Knowledge leadership:
Mobilising management research by becoming the
knowledge object1
Michael D. Fischer
Sue Dopson,
Louise Fitzgerald
Chris Bennett
Ewan Ferlie
Jean Ledger
Gerry McGivern
Corresponding author
Michael D. Fischer
University of Melbourne, Australia and University of Oxford, UK
michael.fischer@unimelb.edu.au
www.michaelfischer.org
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This is the authors’ version of an article accepted for publication in Human Relations. Changes
resulting from the publishing process, such as editing, corrections, formatting and other quality
control mechanisms, may not be reflected in this document. A definitive version was published
online before print, December 14, 2015, http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0018726715619686.
Abstract
This article explores contrasting forms of ‘knowledge leadership’ in mobilising management research
into organizational practice. Drawing on a Foucauldian perspective on power-knowledge, we
introduce three axes of power-knowledge relations, through which we analyse knowledge leadership
practices. We present empirical case study data focused on ‘polar cases’ of managers engaged in
mobilising management research in six research-intensive organizations in the UK healthcare sector.
We find that knowledge leadership involves agentic practices through which managers strive to
actively become the knowledge object – personally transposing, appropriating or contending management
research. This article contributes to the literature by advancing the concept of knowledge leadership
in the work of mobilising management research into organizational practice.
Keywords
knowledge leadership, knowledge mobilisation, management research, knowledge object, evidencebased management, healthcare management, knowledge-intensive firm, Foucault
The role of leadership in mobilising research-based management knowledge into organizational
practice is an important area of research, yet it is largely neglected in the literature. In this article we
develop the concept of ‘knowledge leadership’ – in which managers strive to personally become the
knowledge object, so mobilising research-based management knowledge (‘management research’
hereafter) into practice.
Previous scholarship has considered managers’ roles in terms of empowering (Srivastava et al., 2006)
or motivating (Lakshman, 2005) subordinates to share knowledge, by providing supportive climates
for learning and innovation (Viitala, 2004), and knowledge creation (von Krogh et al., 2012). Some
scholars suggest senior managers should intervene more strategically by participating in knowledge
management initiatives (Lakshman, 2005), by ‘role modelling’ knowledge adoption (Bell DeTienne et
al., 2004; Goh, 2002), directing resources (Kimble et al., 2010), or constructing crises to expedite
knowledge flows (Kim, 2001). Overall, these perspectives suggest managers have a facilitative but
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relationally distant role, directed at mobilising aspects of knowledge in organizational settings.
An alternative analytic framing is raised by Foucault’s (1980) concept of power-knowledge, which
argues that a power-knowledge nexus operates pervasively through and upon all human subjects.
This nexus functions by dynamically shaping how subjects relate to their contexts, the forms of
knowledge with which they engage, and indeed how they relate to themselves and others. As
adopted within organizational studies, Foucauldian scholarship tends to focus on disciplinary aspects
of organizational control (for reviews, see Menicken & Miller, 2014; Power, 2011) such as the
regulation and surveillance of employees, consumers, inmates and patients.
An important second strand of Foucauldian thinking investigates, by contrast, how powerknowledge operates through mundane practices, inscriptions and devices of everyday work that
produce knowable, calculable objects. These operations notably give rise to the emerging knowledge
domains and expert groupings of the ‘grey sciences’ such as accounting (Miller & Rose, 1990), audit
(Power, 1997), and management knowledge (Jacques, 1996). Such scholarship, influential in
sociological accounting research, portrays an image of human subjects deeply immersed in, and
indeed constituted by, a pervasive organizational apparatus.
However, might more agentic subject positions develop, potentially shaping and mobilising less
dominant modes of knowledge? An intriguing third strand of scholarship focuses on Foucault’s
(1988) ‘technologies of the self’, exploring how subjects actively constitute themselves through
practices of self-formation – whether as subjected to disciplinary power, or potentially as selfactualising, autonomous subjects, through personal desire, truth-seeking and practical critique
(Foucault, 2011). Against his original analysis of power-knowledge and its internalization by docile
subjects, Foucault’s later libertarian ideas offer an alternative lens for investigating how different
subject positions and power-knowledge relations may develop within organizational contexts
(Barratt, 2008; Ferlie et al., 2013; 2012; Fischer & Ferlie, 2013; McKinlay & Starkey, 1998).
In this article we draw together Foucauldian perspectives on power-knowledge with his later work
on technologies of the self, arguing that knowledge leadership involves agentic, effortful and often
deeply personal engagement in mobilising knowledge into practice. Drawing on Foucault’s (1980)
framing of codified, discursive-contextual and subjective axes of knowledge, we suggest that
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knowledge leadership operates through mobilising management research between these axes,
through three very different mechanisms of transposing, appropriating or contending management
research.
We develop this Foucauldian framing through our empirical study of six research-intensive
organizations operating in the UK health economy, in which we explored how senior to middle level
managers (general, clinical and academic) used management research in their work. We define
management research as codified texts that have undergone scholarly peer review and been
published in academic journals or books, while knowledge mobilisation is defined as the translation
and utilisation of such research-based texts into practice (see Townley, 2008). We purposively
sampled managers with demonstrable interest in management knowledge, including doctoral or
other postgraduate degrees in management-related studies. Drawing on a comparative study of our
six organizations, we explore an unexpected finding in our data: despite their prima facie evidence of
prior sustained involvement, few respondents accessed or used management research in their work.
Yet we also found some notable outliers whose endeavours to mobilise management research in
their work stimulated wider engagement with such knowledge, in what we describe as a process of
‘knowledge leadership’.
Our article contributes to the extant literature on knowledge leadership in the work of mobilising
management research in organizations, applying a Foucauldian perspective on knowledge. When
individuals strongly engage with certain knowledges – their identities and practices intertwining with,
and coming to represent, the knowledge object – this produces a dynamising effect that raises
intersubjective tensions, with potential personal and emotional costs. We argue that mobilising
codified knowledge into practice entails effortful processes of transposition in which individuals are
personally involved in converting management research into its utilisation, practices of appropriation
in which certain elements are selectively used and deployed, or contention involving codified
knowledge being actively engaged with yet deliberately undermined, as a means of advancing
subjective ‘truths’ and alternative ways of knowing.
