Steve Cropper

The Oxford handbook of inter-organizational relations

SECTION I: INTRODUCTION SECTION II: MANIFESTATIONS OF INTER-ORGANIZATIONAL RELATIONS SECTION III: THEORETICAL AND DISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES ON THE STUDY OF INTER-ORGANIZATIONAL RELATIONS SECTION IV: KEY TOPICS IN INTER-ORGANIZATIONAL RESEARCH SECTION V: CONCLUSION

Keeping sense of accounts using computer based cognitive maps

This article describes the use of Cope, which is designed to hold knowledge encoded using the cognitive mapping techmque. Cognitive mapping is an attempt to operate Personal Construct psychology beyond the use of Repertory Grids. Cognitive maps have some similarities to modeling techmques used in political science, notably by Robert Axelrod and colleagues. Concepts (short phrases) are linked to form chains of argumentation, essentially explanations leading to consequences. Any concept can be linked to any other concept and the links can be directed. The software releases cognitive maps from many constraints of two-dimensional representation, allowing the researcher to manage complex, qualitative data more effectively. The modeling method and software are used to gather materials—observations, interview data, documentary data and so forth—together, to find areas of corroboration and difference between accounts of events and issues, to examine the coherence and adequacy of accounts and to promote enquiry into and understanding of the structure of accounts as modeled. Through the analytic and retrieval routines in the software, a models contents can be sorted, explored, and presented in many ways in order to manage the richness and complexity of qualitative data. Principles and practices of model building and qualitative data analysis are illustrated throughout the article. Keywords: qualitative data, accounts, cognitive maps, software, complexity, analysis, storage, retrieval.

Analysing the medicine-management interface in acute trusts.

The impact of the NHS reforms, and the resulting purchaser-provider split, has refocused attention on the relationship between management and medicine in acute hospitals. It is timely to assess the explanatory power of various theoretical models regarding the management-medicine interface. Argues that this interface is currently rather fluid and that a dynamic and adaptive model is best suited to understanding the way in which doctors and managers develop their relationship within the changing policy context. Two examples illustrate these shifting boundaries.

Moving between groups and individuals using a DSS

This paper aims to explore how an « Ideas Management program », COPE, used by senior decision makers in a number of organisations, act as a Decision Support System. Based upon two extensive case studies of decision makers using the COPE system, rather than a more conventional DSS, benefits of this type of system for these decision makers are explored. These insights not only suggest some further characteristics worth bearing in mind during the design and development of DSSs, but also support a framework for creating DSSs focused on supporting managerial decision making. The characteristics include: the advantages of designing DSSs that do not disaggregate the decision makers DSS from his interactions with groups or other individuals but rather aims to support it; the increase in effectiveness of incorporating social as well as analytical process within the DSS; and the role of qualitative rather than quantitative data as the source to the model base.

Quality Assurance and Improvement: The Role of Strategy Making

Describes the process by which an NHS provider Unit sought to make quality assurance and improvement a shared concern of professionals and managers. Development of a quality assurance strategy and related action plans pulled together existing quality initiatives in the Unit and set new initiatives in an agreed framework for organizational development. Thus the strategy filled the gap between a statement of organizational values and detailed quality auditing practices at the sharp end. Through the active involvement of professional staff and managers in multidisciplinary and multi‐level project groups, the facilitated processes of strategy making, dissemination and implementation led to significant learning by and development of staff and managers and an unanticipated spill over of energy, enthusiasm and commitment throughout the organization.

Coherence and balance in strategies for the management of public services

Recent ‘models’ of public management see strategy as providing a broad direction, or framework, within which learning and responsiveness are encouraged. Strategic direction is deliberately designed and yet is expected to emerge through the ‘routine’ decision‐making activity of managers at all levels in the organization. In this article, an approach to managing strategy development, review and renewal in public service organizations is proposed, and methods for testing it are described. The work was developed and tested over three years with the Director General of the Prison Service of England and Wales and with senior managers responsible for developing strategy in other public service organizations.

Making sense of strategic clinical networks

Maternity and childrens services are one of the four service areas for which Strategic Clinical Networks1 (SCN) have been designated in England. Is this latest introduction to the new commissioning framework good news or something that will hardly impinge on the working lives of most paediatricians? More importantly, will this impact on the health outcomes for babies, children and young people (CYP)? Certainly there is much room for improvement; across the UK there remains huge variation in both health and service quality for children.2–4 Furthermore, a review of health services across Western Europe has recorded that the UK has moved from the average to the worst for ‘all-cause’ mortality rate for children aged 0–14 years. There are many reasons for this statistic, but the authors concluded that some health systems are not keeping up with the changing health needs of children, and that a whole-system approach is required to improve outcomes.5 Consequently, if SCNs provide an opportunity to make the necessary cross-organisational changes to service, then it is beholden on paediatricians to engage. NHS Englands (NHS-E) statement of its intentions to host and support SCNs started by observing1 that: “Clinical networks are an NHS success story…networks perform varied and valuable roles…” A recently published book,6 which assesses the development of managed clinical networks to date, concludes that while the record is perhaps rather more mixed, nevertheless, clinical networks “should be given more time to develop and reach their potential”. Networks can make effective use of scarce resources, bridge the cracks between services offered by ‘self-interested’ NHS organisations, and move knowledge around clinical communities more effectively than hierarchy and the market. 1996 was a key year for the idea of networks. A review7 argued that there have always been networks in the NHS but ‘ad hoc’ …

The Role of Decision Support in Individual Performance Review

This paper reports on the use of a Qualitative Decision Support System used within the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK. The system has been used to enable the individual performance review (IPR) process to become more effective. One aim of IPR is to motivate managers. However, the vision of the Unit General Manager was that the IPR DSS would help him (a) understand how individually negotiated IPR objectives fitted together as a whole and related to corporate goals, (b) monitor and control progress through the IPR year and (c) build teams. Managers would be able to understand the impact each of their IPR objectives had upon one another and be able to identify what contribution their objectives made to the aims of the organization as a whole. The decision support system was based upon cognitive mapping as the modelling technique and COPE as the DSS software. The system was used by the General Manager for taking a composite view of the role of IPR in meeting the Strategy of the organization, and also as a method for monitoring progress of individual managers in relation to their personal IPR objectives. This paper reports on the development and implementation of the system within a specific NHS Hospitals Unit.

Post-Industrial Society

Operational Research is one of a wider set of organisational services — “Information or knowledge work” which has become the subject of an increasing debate in the social sciences following early, seminal statements about an emerging post-industrial society. The debate has turned around the continuing validity of this vision and its provenance as characterised by Daniel Bell and others. (Bell, 1973).