This article focuses on the pattern and impact of change leadership in complex, pluralistic, public sector settings, and specifically in English healthcare. The argument draws on evidence from ten comparative cases, exploring links between leadership patterns and organizational outcomes. Our...

This article illustrates how distributed change agency can implement complex organizational changes in the absence of formal management plans, roles, and structures. Distributed change agency typically involves small teams and senior groups. In this qualitative study of service improvements in...

This article uses the stream of literature relating to receptive contexts for change to explore the variations in progress on change implementation between different organisations within healthcare. The aim of the article is to develop our understanding of change processes as they unfold in...

We explore the argument that a new mode of health care organizing is emerging which moves beyond the established professional dominance versus New Public Management (NPM) debate. We review Foucault’s work on ‘governmentality’, as applied to health care organizations. We specify two...

This paper describes and analyses the creation and development of an Academic Health Science Centre (AHSC) as a major organizational innovation diffusing in the health knowledge economy, internationally. Drawing on an institutionalist model utilized in an earlier study of a failed merger in the...

Two qualitative studies in the U.K. health care sector trace eight purposefully selected innovations. Complex, contested, and nonlinear innovation careers emerged. Developing the nonlinear perspective on innovation spread further, we theorize that multi-professionalization shapes "nonspread."...

The objectives of the present paper are to describe selected findings from a research project on the diffusion and adoption of innovations in primary-care settings. The project design was a comparative case study design exploring four innovations in different settings. The findings are used to...

This article aims to provide a reassessment of the processes of diffusion of innovations into organizations, based on new empirical data. The focus of the article is the latter stages of the diffusion process. The article draws on the results of two studies, which examined the diffusion of...