Our argument proceeds firstly by situating our exploration of knowledge leadership within a
Foucauldian framing of practices, through which we elaborate our conceptual framework of three
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axes of codified, discursive-contextual and subjective modes of knowledge. We then introduce our
empirical research, drawing from a wider dataset to explore our unexpected findings of relatively few
but significant exemplars of knowledge leadership in our sites. Finally, we explore analytically the
dynamics of knowledge leadership work, outlining implications for mobilising forms of management
knowledge into organizational practice.
Foucault’s organising apparatus: power-knowledge relations
In discussing his seminal concept of power-knowledge, Foucault (1980, 2002) explores how ‘truth
regimes’ come to be constituted, illuminating how power relations are intertwined with assembling
knowledge as ‘truth’. These relations are immanent and continuously reproduced through ‘nests of
practices’, such that efforts to mobilise knowledge can be seen as inherently agonistic. These
practices involve material artefacts as carriers of power-knowledge, grounded in everyday routines.
According to Power (2011), materials and associated technologies are essential in connecting
abstract organizational ideas and purposes with routine operations that mobilise these through
regulations, technical reports, textbooks and the micro-practices of organizational life. Practices
should therefore be studied as a relational network that may become aligned as an organising
‘apparatus’ forming these knowledge-power relations:
“a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural
forms, regulatory decisions, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical,
moral and philanthropic propositions… The apparatus itself is the system of relations that
can be established between these elements” (Foucault, 1980: 194)
Foucault’s (1980) sociology of knowledge emphasizes the centrality of practices in forming, and
being shaped by, complex interrelations between subjects, contexts and forms of knowledge. In his
analysis of disciplinary power, Foucault shows how this is exercised through mundane yet pervasive
routines and techniques. A Foucauldian reading posits that formal (codified) knowledge and practice
should be analysed as power-knowledge configurations producing various systems of thought such
as those associated with science, clinics and prisons. Scientific reasoning is thus embedded in “the
passion of scholars, their reciprocal hatred, their fanatical and unending discussions… that slowly
forged the weapons of reason” (Foucault, 1977: 78).
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For example, Foucault argues that the emergence of psychiatry was established not through
progressive advances in formal medical knowledge, but through a shift in broader discursive
conditions within society. Psychiatry thus advanced as ‘a quite different (knowledge) game’ of
relations between hospitalization, internment, social exclusion, the rules and norms of law, work,
and moral values (Gutting, 1993: 252). These broader socio-historical conditions produce a
discursive-contextual knowledge axis that Foucault (2002) termed discursive practice-savoir – involving
such heterogeneous elements as political discourse and rhetoric, institutional regulations, societal
norms, narratives and fictions.
Alongside this discursive-contextual axis Foucault (2002) argues that formal, science-like knowledge
(which he referred to as consciousness-connaissance) develops as a distinct second axis, in the form of
codified, rational rules. Whereas this codified knowledge axis assumes an authoritative, science-like
status (such as Evidence-based Medicine), Foucault argues (2002) that the notion of ‘scientific truth’
obscures practices, passions and ‘wars of reason’ through which it is fabricated between interested
parties and their powerfully and emotionally invested knowledge ‘objects’.
According to Foucault’s power-knowledge thesis, these discursive-contextual and codified axes are
pervasive and ‘cannot escape subjectivity’: researchers are also ‘the researched’, modified by the
work required in order to know (Scheurich & McKenzie, 2005). Human subjects are necessarily
embedded in and shaped by their own discursive-historical contexts. Knowledge of economics is
thus known through being constituted as a productive subject, just as knowledge of madness is
known through being constituted as a rational subject (Foucault, 2002: 60).
But how might individuals engage with and seek to influence these conditions? Although Foucault
originally dismissed the possibility of agency, insisting upon a totalising concept of powerknowledge, in his later research he explored the possibility of more autonomous and agentic subjects
choosing how to engage with ‘regimes of truth’, on their own terms (Scheurich & McKenzie, 2005).
Notably, in his final lectures on ethics-based practices of the self, he argued that subjects may
actively seek agonistic and contested relations to power-knowledge, seeking more autonomous
subject positions for themselves, while attempting to induce similar practices in others through freespoken, practical critique (Foucault, 2011).
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Foucault (1988, 2011) argues that subjective forms of knowledge constitute a third knowledge axis
as modes of subjectivity, reflecting this possibility of a shift from subjection to dominant modes of
power-knowledge, to potentially becoming a more ‘intensely-free’, agentic subject. Indeed, he
ultimately suggests a more dynamic field of power-knowledge in which the balance between
codified, discursive-contextual and subjective knowledge axes may be transformed through
politically courageous ‘truth-seeking’ (Fischer & Ferlie, 2013; Kosmala & McKernan, 2010).
Overall, we see in Foucault’s sociology of knowledge a central preoccupation with how subject
positions are tied to and indeed constituted by the operations of codified, discursive-contextual and
subjective axes. His theorizing suggests a useful heuristic for studying how management research
may be mobilised in organizations, but how might we operationalize this empirically?
An interesting example of the use of Foucault’s theorizing for empirical research is Townley’s (2008)
study of rationalities in organizations, building on what she terms Foucault’s three ‘axes of practical
reason’. Townley uses the empirical setting of the UK criminal justice system to study how
performance measures operate as disciplinary knowledge that cascades within this system. This
produces individuals with particular subject positions and identities as specific knowledge-power
effects. Thus, prosecutors, the accused, victims and the police imply very different power relations,
access to fields of knowledge and required subject positions.
According to Townley’s (2008) analysis, codified knowledge seeks to define a field by establishing a
science-like status, such as advancing economic or technocratic organizational theories. In her
example of criminal justice bureaucracy, this functions through the position of a dispassionate,
‘disembedded self’, operating according to rules. In contrast, discursive-contextual knowledge
regulates meaning through a normative system of political, economic and values-based interests. Its
subject position is that of an ‘embedded self’ which applies institutional norms such as policing,
imprisonment and probation, therefore giving voice to embedded values and interests. Finally,
subjective knowledge arises through the ‘embodied self’ as a specific site for the ‘microphysics’ of
power, evoking ‘a lived, embodied, corporeal experience of being in the world that functions to give
access to knowledge of the world’ (Townley, 2008: 25). Subjective knowledge is accessed through
physical sensations, emotions and fantasies, such as victims’ or criminals’ understanding and
recognition of themselves as subjects.
