Business and Management

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 exemple 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, the importation of models of organizing from private to public organizations, and the dynamics of public sector transformation. The outcomes of the change programme add to our more general organizational knowledge about the impact of corporate change programmes, particularly in professionalized and public sector settings, impediments and enablers of lateral organizing structures and processes, and contradictions within the New Public Management between functional and process principles for organizing.

Regulating the risks associated with economic activities is a feature of modern societies and one in which the state increasingly seeks to co-opt the regulatory powers of corporations. This book examines the impact of a system of enforced self-regulation on the corporate life of British railways. It uses this case study of occupational health and safety regulation to focus on broader theoretical and empirical discussions of regulation, risk, and corporate activities. A central organizing perspective of this book is that regulation is a form of risk management. It examines how workplace risks in modern societies are managed by businesses and the individuals within them, and considers what influence the law has in this. The tensions between the constitutive and controlling aspects of regulatory law are analysed with reference to in-depth empirical data about corporate and individual compliance and non-compliance. Related concerns about the social control of organizational and economic life are explored and their policy and theoretical implications examined. These issues are especially significant following the privatization of Britain's rail network and the introduction of regulatory systems which are highly reliant on industry self-regulation.