How does knowledge flow in organisations?

People are more likely to share information with colleagues inside their professional group, writes Stefano Tassell

Love and Organization Studies: Moving beyond the Perspective of Avoidance

Despite its undoubted centrality in modern society, Love has not received the attention it deserves in the study of organizations. Among the reasons for this avoidance is the fact that love is passionate and not authoritative; personal and subjective but not public. To understand the way organizational research can incorporate love, I explore and discuss three interweaving constructs. Eros (or a tale of the self) calls for an expression of the individuality in organizations, in terms of creativity, sense making and experience. Philia (or a tale of trust) contributes to explore trustworthy relationships, welcoming the other and enabling individuals to flourish in the workplace. Agape (or a tale of compassion) refers to generalized love for humanity and opens to the understanding of compassionate leadership. In the discussion, I call for new directions in the study of love as the organization and the organization as love

The growth and composition of primary and community-based care services. Metrics and evidence from the Italian National Health Service.

RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are.BACKGROUND: Over the past few decades, in OECD countries there has been a general growing trend in the prevalence of out-of-hospital healthcare services, but there is a general lack of data on the use of these services. METHODS: We defined a list of 303 indicators related to primary and community healthcare services in collaboration with 13 Italian Local Health Authorities (LHAs). Then, for each LHA, we collected and analyzed these indicators for two different years (2003 and 2007). RESULTS: Out-of-hospital care absorbs 56% of all costs in our sample of LHAs. Expenditure on outpatients' visits to specialists and on diagnostic examinations accounts for 13% of the costs, while spending on primary care (including prevention and public health) accounts for 9%, and for intermediate structures (including those related to rehabilitation, elderly people, disabled people, and mental health) the figure is 11%. Different Italian LHAs have made different strategic choices with respect to primary and community-based care (PCC). CONCLUSIONS: Two distinct strategic orientations in the adoption of PCC services by LHAs has emerged from our study. The first has been an investment mainly in ambulatory and home-based primary care services in order to increase the number of low-complexity settings. A second strategy has prioritized the allocation of resources to intermediate inpatient structures for specific types of patients, namely elderly and disabled people, post-acute patients in need of rehabilitation and long-term care, and patients in hospices

The power of love in organisations

Love in the workplace goes far beyond the superficial. Expressed as trust, compassion, friendship, and creativity, love shapes our working environment to such an extent that we could say love is the organisation and vice versa. Problematically for our data-driven systems, love is impossible to quantify or manage. Rather than developing new frameworks in which to examine and discuss love in the study of organisation and management, it is easier for us to simply ignore it. But exploring these potential frameworks may uncover opportunities to more fully understand our workplaces, our teams, and ourselves

Public service management during the Covid-19 lockdown: a qualitative study

This qualitative study investigates the managerial practices adopted during the Covid-19 emergency in Lombardy, Italy, amidst unforeseen changes in public service ecosystems. Using longitudinal data, we identify seven key practices adopted by public service managers to organize amidst disruption. Our findings underscore the public managers’ role in fostering adaptation, innovation, and coordination among ecosystem actors. Extending roles outlined by Osborne et al. as ‘appreciate, engage, and facilitate’, our study reveals how these roles were interpreted following logics of entrepreneurial stakeholder engagement, rather than citizen-centred services. We discuss conceptual implications to further develop the theory and practice of public service management

A Microstructural Approach to Self-Organizing:The Emergence of Attention Networks

A recent line of inquiry investigates new forms of organizing as bundles of novel solutions to universal problems of resource allocation and coordination: how to allocate organizational problems to organizational participants and how to integrate participants' resulting efforts. We contribute to this line of inquiry by reframing organizational attention as the outcome of a concatenation of self-organizing, microstructural mechanisms linking multiple participants to multiple problems, thus giving rise to an emergent attention network. We argue that, when managerial hierarchies are absent and authority is decentralized, observable acts of attention allocation produce interpretable signals that help participants to direct their attention and share information on how to coordinate and integrate their individual efforts. We theorize that the observed structure of an organizational attention network is generated by the concatenation of four interdependent micromechanisms: focusing, reinforcing, mixing, and clustering. In a statistical analysis of organizational problem solving within a large opensource software project, we find support for our hypotheses about the self-organizing dynamics of the observed attention network connecting organizational problems (software bugs) to organizational participants (volunteer contributors). We discuss the implications of attention networks for theory and practice by emphasizing the self-organizing character of organizational problem solving. We discuss the generalizability of our theory to a wider set of organizations in which participants can freely allocate their attention to problems and the outcomes of their allocation are publicly observable without cost.</p

Why trust in the workplace matters and how to cultivate it

Advancing your career depends on gaining the trust of others, and while nothing creates trust better than friendships between colleagues, the workplace presents unique challenges for these relationships. A recent study, explored here, reveals which personality traits are the best fit for creating trust in different friendship network configurations