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Our reading of Foucault and Townley is that the idea of distinct knowledge axes can be seen as ideal
types, providing a useful framework for analysing how power-knowledge operates. Townley’s (2008)
research illustrates this especially through her investigation into dominant organizational rationalities
and specific subject positions inscribed within these. However, our research focus on knowledge
leadership in mobilising knowledge suggests that these axes may be conceptualised differently as
framing a dynamic field. Indeed, studying interactions between knowledge axes (rather than merely
along them) is likely to be a promising lens for exploring how managers mobilise management
research. We would expect to see different patterns of knowledge leadership work between
‘disembedded’ subjects attempting to mobilise codified knowledge into practice, ‘embedded’ subjects
seeking to normatively shape research for their contexts, and ‘embodied’ subjects engaging with
knowledge more autonomously.
In the following empirical account, we develop our analytic focus by studying the work of managers
in six knowledge-intensive organizations operating in the UK healthcare sector. These settings offer
an ideal vantage point to investigate how management research may be mobilised into practice. Each
of these organizations is orientated towards using management research in healthcare; they each
operate within the socio-political context of the UK public sector healthcare system; and each
broadly espouses values-based principles, orientated to the delivery of public services. In the
following section we explore our specific research question: how do managers who are influenced by
management research mobilise such research in their work?
Methods and organizational contexts
Our empirical data are drawn from a broader, 30-month study (Dopson et al. 2013; Ferlie et al.
2015) in which we investigated under what circumstances and how (general and clinical) managers
access and use management research in their decision making, and how such knowledge is utilized in
their organizational contexts. To explore these questions we studied six diverse organizations in the
healthcare sector, which we saw as likely to draw upon management (as well as more embedded,
clinical) research: a global management consulting firm; a policy think tank engaged in health policy
research; a major Academic Health Science Centre (AHSC) partnership between a university and its
associated hospitals; a region-wide Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and
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Care (CLAHRC) translating research into practice; a not-for-profit hospital undertaking
organizational change; and a large primary care trust (PCT) implementing national health policy.
These settings demonstrated prima facie evidence of using management research and were widely
considered to be leading examples in their respective areas of specialisation.
We focus in this article on managers within these settings as our unit of analysis, drawing from
interviews with 45 mid to senior level managers, each of whom demonstrated interest in
management research and had doctoral or other postgraduate degrees in management-related
subjects. As part of the wider study (involving a further 92 respondents), we explored how managers
might mobilise management knowledge within their settings. We explored respondents’ careers,
motivations to seek management research, practices of accessing and using management research,
and experiences and practices of mobilising research and management knowledge more broadly.
Our interviews were of 1 to 2½ hours’ duration, beginning with open-ended autobiographical
narratives, while subsequent questions (informed by our literature review) were loosely structured,
focusing on respondents’ access to and use of a range of management knowledges.
We worked in pairs to interview respondents and analyse transcripts (professionally transcribed),
using NVivo software to assist in data management and analysis. After our original findings were
written in an empirically focused report (Dopson et al., 2013), we undertook a further phase of
analysis to explore instances of ‘knowledge leadership’ (which we initially coded broadly). To
increase our analytic focus, we re-examined 19 of the 45 cases, where we had initially coded for
knowledge leadership. Two researchers independently re-analysed these 19 transcripts and produced
narrative reports that we compared and discussed with the wider team. In narrowing our focus on
contrasting approaches to knowledge mobilisation, we first drew upon broader theoretical literature
on practices of knowledge mobilisation, then gradually focused on Foucauldian perspectives on
power-knowledge which we found helpful in framing our analysis. We developed a loose initial
framing (see Pentland, 1999) through which we progressed from open to focused coding (Strauss &
Corbin, 1998) for contrasting mechanisms of transposing, appropriating and contending
management research. We refined our analysis through comparing cases where participants exercised
strongly agentic practices within their settings. Our analysis of these data is summarized in Table 1,
drawn from our 19 cases.
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Finally, through consolidating our codes, we identified four focal cases that most clearly represent
the knowledge leadership mechanisms of transposing (Peter), appropriating (Clive), and contending
(Ben) management research, and a final example of integrating all three mechanisms (James). In
doing so, we followed Lockett et al.’s (2014) study of social position in organizational change in
which they focused on a small number of cases to exemplify their codes. As Sveninsson and
Alvesson (2003) also argue, focusing on a small number of representative cases allows for greater
focus on the depth and richness of empirical material, which is important in understanding
individual actors. In our empirical account, we similarly concentrate on four focal cases to elucidate
distinct approaches to knowledge leadership.
Knowledge leadership in the mobilisation of management research
In the following empirical material we introduce our four focal cases, illustrating how individuals
mobilised management research in distinct ways. This analysis arose from a surprising finding in our
wider data set. Despite our purposive sampling of respondents with demonstrable interest in
management research, we found scarce access or uptake of management research texts. Few
respondents attempted to mobilise management research, despite working in ostensibly researchintensive settings. As one senior manager and former management scholar (PhD in management
studies) described, management practice demands ‘very different ways of knowing’ compared to
academic scholarship:
“Experience, yes it’s experience – because it’s immediate and doesn’t require additional
effort compared to reading a journal article. So it’s much more a felt evidence rather than a
thought or (research) evidence.”
Indeed, despite respondents’ demonstrable interest in management research, we found management
research was the least important source of influence upon management practice for most of our
respondents, across the six settings. As one senior management consultant (MBA from a leading
business school) commented:
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“What the hell does that mean at all … evidence-based medicine I think is critical, (but)
evidence-based management is not something that I’ve heard of before.”
Yet intriguingly, we identified a minority of managers who drew significantly upon management
research, striving to mobilise this research into organizational practice, often at personal cost,
putting their working relations, reputations and careers at risk. In the following focal cases, we
explore four distinct patterns of knowledge leadership in which individuals exercised these strongly
agentic practices, actively mobilising management research in their settings.
