NHS CHANGE
Organizational Transformation and Top-Down Change: The Case of the NHS by Dr Lynn Ashburner, Dr Ewan Ferlie and Dr Louise FitzGerald Coverage What is the paper about ? Paper analyses affects of government sponsored attempt to change the way the NHS is managed from a Transformation perspective. Discusses how Transformation change theory came about from the weakness in Organisational Development tradition. ... Ashburner et al recognised much literature on organisation transformation proceeds at a highly general level and does not desire empirical assessment criteria for judging whether transformation change has occurred. The NHS research tried to avoid this by using quantitative and qualitative methods Methodology Is the paper guided by a research question? Yes, ‘seek to identify what the organisational change process characteristics are which might indicate the potential for transformatory rather than incremental change and explore themes in spectrally specific literature’ Ashburner. et al (2001) Because there was no criteria for assessing the scale of change in the NHS researchers used five key indicators of whether or not transformatory change was occurring (Appendix 1). You can’t be sure that these factors are evidence of transformatory change and researchers may have chosen indicators because they knew they would be present.