Teresa Carla Oliveira

On the centrality of human value

The financial crash of 2008 following the selling of fictitious derivatives was a crisis of both rationality and values whose aftermath has thrown the legitimation of deregulated markets, and governments, into question. This paper critiques the Becker metaphor of human capital and submits that human value is central to and the fulcrum of both economic and social values. It illustrates that Hume and Adam Smith directly countered the Hobbesian hypothesis that human nature is based only on self-interest, distinguishes market values from social values, explicit from implicit values and parallels Sen in adopting an ordinal ranking of what people value rather than a search for cardinality. It draws on cognitive psychology, neural research, revealed preference theory and a principle of implicit verification. It also outlines implications for what Adam Smith centrally valued as concern for the welfare of the whole of society.

Deigning Down or Learning Up? Lack of Voice and Dialogue in Change Management of Public Hospitals

Who knows what, at which level, is vital for effective change management, and whether there can be mutual learning. Yet whether this is organizational learning, and how it relates to institutional change (such as reforms of public health systems, or of education, or of a judiciary), is open to question. Thus, there have been some claims that knowledge management (KM) is already an established discipline with a growing and solid base of theory and practice (Mertins et al., 2003, Dalkir, 2011), revealing proven strategies for organizational learning (Malhotra, 2001, O’Dell and Hubert, 2011). Yet Legge (2005) has suggested that the very concept of a learning organization is fraught with both conceptual and practical difficulties. Questioning whether senior management can possibly have knowledge of a whole organization, she claims that the concept of organizational learning displaces that it is people who learn and that to suggest that organizations learn is to reify this.

How to Learn Up from Lean Management in Health Services? HRM, Leadership and Relational Coordination

This chapter suggests that while the case for New Public Services rather than New Public Management is well grounded, some expositions of it have neglected the degree to which much can be learned for lean hospital management from the Toyota Production System . It distinguishes inflexible Fordist production based on economies of scale and Taylorist surveillance of performance from Post Fordist lean production based on economies of scope and continuous improvement in work methods . It highlights the contrast between top-down management and transactional leadership in Fordist-Weberian hierarchies with relational coordination through lower-level transformational leadership enhancing base-up learning in the Toyota Production System. It seeks to inform hitherto inconclusive debates on the effectiveness of strategic Human Resource Management by distinguishing institutional, organisational and operational logics and the case for recognising mutual advantage from psychological contract not only between individuals or within groups but also at organisational levels. The chapter gives examples of learning from lean in health reforms in the US and Sweden , contrasts this with not learning from lean in New Public Management in the UK and also draws implications for operationalising lean management within New Public Services paradigm .

From New Public Management to New Public Services: Challenges for Hospital Governance and Lean and Hybrid Management

New Public Management (NPM) in health services has proved increasingly controversial. It has been criticised as Weberian in terms of authoritarian hierarchy, Fordist in its obsession with gaining economies of scale and Taylorist in its surveillance of performance criteria. It has assumed a production and output logic derived from manufacturing, whereas both private and public services differ from this. Nonetheless there recently has been a resurgence of interest in what can be learned in terms of lean management in manufacturing, both in terms of economies of scope rather than scale and of multi-tasked and multi-skilled hybrid management at operational levels. This chapter seeks to inform this by distinguishing operational and organisational logics within institutions and by evaluating alternative models of governance of health, including the scope for New Public Services rather than NPM to reinforce social rights and the degree to which replacing a command-and-control model of hospital management with health professionals as ‘hybrid’ managers may enable both social efficiency in service delivery and enhance the wellbeing and fulfilment at work of health service employees .

Managing Careers: Anchored, Plateaued or Drifting?

There have been differences in the definition and understanding of career issues for many years. Literature on careers also has been replete with metaphors (Inkson 2004, 2006, 2007), some of them mixed, ranging from the presumption that they enable a purposeful Protean self-fulfillment (e.g. Hall 2002) to reminders that Proteus changed shape to avoid being captured and punished (Arnold 2001, Arnold and Cohen 2008). In seeking to understand career development some analysts have stressed individual work experience over time (e.g. Arthur, Hall et al. 1989, Defillippi and Arthur 1994, Arthur, Khapova et al. 2005, Gunz and Heslin 2005), while others have been concerned with the survival of careers within organizations from a social exchange perspective (Guest and Rodrigues 2012). Moreover, Rodrigues, Guest and Budjanovcanin (2013) have argued that how people make sense of their careers can no longer be usefully captured by objective benchmarks of career success, such as a higher salary or promotion, and have offered the concept of career orientation rather than career anchors.

Power and Panel Interviewing

This chapter illustrates leadership and power dynamics in selection decision-making. It relates this to Henry Mintzberg’s (2006) claim that leadership can be found at any level rather than only at higher levels in organisations. It does so with reference to the earlier conceptual framework of conscious and unconscious logic, as well as to theories of position power, latent expert power, and operational power and also to Michel Foucault’s (1975, 1978, 1980, 1982, 2002) concept of power-knowledge.

Yet How Do We Know

The previous chapter drew on Gestalt psychology to suggest that one of the reasons for the hold of an intellectual paradigm is that people may be disposed to view the same phenomenon in different ways. This chapter indicates that the hold of a paradigm may also be embedded in ‘the matter of the mind’. It outlines findings from left and right hemispheric brain functioning, which demonstrate that the left hemisphere both can be premise constrained and can ‘confabulate’ or invent its own ‘virtual reality’ while displacing or denying right hemispheric sensing, feeling or intuition that the paradigm is dysfunctional.

Rethinking Selection Theory

Previous chapters have recognised that normative theory is the ‘high road’ of personnel selection. No one should go ‘off road’, traverse uncharted terrain and start asking supplementary questions of one candidate rather than others. Selectors should conduct interviews in the same way for all candidates. Fractal rather than general indications of candidates’ attributes should not be followed up. Selectors should stick to the normative ‘Highway Code’.

Tacit Knowledge and Implicit Learning

Previous chapters have made claims for the importance of tacit knowledge and implicit learning. They have cited the case of Nonaka and others that tacit knowledge can be surfaced through discourse (Nonaka, 1994; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995; Ichijo & Nonaka 2007). They have recognised that there has been challenge to this from Akbar (2003) and Gourlay (2006), who have claimed that any ‘know how’ combines both tacit and explicit knowing domains. They also have allowed that there is a debate on how implicit is implicit learning (Berry, 1993).

Who Knows for a Fact

One of the claims for modern social science is that it infers from facts. Some of this stems from the positivism of Auguste Comte, who argued that there were three stages in the evolution of knowledge — fictions, as in myths; metaphysics, as in speculative philosophy; and scientific theories, based on evidence. Yet Comte qualified claims to know something ‘for a fact’ and warned against assuming to do so rather than allowing for a high degree of scepticism. He submitted that the proper function of intellect was the service of society, was critical of mathematical modelling, claiming that algebra could as readily usurp rather than enhance understanding, and declared that if a theorem was not approached in the same way as a poem, it could deprive us of our humanity (Comte, 1848, 1865; Muglioni, 1996).