Transposing management research: Peter
Our first example is taken from an Academic Health Science Centre – a partnership between leading
teaching hospitals and a multi-faculty university, intended to accelerate the translation of medical
research through evidence-based professional education, training and clinical practice. As was typical
across our cases, most of our participants in this site emphasised the role of evidence in clinical
knowledge, privileging this above management research (which most tended to ignore in favour of
populist texts). However, one notable exception was the work of Peter, a medical consultant who
describes himself as a lone ‘boundary spanner’ between clinical and management knowledge
domains.
“Other people … can’t see it because it’s not really being applied in healthcare – they’re
saying, we’re not (a supermarket), it’s not (a consulting firm). So it’s very hard to be a lone
voice saying it.”
Drawing on process engineering concepts such as queuing and flow management (previously
developed within acute physical healthcare), he attempted to transfer and test these for the first time
in a mental healthcare setting.
“The ideas that I’m doing for quality improvement is get(ting to) the operations
management heart of the organization… The first thing (I’m) doing is going out to literature
to check that the methodology would come from an evidence base … on every, every
occasion... Well, in the MBA you’re taught always to go for the numbers, never go on your
opinion… Whether that be financial data, or activity data, or outcome data, whatever it is,
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but you’re measuring something and gathering evidence as to why and how you’re going to
… make an improvement.”
During our fieldwork, we heard many accounts of Peter’s work on quality improvement, which was
respected and often highly regarded. Yet he also experienced repeated setbacks from his fellow
clinicians and senior managers, many of whom found his strongly evidence-based approach
challenging. When he developed an initiative to improve patient flows (capacity management) within
the mental health hospital, this encountered strong resistance, producing heated confrontations with
managers and some clinicians, which ultimately derailed his project.
“Very defensive from the managers… I guess it could be perceived that I’m threatening
them, showing knowledge that maybe they don’t have … taking on their job and telling
them how to do it rather than adding to their knowledge… My (change project) was one of
the biggest things that caused a lot of upset around the flow of patients. It had a lot of
evidence behind it, a lot of maths… (Managers) found it very hard and one of them said he
couldn’t see me for a while because he felt so angry … even three years on. They got the
terminology but not the understanding. We certainly realised how important and crucial that
is.”
His repeated proposals to the hospital board, addressing service improvement, were often returned
to him for further work – although interestingly, his initiatives were seen as persuasive and rarely
rejected. Despite such tensions, which he experienced personally as rejections, his personal
convictions about using management research to improve healthcare quality led him to explore
further means of engaging senior leaders and clinicians across various institutes to develop his
approach. He sought advice through coaching and joined an action learning set with senior
colleagues, focused on how to embed more evidence-based organizational change.
An intriguing aspect of Peter’s engagement in management research was his resolve and increasing
commitment over several years to drive healthcare quality through service improvement, despite
experiencing this as “a weight around my neck”. Although he was perceived by his fellow doctors as
having “gone over to the dark side” of management, and was seen by certain managers as intruding
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upon their domain of authority, Peter had an enduring and personal engagement with translating
management research into healthcare service improvement.
How might we understand Peter’s commitment to mobilising research in this way, given the
criticisms and personal attacks he experienced? After gaining a PhD in clinical medicine, Peter had
gone on to study an MBA, researching operations management to “bring management theory into
practice”. Yet he described his interest in management research as driven by “probably my
childhood and nothing else” – influenced by early family discussions with his father (a professor of
medicine involved in healthcare policy) and siblings who worked in senior positions in the health
industry. Peter’s deep sense of personal commitment to using management research appears
intrinsically bound with his personal values and a drive to improve what he saw as outdated
organizational (and associated clinical) practices. His strong personal identification with his
transposing work was reflected in his reputation within the AHSC – by colleagues who saw him as
exemplifying this approach, as an internal expert in the operations field.
Appropriating management research within discursive practice: Clive
In our next example, this time from a not-for-profit hospital, we focus on the work of its ‘hybrid’
(McGivern et al., 2015) CEO, Clive, who was medically and managerially trained, with a PhD in
medical science and an MBA. His academic work and publications, focused on his medical specialty,
were widely respected within his organization and externally. His interest in management research
was reflected in participating in executive education programmes and in developing collaboration
between his organization, business schools and medical faculties. Interestingly, Clive described being
less interested in management research than in selectively assimilating ideas, phrases and data from a
variety of sources, moulding these into a narrative that he constructed to produce organizational
change.
“(I) don’t use a huge amount of hardwired, standard management knowledge… I have a few
key management theories or phrases batting around in my head that I use from time to
time… My team obviously provide (numbers and facts) and I then work that up into a
narrative to explain why one’s doing something. I don’t find reading routine management
journals (important)… I’ve bought books on leadership and management (and) sort of
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assimilate them into my model, but the books that stand out are not management books…
You may have picked up this slightly abstract way with some of that managing stuff. I’m in a
kind of fairly loose-thinking world.”
In contrast to our earlier example of Peter’s strong adherence to management research, Clive
described having moved on from his detailed mastery of theory and texts to a broader conception of
knowledge as embedded within day-to-day relations and practices:
“Earlier in my career… I’d sort of burn my way through journals. There are some
management jobs where … attention to detail is the appropriate approach. I’ve sort of
moved on from that model to a kind of complexity systems model where I wander around,
seeing where there are emergent patterns… In that different way of being, you learn
differently, looking for patterns and not specifics. You’re looking for a fit between ideas
triggered in your mind with … stuff in the organization, putting them together in a very sort
of chaotic way … ‘oh, that’s what we need to do’.”
If Clive’s account suggests a drift away from management research, in practice he drew powerfully
on certain texts, drawing on examples that seemed to “kind of fit” with his systems view. He
described using these to “cause a certain amount of chaos”, following which he created project
groups to “sort it all out”. Of particular interest, from our perspective, he selectively drew upon a
junior colleague’s MBA dissertation focused on Kaplan and Norton’s (1992) balanced scorecard.
Interested in this idea, Clive read a balanced scorecard textbook that he then assimilated into his
own ‘model’, using this to produce written frameworks, reporting systems and templates that he
used to powerfully drive organizational reform.
