Reengineering Health Care

Organizations are being urged to experiment with new structures and processes. A ‘process perspective’ on organizing is emerging as a major challenge to ‘functional’ principles of organizing established during the last century. Business process reengineering is one exemplar of process thinking that has received great attention amongst organizational theorists and practitioners. This in-depth account of business process reengineering within a major NHS hospital is an
important contribution to the very limited stock of empirical knowledge about new organizational forms, especially in the public sector. The book combines empirical data gathered
through an intensive, comparative case study method with strategic choice and neo-institutional theories to analyse the changing context of public organizations, importation of models of organizing from private to public organizations, and dynamics of public sector transformation. The outcomes of the change programme add to our more general organizational knowledge about (a) the impact of corporate change programmes, particularly in professionalized and public sector settings, (b) impediments
and enablers of lateral organizing structures and processes, and © contradictions within the New Public Management between functional and process principles for organizing.

Author Biography

Terry McNulty is Senior Lecturer in Organization Behaviour at Leeds University Business School. Previously he was a senior research fellow at Warwick Business School. He has also worked in the National Health Service and for the Institute of Health Services Management. His teaching and research cover processes of organizing and change in public and private sector organizations. His research has been published in leading practitioner and scholarly journals including
Organisation Studies, European Journal of Work and Organisational Psychology, Journal of Management Studies, Human Relations, and Corporate Governance. Ewan Ferlie is Director of Research and
Professor of Public Services Management at Imperial College Management School where he has been since 1997. Prior to this he held research posts at the Personal Social Services Research Unit, University of Kent at Canterbury, and was Deputy Director of the Centre for Corporate Strategy and Change at Warwick Business School. He has also been a Non Executive Member on Warwickshire Health Authority (1993-6).