Research Groups and Networks

Director of the AMBS Health Services Research Centre.

www.research.mbs.ac.uk/hsrc/

Academic lead for the Organising Healthcare programme at CLAHRC Greater Manchester.

clahrc-gm.nihr.ac.uk/

I am Professor of Organisational Analysis at Alliance Manchester Business School, Director of the Institute for Health Policy and Organisation and lead of the Organising Healthcare programme at CLAHRC GM (Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care Greater Manchester). 

I joined the university in February 2000, having previously worked at the Universities of Birmingham and Leeds. I was awarded a PhD from the University of Leeds in 1999, and have previously spent time as visiting faculty at the University of Sydney, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. I was also visiting research fellow at CRISES Research Centre in Quebec, Canada, in 2009.

My primary research interest is on the transformation of health and care, with a particular focus on the organisational and policy dimensions of this transformation. I am committed to engaged and often co-produced research which is theory-driven but also pragmatic, with a focus on driving real change in practice. 

I have led a suite of CLAHRC research projects examining primary care reorganisation, access to care, workforce transformation and health and care integration and have interests in policy piloting and the role of evidence in policy change. I have also been Co-Investigator in several other NIHR-funded research projects in healthcare; on GP federations, digital capture of patient experience data and health leadership (details below).

The Use of Management Knowledge across Communities of Practice in Healthcare Organisations, 

Developing and Enhancing the Usefulness of Patient Experience and Narrative Data (DEPEND) 

Learning about and learning from GP Federations in the English NHS: A qualitative investigation

More broadly, my research centres on issues of power, knowledge, identity and control in complex organisations and the management of experts/professionals. These interests have been developed in several fields, including; 

Critical Project Studies: I have been engaged for some time in a collaborative movement to open up project management and project-based organisation to critical examination, as co-founder of the "Making Projects Critical" workshop series with my colleague Svetlana Cicmil (UWE) and through my own research in several published papers and books. The ‘Making Projects Critical’ workshop series was launched in 2001 and the most recent event, MPC9, was held in Sweden in January 2019. 

Social Studies of the Professions and Expert Labour: I have an ongoing interest in the emergence of ‘corporate professionalism’ developed through several recent publications. In the past, I have published on the management of experts and professionals in financial services, creative industries (in the UK and Canada) and also R&D and engineering in hi-tech industries.

I am interested in supervising research students in the following areas;

• Organisational issues in healthcare
• Organisational and managerial issues in primary care
• Projects, power and policy making in the public sector
• Knowledge and learning in healthcare organisations
• Professions/professionalisation/management of professionals
• Project organisations/project management

I have published in a range of journals, including the Journal of Management Studies, Public Administration, Organization, New Technology, Work and Employment, British Journal of Management, Work, Employment and Society and Gender, Work and Organization. I have also published several books, including "Making Projects Critical", co-authored by Svetlana Cicmil, and "Managing Modern Healthcare", co-authored with Mike Bresnen, Simon Bailey, Paula Hyde and John Hassard. Since 2001, I have co-organised a series of workshops entitled 'Making Projects Critical', held in Manchester, Stockholm, Bristol and Newcastle. In 2017, I was awarded the PMI Research Achievement Award for the impact of my work with Svetlana Cicmil, Monica Lindgren and Johann Packendorff on 'Making Projects Critical'.

I have presented research at a wide variety of international conferences, including the Academy of Management, the British Academy of Management (BAM), the European Group on Organizational Symbolism (EGOS), the Critical Management Studies Conference (CMS), the Labour Process Conference (LPC) and the European Academy of Management (EURAM), and at various practitioner events, including a keynote presentations at EGOS and the Project Management Institute Research conference. 

My teaching portfolio at MBS has included Executive Education, MBA and Undergraduate courses for both management and non-management students.