“So I read up a little bit at that time and the understanding I got was … (figure) out what
was really important and (focus) on it regularly… (So) I had a meeting with the senior
clinicians and managers, and the oldest of them said to me, ‘what’s your agenda here’, in this
rather suspicious way. I found myself saying in a sort of Thatcherian (sic) tone ‘occupancy,
occupancy, occupancy’. Well, there was this short of shocked silence. And since then I’ve
looked at the occupancy figures every week. I’m just hammering down on (them) all the
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time. I have a simple management theory that if I pay attention to it, everybody else just has
to keep at it.”
In Clive’s example, then, we see a model of knowledge leadership in which as CEO he was
positioned to bring in knowledges that ‘kind of fit’ with his interest in converting these into
powerful techniques for producing organizational change. Thus, he selectively used management
texts to justify ‘ranking and yanking’ to tackle poor staff performance, ‘regularly deconstructing
hierarchies’ to disrupt established power positions, and hammering down on occupancy figures.
In Clive’s pragmatic approach to management knowledge, (“go to the frontline … get involved,
make lots of mistakes”), he saw the deployment of management research as a means of powerfully
exerting influence within settings that appear resistant to organizational change. He was strongly
influenced by a commercial logic which Clive attributed to his childhood grounding in his parent’s
healthcare business: “I worked in every role (there) that you could as a schoolboy… I’d literally sit
on the kitchen table and my father would explain it to me”. Indeed, he described this prior
experience as inspiring his ambitions to lead his own service early in his medical career. Against the
trend of colleagues, who joined large consultant teams in teaching hospitals, he “always wanted to be
the number one consultant … to have a service with potential for development”. In this example we
see a stronger orientation towards discursive context in which personal investment is portrayed as
political, involving a more distant mode of subjectivity (“avoid getting emotional or irrational …
business is business … just don’t get upset about it”). Knowledge leadership involves shaping
settings through carefully crafting and deploying selected management research to drive ambitions.
Contending management research as an agonistic struggle: Ben
In the examples portrayed thus far we have described either privileging management research or
more selectively drawing upon and reassembling such research, mobilising these into organizational
practice. In our next example from a large primary care trust (PCT) implementing national policy
changes, Ben, a medically trained clinical director, drew upon management research to challenge and
refute it. Ben was strongly interested in management research, held a doctoral degree (MD) based
upon research on whole systems in health care, and had worked at leading universities. Yet in his
clinical director role he sought to challenge the prevailing research-based models of organizational
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change favoured by health authorities and management consultancy firms operating within UK
healthcare. He became increasingly frustrated with what he regarded as a paternalistic medical
paradigm and sought to develop instead community-led solutions to local problems, inspired by
examples he had seen elsewhere.
“I gravitated towards the kind of role I [have] now, which is helping people to think broader.
I (have) deep questions in my mind about contemporary understandings of health,
organizational development and science… Well, that is very uncomfortable for most
academics … because it strikes at their entire discipline and sense of meaning. Managers find
this deeply discomforting … how do you manage it?”
Convinced by his experience that “this is how you need to run health services … for people to come
together for the collective good”, he became engaged in stimulating community-led organizing and
decisions that challenged prevailing ways of working within his organization.
“The really big influences came after I tried to apply this thinking … that stage where the
mismatch between my observations and the available theory to me, that made it into a quest
rather than idle interest. So I’m looking for ideas … (but) I want to push them away and
come back to people … community organising, how you get various (groups) to agree to
collaborate over small win issues, mobilising different interest groups.”
An important aspect of his ‘quest’ was Ben’s search for more subjective forms of ‘truth’ derived
through deeply shared experiences. He described his method of discovering such truth and meaning
as requiring new organizational processes and ‘cultural agreements’. He thus actively engaged with
and strongly refuted data-driven healthcare improvement theories, along with linked organizational
performance and productivity metrics which he saw as neglecting experiential and more tacit forms
of knowledge.
“All this stuff … it’s all full of straight lines and pyramids and how to control people stuff,
every single page of it. Where is the rapprochement between what I do and what are they
doing...? The notion of evidence, of course, I seriously contest the (‘evidence-based’) stuff
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… they start off with assumptions that everything is a given and their perspective is their
given.”
Although Ben’s approach was effective in creating a community-driven initiative, focused on locally
prioritised health issues, other managers experienced his opposition to managerialist efforts to
implement top-down changes as provocative. Indeed, he actively refuted attempted data-driven
changes, arguing that these should be rebalanced with more context specific and subjectively held
knowledge held by community groups. He made active use of this local knowledge to challenge
managerial ideas in community meetings.
“There’s virtually no committee meeting my end where there is a point to be made … where
I don’t throw in an anecdote from yesterday’s (clinic)”.
An important aspect of this work is the personal effort and cost involved in Ben’s efforts to ‘speak
truth to power’ (Foucault, 2011). Tensions between contrasting modes of knowledge are
experienced here as an impassioned and increasingly conflictual arrangement in which Ben argued
for and sought to stimulate, a deeper understanding of subjective ‘reality’. Actively contending
management research and codified data in favour of this subjective knowledge was perceived (by
himself and others) as identified with, and even integral to, his efforts to drive community-led
change.
“When you succeed and succeed with it to a degree that (authorities) could not imagine
possible, it’s very scary, it’s like witchcraft… (I) had a period when it got summarily
executed, a difficult six months when I was marginalised from everything. One (director)
was extremely destructive, and saw me personally as a threat … these ideas were extremely
controversial and extremely uncomfortable.”
In the above example, then, we see strong orientations towards subjective knowledge, motivated by
personal belief in the ‘truth’ value of (inter)subjective experience. But what explains these efforts
which involve significant personal, emotional and reputational costs? Ben described his ambitions as
driven by formative experiences in which an early trauma (the death of a parent) influenced his
career in medicine, while later experiences travelling in developing nations led him to address the
17
gap he saw between the supposed certainty of medical science and his experiences of how
meaningful social change works in reality. Analytically, we suggest his more subjectively orientated
concept of knowledge was in part developed through an ongoing agonistic struggle with increasingly
data-driven policy and managerial ideas.
