Rhetoric And The Politics Of Workplace Innovation

This book provides a critical insight into the ongoing debates and controversies that surround employee empowerment and workplace innovation. It highlights competing interests and conflicting values, and illuminates some basic tensions between confident rhetoric and everyday realities. Martin Beirnes contribution marks a contrast with established academic investigations in this area. It combines sober analysis with advocacy to claim space for a research-based activism among coalitions of critical researchers and like-minded practitioners that can anticipate and promote genuinely enriching and empowering ways of managing and organizing work. Advanced students of management and organization will discover an invaluable, thought-provoking resource. It offers fresh insights, stimulating arguments and applied knowledge that will also appeal to managers with responsibility for work and employee relations, and to educators and researchers in the areas of critical management studies, work and employment.

The deployment of remotely piloted air platforms (RPAs) - or drones - has become a defining feature of contemporary counter-insurgency operations. Scholarly analysis and public debate has primarily focused on two issues: the legality of targeted killing and whether the practice is effective at disrupting insurgency networks, and the intensive media and activist scrutiny of the policy processes through which targeted killing decisions have been made. While contributing to these ongoing discussions, this book aims to determine how targeted killing has become possible in contemporary counter-insurgency operations undertaken by liberal regimes. Each chapter is oriented around a problematisation that has shaped the cultural politics of the targeted killing assemblage. Grayson argues that in order to understand how specific forms of violence become prevalent, it is important to determine how problematisations that enable them are shaped by a politico-cultural system in which culture operates in conjunction with technological, economic, governmental, and geostrategic elements. The book also demonstrates that the actors involved - what they may be attempting to achieve through the deployment of this form of violence, how they attempt to achieve it, and where they attempt to achieve it - are also shaped by culture. The book demonstrates how the current social relations prevalent in liberal societies contain the potential for targeted killing as a normal rather than extraordinary practice. It will be of great use for academic specialists and graduate students in international studies, geography, sociology, cultural studies and legal studies.

Now a classic in its field, the fourth edition of Change Management: A Guide to Effective Implementation continues to offer readers highly practical strategies and step-by-step guidance for applying different models of change in different organizational scenarios. New to the Fourth Edition: A third expert author, Sabina Siebert, bringing a background in sociology and cultural studies An improved structure that consolidates all the existing strengths of the previous editions and separates the book into three parts, beginning with chapters assessing ‘The Impact and Definition of Change’, ‘Implementation and Evaluation of Change’ and ending with a critical outlook in ‘Change Management – A Critical Perspective’ A wealth of new and richly detailed case studies with an international and cross-cultural scope that draw upon different organization types, environments and perspectives for a diverse and global understanding of the current field of change management Two additional chapters on leading change and organisational culture, offering unparalleled coverage of managing systems and processes, combined with increased emphasis on managing human issues. For students taking Change Management courses on Business and Management degrees, MBA′s, specialist masters and healthcare subjects.

The seventh edition of Sociology, Work and Organisation is outstandingly effective in explaining how we can use the sociological imagination to understand the nature of institutions of work, organisations, occupations, management and employment and how they are changing in the twenty-first century. Intellectual and accessible, it is unrivalled in the breadth of its coverage and its authoritative overview of both traditional and emergent themes in the sociological study of work and organisation. The direction and implications of trends in technological change are fully considered and the book recognises the extent to which these trends are intimately related to changing patterns of inequality in modern societies and to the changing experiences of individuals and families. Key features of the text are: clear structure; ‘key issue’ guides and summaries with each chapter; identification of key concepts throughout the book; unrivalled glossary and concept guide; rich illustrative snapshots or ‘mini cases’ throughout the book. This text engages with cutting-edge debates and makes conceptual innovations without any sacrifice to clarity or accessibility of style. It will appeal to a wide audience, including undergraduates, postgraduates and academics working or studying in the area of work and the organisation of work, as well as practitioners working in the area of human resources and management generally.

“This book claims to be ‘like no other’ and that is so true. The editors and authors each add quality guidance around distributed leadership to readers, providing evidence-based examples, useful websites and key reading material to support and supplement the ideas being presented.” Bridie Kent, Professor in Leadership in Nursing, University of Plymouth, UK “This book, thankfully, isn’t about self-defined heroic organizational leaders or power-hungry political leaders – it tells the stories of the people doing leadership every day in their work to make healthcare happen.” Scott Taylor, Business School Director of Admissions, University of Birmingham, UK This innovative book brings together experts from health sciences, nursing, business and management backgrounds to provide a broad analysis of the growing field of distributed leadership. The book offers health professionals practical guidance on applying distributed leadership, resulting in more effective forms of collaborative clinical teamwork and lasting improvements in care. The text: •Offers a comprehensive collection of perspectives, featuring chapters by expert clinical, nursing and management studies contributors •Synthesizes and explores recent developments in the leadership and distributed leadership research literature •Supports research and theory with examples of cases of effective distributed leadership in clinical practice, service quality, patient safety, leadership development, general nursing, midwifery education, oncology services, intellectual disability, evidence-based practice and organizational change and development •Provides an international focus, to encourage reflection on learning from experiences across Europe and beyond Distributed Leadership in Nursing and Healthcare is essential reading for health professionals, undergraduate and postgraduate students, and researchers working in the field of leadership. Edited by: Elizabeth A. Curtis, Assistant Professor, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland Martin Beirne, Emeritus Professor of Management and Organisational Behaviour at the University of Glasgow, UK John G. Cullen, Associate Professor, Maynooth University, Ireland Ruth Northway, Professor of Learning Disability Nursing, University of South Wales, UK Siobhán M. Corrigan, Assistant Professor, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

This book focuses on workplace innovation, which is a key element in ensuring that organizations and the people within them can adapt to and engage in healthy, sustainable change. It features a collection of multi-level, multi-disciplinary contributions that combine theory, research and practical perspectives. In addition, the book presents new perspectives from a number of nations on policies with novel theoretical approaches to workplace innovation, as well as international case studies on the subject. These cases highlight the role of leadership, the relation between workplace innovation and well-being, as well as the do’s and don’ts of workplace innovation implementation. Whether you are an experienced workplace practitioner, manager, a policy-maker, unionist, or a student of workplace innovation, this book contains a range of tips, tools and international case studies to help the reader understand and implement workplace innovation.

The past is an increasingly unreliable guide to the future. European workplaces and the regions in which they are located face unprecedented pressures and challenges. Whereas in recent decades incremental adaptation has largely been sufficient to cope with external change, it is no longer clear that this remains the case. Globalisation, technological development and dissemination, political volatility, patterns of consumption, and employee expectations are occurring at a rate which is hard to measure. The rate of change in these spheres is far outstripping the rate of organisational innovation in both European enterprises and public governance, leading to a serious mismatch between the challenges of the 21st Century and the organisational competence available to deal with them. In this context, there is no clear roadmap. The contributors to this volume address these issues and demonstrate that building the knowledge base required by actors in this volatile environment requires continuous dialogue and learning – a context in which social partners, regional policy makers and other participants share diverse knowledge and reflect on experience rather than seeking and imitating any notion of 'best practice'. Action Research has a crucial role to play, embedding shared learning within the process of innovation.