From events to personal histories: narrating change in health-care organizations

ABSTRACT

To cope with large-scale change managers must understand complex events, but representations of change are never objective and factual, they reflect choices. They are not simply chronicles but personal histories. We apply this perspective to analyze change in public sector health-care organizations. Health-care is an illuminating context because it is affected by large-scale policy-driven reform. There is a clear macro-context against which to map personal histories, which although diverse in terms of content, have common narrative templates which give them with structure. This helps managers understand a chaotic and complex flow of events; enabling them to cope with change.

KEYWORDS:

• Narratives
• managers
• national health service
• organization change

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Birmingham and Black Country Collaborations for Leadership in Applied Health research and Care (CLAHRC BBC). The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the CLAHRC, the NHS, the NIHR or the Department of Health.

Notes on contributors

Kevin Morrell

Kevin Morrell is a Professor of Strategy in the Business School at the University of Durham. Prior to joining Durham he was a Professor of Strategy at Warwick Business School (WBS). He was also a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow (2015–16) and Head of the WBS Strategy and International Business Group. He has research interests in Critical Management Studies, Public Administration, Narrative, and Leadership.

Alistair Hewison

Alistair Hewison is Senior Lecturer, and Director of Clinical Leadership in the University of Birmingham Centre for Leadership in Health and Social Care. He worked for many years as a staff nurse, charge nurse and manager in the UK National Health Service (NHS). His current research and teaching activities are centred on the management and organization of care, and recent projects have included the investigation of large scale service re-design in acute hospitals and the organisation of End of Life Care services. He has research interests in leadership, service design, and service transformation.

Loizos Heracleous

Loizos Heracleous is Professor of Strategy at Warwick University Business School. Before joining Warwick Business School, Loizos was Reader in Strategy at the Said Business School and Official Fellow of Templeton College at Oxford University, and Associate Professor of Business Policy at the National University of Singapore His research interests include- Strategic Management from an Organizational Perspective (dual strategies, innovative strategizing processes, strategic capabilities and innovation, corporate governance, strategic management instructional case development); Organizational Discourse (discourse conceptualization and analysis, interpretive/hermeneutic approaches to theory and methodology, organisational analysis from a discourse perspective, Gidden’s structuration theory and continental social theory) and Organization Change and Development (roles of organizational discourse, metaphor, dialogue, culture and learning in organization change and development processes).