Integrating codified, discursive-contextual and subjective knowledges: James
Our final example, a senior policy manager in a health policy unit, illustrates more integrated but
unusual practices in which knowledge leadership involves mobilising across codified, discursivecontextual and subjective modes of knowledge. James, who held a PhD in information science, was
highly regarded within his organization for his evidence-based approach, using management research
as a means of informing and implementing organizational change.
“What’s the state of the literature right now? That’s really, really important to me. If I don’t
know what’s being written, then I have a fear.”
Yet he was critical of some mainstream efforts to apply management research to the particular
context of healthcare organizations. Instead of searching for and applying more generic management
texts, James actively sought out and strove to transpose lessons from wider related research fields,
such as the sociology of science and the military literature.
“You can’t rely on the normal texts. People start quoting Peter Senge, Jack Welch, all this
stuff, and you say to yourself, what are you talking about? This doesn’t work here and it never
will – it’s not going to work in this organization. You have to think of some other way of
doing it.”
He sought to directly translate such wider research into his own management practices, adapting his
approach to working with others – and advocated others to do the same, motivated by his wish to
‘be the guy that helps people’. This interest in translating and personally embodying certain
management research in his own management practice led him to span established demarcations and
hierarchies within his organization. His approach was highly effective at bringing in new ideas and
stimulating debate, prompting questions about the possibility of organizational change
18
“I really want to get a transformative way of working. So I go to the management literature
about this on what made different groups collaborate: ‘Where is the tension? What’s at stake?
What do we believe in?’ So this is what Leigh Star’s doing right now: how do you know when
you choose the right boundary object? One way is by making differences explicit, raising
tensions – in a sense you’re making problems for people. And you just have to wait for them
to calm down, because there’s a hell of a lot of emotion in organizations ... they’d want to
wring your neck. I discovered what you need to do is to back off (a bit), so you’ve got to be
really, really careful, recognising the traps… The best thing to do is just kind of lay back,
subside a bit and be patient.”
James ability to stimulate meaningful discussion was generally well regarded by colleagues, some of
whom welcomed the energetic debates this generated across departments. Yet these practices also
evoked emotional reactions that reduced his personal and political support amongst colleagues,
undermining James confidence and risking his standing within his organization.
“If you’re trying to work across boundaries (within your own organization) and it’s creating
tensions, no matter how much people think that they want to be reflective, nobody wants to
do it. (Looking back), I would have worked very differently, recognising … the traps.”
As we have seen in previous examples, transposing management research into practice is effortful
and can involve significant personal costs. In James’ example, we see a rather novel and in many
ways highly effective approach to knowledge leadership, although it seemed to destabilise his
position within the organization. So how can we explain his motivation to challenge established
knowledges internally? Despite his evidence-based approach being seen as more typically ‘academic’
than most colleagues within his organization, he described his practices as being driven by an
underlying fear of humiliation.
“Now I’ll tell you something – a lot of people could misinterpret this and say ... he’s an
academic with chalk up his nose. That’s not the answer. The answer is, I came from a poor
background, and if I tried to take shortcuts when talking with people smarter than me, I
always looked stupid … people would turn around and say how could you be so naive? I
19
said enough is enough; I’m not going to go through life like that, looking stupid… I feel it
very personally.”
However, James’ original efforts to draw on research as a means of protecting his personal
reputation were later articulated through his values-based commitment to healthcare delivery – “you
are working with human beings – I mean, take the goddamned time to read (up on) what you’re
doing” – even if this entailed a personal cost. Analytically, we see a stronger interplay in James’
example between codified, discursive-contextual and subjective knowledge axes.
Discussion and conclusion
How does knowledge leadership operate to mobilise management research? Our findings of
significant tensions in the practices of knowledge leadership suggest a relationally and dynamically
‘charged’ process through which individuals activate key mechanisms for mobilising management
research. Our focal cases were not just ‘facilitators’ (Kaplan & Norton, 1992), ‘brokers’ (von Krogh
et al., 2012), or ‘translators’ (Lakshman, 2005; Srivastava et al., 2006), but deeply and personally
immersed in how management research was mobilised, actively disrupting and reshaping aspects of
their settings.
We capture in Table 2 three very different mechanisms through which knowledge leadership
transposes, appropriates or contends management research, by mobilising knowledge between Foucault’s
codified, discursive-contextual and subjective knowledge axes. Through transposition, managers
become deeply involved in converting management research into practice through actively
disrupting their settings – stimulating a relational attention to their specific roles and practices of
‘activating’ processes of knowledge mobilisation. In appropriation, managers craft how various
knowledge artefacts are selectively fashioned and deployed, using these to produce authoritative
materials and effects in their settings. Through contention, managers openly critique and undermine
the credibility of established texts, inducing more intersubjective and potentially agentic search for
experiential truth in their settings. Whereas these mechanisms operate very differently, our analysis
suggests that these are actively developed through assembling power-knowledge relations across the
following dimensions.
20
First, managers’ sense of purpose and agency is tied to their personal engagement with texts,
technologies and devices, with which they tend to closely identify. Managers had been immersed over
long periods with research texts and models (each of our focal cases had a doctoral degree), with
which they were intensely familiar. These managers readily interpreted, critiqued and deconstructed
management research texts, along with tangible materials, which they used in various ways to
mobilise management knowledge in their settings. Hence, we find hermeneutic readings of
unfamiliar texts to reveal their ‘hidden truths’, synthesised narratives and templates mixing clinical
and commercial logics, and deconstructing authoritative texts to stimulate more experience-based
forms of truth-seeking.
Second, we find knowledge leadership requires a dynamically charged organizing ‘apparatus’ (Foucault,
1980), refashioning diverse materials and texts in ways that stimulate the wider engagement of
organizational participants. Our focal managers drew upon these materials to reshape key aspects of
their settings: ‘raising tensions … you’re making problems for people’. Such tensions can be a source
of creativity that mobilises resources and action, as well as being potentially conflictual and
destructive (Fischer, 2008, 2012). Indeed in each of our focal cases, managers brought together
diverse knowledge materials and devices to powerfully shift embedded mentalities, practices and
contexts. Managers may seek to craft an organizing apparatus for personal gain, or for other shared
or altruistic purposes, such as in Peter’s data-driven redesign of patient flows, Clive’s enforced
upwards weekly reporting of bed occupancy, and Ben’s development of a participatory, communityled initiative. However, a key finding is that such preparedness to stimulate and withstand tensions
arising from an organizing apparatus is a significant driver for mobilising management knowledge.
