rank and file (van Biezen et al., 2012). Similarly, voter turnout has plummeted worldwide since the middle of the twentieth century, currently reaching a level well below 70 percent (Solijonov, 2016). Voters' tendency to identify with specific parties is likewise declining due to the reconfiguration of class-consciousness and the emergence of more ‘liquid loyalties’ in the electorate (Ignazi, 2017: 201). Finally, people’s trust in political parties is at an all-time low, with politicians deemed less trustworthy than complete strangers and more dishonest than second-hand car salespeople (Newton et al., 2017). As such, it seems fair to conclude, as many have done, that the party is – or, should soon be – over (e.g. Hardt and Negri, 2004; Holloway, 2002; Rosavallon, 2008; Tormey, 2015). However, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of the party’s pending death are greatly exaggerated. Financially at least, political parties have never been stronger. Owing particularly to a significant increase in public funding since the 1980s, parties are today more resourceful than ever before. In fact, most European parties receive more than two-thirds of their income from state subsidies alone (Falguera et al., 2014). On top of this, a range of countries are currently going through a process of 'constitutionalizing' political parties, thereby acknowledging them legally as ‘desirable and procedurally necessary for the effective functioning of democracy’ (van Biezen, 2011: 187). The combination of growing public discontent and state consolidation have thus created a paradoxical situation in which political parties are as powerful as ever yet increasingly seen as illegitimate representatives of common interests (Ignazi, 2017).

Furthermore, within the past decade, a wave of young radical parties on both sides of the political spectrum has sparked a sense of party revitalization. Podemos in Spain, Movimento 5 Stelle in Italy, SYRIZA in Greece, The Pirate Party in Iceland and Germany, Feminist Initiative in Sweden, and The Alternative in Denmark figure here as prominent examples. Inspired by ‘new global revolutions’ like the Occupy Wall Street and Los Indignados (Mason, 2013), these parties have sought to restore the legitimacy of party politics by introducing a number of organizational innovations meant to increase membership participation. For instance, Podemos have redefined intra-party democracy by structuring its organization around local ‘Circles’ where members and non-members can deliberate about various policy issues (Pavía et al., 2016). Similarly, The Alternative has constructed its entire political program through a bottom-up process inspired by the open-source community (Husted and Plesner, 2017), while Jeremy Corbyn and the Momentum movement have managed to turn Britain's Labour Party into one of the biggest membership parties in Europe (Seymour, 2017). Towards the other end of the spectrum, Movimento 5 Stelle have reconfigured Italian politics by relying heavily on Internet technology for mobilizing support and coordinating events (Tronconi, 2016), whereas the Dutch anti-Islam PVV has gone the opposite direction by creating a party with only one member.

Such organizational innovations point to the need for a deeper understanding of how political parties have traditionally organized, and how this new wave of contenders challenge the dominant mode of coordination within party politics. However, despite the abundance of research on political parties, we still know very little about the inner-life of parties, as the scope of research is often limited to questions of formal structure (Krouwel, 2006). This means that classical organizational themes like culture, identity, learning, strategy, decision-making, and management have been surprisingly underprioritized if not entirely neglected by the literature on party organization (see Barrling, 2013; Heidar and Koole, 2000; Lawson, 1994). In the mid1990s, Peter Mair argued that while there is a number of ‘surprisingly evident lacunae’ within the ‘ever-growing cumulation of knowledge’ of political parties, the 'empirically grounded study of parties as organizations (...) has long constituted one of the most obvious of these lacunae' (Mair, 1994: 1-2). Today, 25 years later, this lacuna still persists as our knowledge of how party organizations work, change, and adapt remains limited.

The absence of empirical studies of ‘parties as organizations’ is particularly surprising given the fact that classical texts on political parties emphasize the question of organization as crucial to understanding party politics. For instance, Michels (1911) famously characterized his iron law of oligarchy as a problem of organization, rather than of ideological dispositions. Similarly, Duverger (1954: xv) argued that modern parties are distinguished not by their actual policies or by the composition of their membership base, but by the ‘nature of their organization’. Of course, such arguments have not gone unheard (Dalton et al., 2011; Katz and Mair, 1994; Scarrow et al., 2017), but most contemporary studies of party organization approach the topic through quantitative methods and by relying solely on official sources of data like organizational charts, statutes, budgets, or membership statistics (Bolleyer, 2016). Hence, within political science at least, qualitative and ‘immersive’ accounts of party organizations seem virtually non-existent (see Schatz, 2009).

The same is true for organization studies. Here, the problem is not methodological or analytical but empirical: while political scientists have deployed a somewhat restricted understanding of what it means to study political parties, organizational scholars have generally overlooked parties as interesting study objects. Save for a handful of recent examples (Fredriksson Almqvist, 2016; Husted and Plesner, 2017; Karthikeyan et al., 2016; Moufahim et al., 2015; Ringel, 2018), parties completely escape the analytic gaze of organization scholars. The purpose of this special issue is to remedy this shortcoming. We thus invite contributions across academic disciplines that employ qualitative methods to explore the inner-life of political parties.

Themes of interest therefore include, but are not limited to:
• Organizational procedures for increasing membership participation
• Managerial practices for keeping members ‘in line’ and ‘on board’
• Modes of power and control in party politics
• Party leadership and followership
• Attempts to build enthusiasm and engagement internally
• Relations between political ideology and organizational culture
• Prefigurative practices and adaptation of social movement techniques
• Oligarchic tendencies and ways of countering these
• New technologies of decision making (i.e. liquid democracy)
• Political branding, image, and identity constructions
• Communication and discursive practices within parties
• Ways of marketing ideology to internal stakeholders
• Methodological challenges to studying parties
While we encourage empirically grounded submissions that focus on the above, theoretical contributions and historical analyses are also welcome. Furthermore, we are equally interested in research that investigates the role and impact of political parties on society (e.g. how do parties organize society?). The crucial thing is that all submissions somehow advance our understanding of political parties as organizations. In accordance with ephemera's subtitle, we thus invite authors to explore the intersection between theory and politics in (party) organization.

Deadline for submissions: April 1st 2019.

All contributions should be submitted to the issue editors: Emil Husted ([email protected]), Martin Fredriksson ([email protected]), Mona Moufahim ([email protected]), and Justine Grønbæk Pors ([email protected]). Please note that three categories of contributions are invited for the special issue: articles, notes, and reviews. However, we are also open for discussing the potential publication of other types of submissions, such as interviews, interventions or documentations. Information about the different types of contributions can be found at: http://www.ephemerajournal.org/how-submit. Contributions will undergo a double blind review process. All submissions should follow ephemera’s submissions guidelines, available at: http://www.ephemerajournal.org/how- submit. For further information, please email the issue editors.