Karen Golden-Biddle

Towards systematic reviews that inform health care management and policy-making.

Objectives To identify ways to improve the usefulness of systematic reviews for health care managers and policy-makers that could then be evaluated prospectively. Methods We systematically reviewed studies of decision-making by health care managers and policy-makers, conducted interviews with a purposive sample of them in Canada and the United Kingdom (n=29), and reviewed the websites of research funders, producers/purveyors of research, and journals that include them among their target audiences (n=45). Results Our systematic review identified that factors such as interactions between researchers and health care policy-makers and timing/timeliness appear to increase the prospects for research use among policy-makers. Our interviews with health care managers and policy-makers suggest that they would benefit from having information that is relevant for decisions highlighted for them (e.g. contextual factors that affect a reviews local applicability and information about the benefits, harms/risks and costs of interventions) and having reviews presented in a way that allows for rapid scanning for relevance and then graded entry (such as one page of take-home messages, a three-page executive summary and a 25-page report). Managers and policy-makers have mixed views about the helpfulness of recommendations. Our analysis of websites found that contextual factors were rarely highlighted, recommendations were often provided and graded entry formats were rarely used. Conclusions Researchers could help to ensure that the future flow of systematic reviews will better inform health care management and policy-making by involving health care managers and policy-makers in their production and better highlighting information that is relevant for decisions. Research funders could help to ensure that the global stock of systematic reviews will better inform health care management and policy-making by supporting and evaluating local adaptation processes such as developing and making available online more user-friendly ‘front ends’ for potentially relevant systematic reviews.

Constructing Opportunities for Contribution: Structuring Intertextual Coherence and “Problematizing” in Organizational Studies

Examining a sample of journal articles, we develop a grounded theory of contribution that shows how organization studies theorists textually construct opportunities for making contributions to the ...

Perspective—Making Doubt Generative: Rethinking the Role of Doubt in the Research Process

In this paper, we want to shift the attention of our scholarly community to the living condition of doubt and its underappreciated significance for the theorizing process. Drawing on Peirces notion of abduction, we articulate the relationship between doubt and belief in the everyday imaginative work central to theorizing, and establish the role played by doubt as abductions engine in these efforts. We propose three strategic principles for engaging and using doubt in the research process. In concluding, we explore our fields overemphasis on validation to the exclusion of discovery processes and to the detriment of excellence in theorizing. We call for a broadening of our notions of “methodology” to incorporate discovery processes and to begin their explication.

Working with pluralism: determining quality in qualitative research

This Feature Topic contains four articles that address the determination of quality in qualitative research by exploring the use of criteria from the perspective of reviewers, editors, and/ or authors. In this introductory article, the authors assert that these explorations represent an important move away from employing listings of static criteria to adjudicate and develop qualitative research. In its place, we see the making of quality as situated in methodological pluralism that occurs both in comparison with quantitative research and also within qualitative research. This fact complicates and enriches the task of determining quality and also suggests ways forward for the academic community.

Toward a communicative perspective of collaborating in research: the case of the researcher–decision-maker partnership

In the shift to a post-industrial order, the production and use of knowledge is gaining greater importance in a world beyond science. Particularly in the health sciences, research foundations are emphasising the importance of translating research results into practice and are experimenting with various strategies to achieve this outcome, including requiring practitioners to become part of funded research teams. In this paper, we present a case of a partnership between researchers and decision-makers in Canada who collaborated on an investigation of implementing change in health care organisations. Grounded in this case and recent empirical work, we propose that such research collaborations can be best understood from a communicative perspective and as involving four key elements: relational stance that researchers and decision-makers assume toward each other; purpose at hand that situates occasions for developing and using knowledge; knowledge-sharing practices for translating knowledge; and forums in which researchers and practitioners access knowledge. Our analyses suggest that partnerships are most effective when researchers see the value of contextualising their work and decision-makers see how this work can help them accomplish their purpose at hand.