Third, whereas many of our wider respondents commented on the formative role of prior
experiences (educational, career, and sometimes childhood), in our focal cases of knowledge
leadership, personal biographies were closely interwoven with modes of subjectivity. Subject positions
varied from Philip’s rational-analytic transposition of management research into practice to Ben’s
impassioned challenge to ‘de-contextualised evidence’ in his search for deeper meaning. Yet an
important aspect of these positions is their functioning as biographical projects tied to managers’
‘will to know’, which individuals actively cultivated and attempted to develop within their
organisational contexts. Strong personal identification with these modes of subjectivity may explain
21
sustained engagement with knowledge leadership, despite the emotional costs and risks to
professional standing that such commitment often entails.
Finally, through personally striving to mobilise knowledge, our managers became the knowledge object.
Whereas previous literature suggests knowledge leadership involves participation in or ‘role
modelling’ (Bell DeTienne et al., 2004; Goh, 2002) knowledge, in our cases managers effectively
‘personify’ knowledge as a powerful relational dynamic. We found intensive modes of engagement in
which managers crafted pivotal, disruptive roles for themselves, which stimulated reactivity to, and
engagement with, the knowledges they introduced within their settings. As our empirical material
shows, such modes of engagement tends to raise tensions (‘making differences explicit … making
problems for people’) that may escalate into what managers experience as personal attacks and
isolation. In their commitment to and identification with mobilising knowledge, managers became
synonymous with the knowledge they advocate and represent.
In summary, our empirical findings illustrate how knowledge leadership assembles these four
dimensions in very different ways, so producing the distinct mechanisms we find of transposing,
appropriating or contending management research. How might these findings advance our
understanding of how power-knowledge operates in knowledge mobilisation?
Returning to our original Foucauldian schema of codified, discursive-contextual and subjective
forms of knowledge, we should expect to see managers’ practices and associated subject positions
concentrated around specific knowledge axes. As Townley’s (2008) study shows, the pursuit of
science-like knowledge (such as economics or management science) entails rather dispassionate and
‘disembedded’ subjects; the advancement of contextual-political knowledge (including institutional
and cultural norms) involves ‘embedded’ subjects; while the search for more subjectively
experienced knowledge requires ‘embodied’ subjects, sensitive to bodily impulses and emotions.
According to this schema, then, managers’ practices should be firmly tied to codified, discursivecontextual, or subjective modes of knowledge.
By exploring mechanisms of transposing, appropriating and contending knowledge, though, we
reveal how managers actively mobilise knowledge between axes. In contrast to Foucault’s (1977, 2002)
22
original notion of power-knowledge, in which docile subjects have scant possibility of agency but
might develop it through his third axis of courageous practices of the self (Foucault, 2011), our three
forms of knowledge leadership involve strongly agentic practices, acting with and upon management
research. Indeed, our focal cases can be seen as examples of personally meaningful ‘self-projects’ in
which individuals sought to mobilise knowledge through deep engagement with management
research texts, shaping an effective organizing apparatus, and pursuing influential subject positions
in which they appeared to personify – and indeed effectively became – the knowledge object within
their settings.
We suggest our findings develop and extend previous accounts of knowledge leadership in the
mobilisation of management knowledge. Previous scholarship finds that knowledge tends to be
‘sticky’ and does not readily flow across organizational and professional boundaries (Szulanski,
2006); this can be explained theoretically, as knowledge is embedded within a nexus of social
institutions, discursive contexts and embedded practices (Foucault, 2011; Schatzki, 2001). Our
research supports these broad arguments, but suggests that such ‘stickiness’ is likely to also be
connected with how diverse knowledge axes operate and may be acted upon by organizational
actors.
We contribute to the literature by elucidating the concept of knowledge leadership and its
mechanisms for mobilising management knowledge. In particular, a major finding of our study is
that the work of knowledge leadership is less directed towards facilitating knowledge flows than
embodied in managers who strongly identify with and effectively become the knowledge object. We
suggest this is an important and novel finding that offers promising directions for future research.
By drawing together Foucauldian scholarship on power-knowledge and his later ideas on
technologies of the self, we analyse specific mechanisms of transposing, appropriating and
contending management research. We argue that these mechanisms are central to the work of
knowledge leadership, involving agentic individuals whose ‘will to know’ (Foucault, 2002) activates
and sustains their development as central actors in mobilising management research.
Does our empirical study have wider implications? Some limitations of this study are that it is based
on only six organizations, specifically in the context of healthcare, and we focus here on a relatively
small number of polar cases. Nonetheless, our finding of significant (if rather infrequent) cases of
23
knowledge leadership suggests that managers’ intensive and sustained personal engagement in
management research – especially at doctoral or related postgraduate levels – is an important and
under-examined aspect of knowledge mobilisation. Further research is needed in other researchintensive settings such as in biomedical science, engineering, and education, where managers may be
similarly motivated to mobilise management research.
Acknowledgement
We wish to thank our research participants for providing generous fieldwork access throughout the
30 months of this study. We acknowledge and thank Matthew Sheep (Associate Editor) and three
anonymous reviewers for their comments and most useful guidance in developing this article.
Funding
The authors acknowledge funding from the UK National Institute for Health Research, Health
Services and Delivery Research (NIHR HS&DR) programme (HS&DR Project 08/1808/242).
However, the views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the
HS&DR programme, NIHR, National Health Service or the Department of Health.
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Table 1. Summary of data analysis
Theoretical
constructs
Agentic ‘will to
know’
Material
practices
Type of subject
positions
Practices in
use
Illustrative empirical data
Connaissance axis
I was trained to be the grit
in the oyster, with a
strong notion about
evidence… trained to be
mavericks.
Savoir axis
I couldn’t see myself in an
academic life, so I left for a
job where I felt I could
change the world… I get
bored very easily.