Liminality as Cultural Process for Cultural Change

This paper offers a revised understanding of intentional cultural change. In contrast to prevailing accounts, we suggest that such change can take place in the absence of initiating jolts, may be infused in everyday organizational life, and led by insiders who need not hold hierarchical power. Drawing on data from field studies and in-depth interviews, we develop a model of cultural change in which everyday occurrences such as meetings or workshops are constructed symbolically as “liminal” phenomena, bracketed from yet connected to everyday action in the organization. The construction of these occurrences as liminal illuminates the symbolic realm, creating possibilities for people to experiment with new cultural resources and invite different interpretations that hold potential for altering the cultural order. Our analyses contribute to the literature on culture by developing liminality, a process that brings forward the symbolic and invites recombination, as a cultural explanation of cultural change, to complement prevailing political or social structural explanations. We discuss implications and boundary conditions for this type of intentional cultural change.

Using Content Analysis to Elaborate Adolescent Theories of Organization

This article shows how content analysis of textual archival data facilitates elaboration of adolescent theories. Drawing on the framework of a well-developed theory offered by Bacharach, the authors explain how specific protocols in content analysis can facilitate elaboration of three theoretical elements underdeveloped in adolescent theories: scientific robustness, relationship identification, and boundary establishment. Using an empirical example from a health care study, they illustrate the use of content analysis protocols to elaborate some theoretical elements of the attention-based view of the firm. The article contributes to content analysis and more generally to research methodology by specifying closer linkages between theory elaboration and content analysis.

Transforming New Ideas into Practice: An Activity Based Perspective on the Institutionalization of Practices

We develop an activity‐focused process model of how new ideas can be transformed into front line practice by reviving attention to the importance of habitualization as a key component of institutionalization. In contrast to established models that explain how ideas diffuse or spread from one organization to another, we employ a micro‐level perspective to study the subsequent intra‐organizational processes through which these ideas are transformed into new workplace practices. We followed efforts to transform the organizationally accepted idea of ‘interdisciplinary teamwork’ into new everyday practices in four cases over a six year time period. We contribute to the literature by focusing on de‐habitualizing and re‐habitualizing behaviours that connect micro‐level actions with organizational level theorizing. Our model illuminates three phases that we propose are essential to creating and sustaining this connection: micro‐level theorizing, encouraging trying the new practices, and facilitating collective meaning‐making.

Identity Struggles in Merging Organizations Renegotiating the Sameness–Difference Dialectic

Mergers as a type of organizational change call attention to questions of identity. In this article, the authors ask: How do people collectively reconstitute their group identities for themselves and others, and in particular, how do they renegotiate understandings of sameness and difference called into question by merging? The authors draw on qualitative case data from two different merger contexts within the health care sector to develop rich descriptions and a deeper understanding of the identity struggles of four groups of employees. They identified four patterns of identity work ranging from more proactive forms of positioning as “mavericks” or fighters” to more passive forms as “adapters” or “victims” as each group struggled to navigate an altered, fluid, and emerging landscape of potential resources for self-understanding and affiliation. The authors show how identity regulation and identity work manifest themselves in three domains of language, practices and space, and how identity regulation and identity work mutually interact. Thus, the negotiation of identity in merging is a dialectic process in which managerial identity regulation aimed at enhancing convergence across groups may be undermined both by groups’ attempts to reestablish differences and by a countervailing managerial need to accommodate (and thus sustain) differences in order to enable groups to locate themselves in the emerging entity.

Using Knowledge in Management Studies An Investigation of How We Cite Prior Work

We know little about the impact of prior scholarly work. Focusing on citation frequency, studies have overlooked the question of how prior work is used. The authors argue for the development of a richer empirical foundation on which to base discussions of impact; its creation requires a situated and relational methodological approach incorporating an assumption of citation heterogeneity and comparative analyses of citation content in context with that of the referenced focal article. Conceiving focal articles as architectures of knowledge claims, the authors examine how knowledge from three award-winning articles is subsequently used during a 6-year period in 489 citations. Analyses generate a typology of prior knowledge use in citing and also disclose differences in prior knowledge use in each focal article. This situated and relational examination provides a more nuanced understanding of how prior work shapes ongoing knowledge development.