Subjectivity axis
I have a philosophy around
always developing, it's core
to what I do. It’s not so
much about ambition (but)
growth and development.
Relations with
management
research
I was fascinated by (these)
difficulties so I went to
the literature… I’m
interested in (and) want to
learn about.
This is about client impact,
pragmatically we can’t
experiment with clients… it
doesn’t work if you’re a
consulting firm… there are
different interests.
Accessing and using
texts
I’d done loads of reading…
looking at what evidence
there is around what works
(and) the knowledge you
get through data collection.
Techniques for
applying knowledge
I take something and
apply it to the healthcare
setting, something
relatively theoretical and
empirically elaborate upon
it.
I can see the overlap
hugely… how much we’re
missing out by not
incorporating business
knowledge… It’s very
hard to be a lone voice
saying it.
I am very invested, it’s
worked extremely well…
the book itself is a powerful
thing for us, but even more
powerful is the fact we no
longer have the framework
wars.
I am very explicit in making
that learning contract with
myself, I steal something
from everyone I work
with… I nick good ideas.
I (felt) quite stuck – this
management work can have
a brutalising effect… I was
becoming rather harsh in
my approach. So this is
what led me onto the
[doctoral] training.
I’m not a great seeker after
knowledge in a formal
sense, what I am a seeker
after is experience.
Crafting identity
narratives
Subject positions in
relation to
knowledge axes
Pattern of
intersubjective
relations
The barrier is, you have to
find somebody people can
really identify with and
respect, [who] can tell
their war stories. That’s
when you’re able to get
buy in.
29
The key is that the solution
to the problems are actually
in your head – it’s a
question of facilitation and
you get those solutions out.
(Avoid) getting emotional
or irrational. Whatever
happens, you just have to
be unblinkingly accepting.
Whatever the challenges
are, whatever your
expectations or dreams,
don’t get upset about it.
It’s a kind of shared
endeavour where I’m
offering some of my
experience… the biggest
tool we bring to it is
ourselves. My personal
experience and training is
more relevant than books
and stuff.
I describe myself as an
academic salesman…
charismatic delivery. (But)
I’m not entirely a believer,
and I’m not sure if this will
work.
There is a way of thinking
which is about engagement
(with clinicians)… trying to
get alignment between heart
and head.
Powerknowledge
apparatus
Creating an
organizing
apparatus
Management knowledge
(is) a tool to help people
think differently… there
were quite a lot of
parallels to how I work as
a (clinician).
30
The key issue is… we
conclude by saying “so
what?” The ability to push
people to (and I’m bashing
the table...) answering the
‘so what?’ question.
What influences me most is
(others’) experiences… very
real and dynamic. It doesn’t
feel like I’m talking about
knowledge very much.
Table 2. Knowledge leadership mechanisms
Dimensions
Transposing
Texts,
technologies and
devices
Immersion in interpreting and
assimilating management
research texts. Accurate
representations of codified
knowledge.
Measuring and analysing specific
contexts to create fit between
codified knowledge and
organisational settings.
Organizing
apparatus
Establishing authority based on
privileged knowledge of
management research texts.
Judging correct correspondence
between local empirical data and
management research texts.
Mode of
subjectivity
Transposing codified knowledge
into locally significant ‘registers’
to focus attention and
comprehension.
The ‘will to know’ involves
close identification with and
interpretation of management
research texts.
Representing and exemplifying
the transposition of codified
knowledge into organizational
practice.
Becoming the
knowledge
object
Sustaining personally
meaningful projects for
research-based organizational
change through rigorous models
and techniques.
Personifies privileged access to,
interpretation and articulation of
authoritative texts, and their
faithful transposition into (and
for) organisational settings.
Mechanisms
Appropriating
Contending
Selective adaptation of
management research texts and
popular/grey literatures.
Seeking and critiquing
management research texts,
testing their truth claims.
Synthesising knowledges to
create rhetorically persuasive
representations.
Deconstructing codified
knowledge to discover
‘underlying’ truths.
Inscribing figures and templates
for specific contexts to broker
and legitimate unifying ideas.
Establishing authority through
the production of pragmatic
technologies with practical
effects.
Testing codified texts and
figures against subjective and
experiential truth-seeking.
Establishing authority through
authentic exchange, inducing
truth seeking in oneself and
others.
Inducing self-monitoring,
recording and reporting by
organizational members.
Stimulating shared participation
and enquiry into subjective
experiences.
Assembling abstractions,
standardisation and syntheses of
organisational data.
The ‘will to know’ involves a
pragmatic identification with
producing ‘knowledge that
works’.
Openly contending prevailing
texts to mobilise practical
critique and truth-seeking
The ‘will to know’ involves deep
identification with a search for
subjective meaning.
Creating compelling knowledge
artifacts to enlist others’ interest
and engagement.
Evoking authentic
intersubjective exchanges and
courageously ‘speaking truth to
power’.
Crafting plausible and sustained
performances through
emotional distance to
intersubjective tensions and
resistance.
Working upon oneself to elicit
subjective truths, provoking care
for the personal growth of
oneself and others.
Personifies privileged access to
and synthesis of a range of
knowledges, rhetorical devices
and techniques; crafting
compelling knowledge artifacts
with pragmatic effects.
Personifies courageous and
agonistic challenge to
‘decontextualised scientific
truths’. Disrupts established
assumptions by testing truth
claims against (inter)subjective
experiences.
31
Michael D Fischer is Senior Research Fellow in Organisational Behaviour and Leadership at the
University of Melbourne, Australia. He is also Visiting Scholar at Saïd Business School, University of
Oxford. His research focuses on emotional-affective and political dynamics of leading and
mobilizing organizational change in research-intensive healthcare organizations. Trained as a clinical
group analyst and social scientist, he leads research projects using longitudinal and ethnographic case
studies to explore processes of major organizational change. His research is published in leading
social science journals including Accounting, Organizations and Society, Human Relations,
Organization Studies, Public Administration and Social Science and Medicine. [Email:
michael.fischer@unimelb.edu.au]
Sue Dopson is the Rhodes Trust Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Faculty Dean at Saïd
Business School, University of Oxford, UK. She is also Visiting Professor at the University of
Alberta, Canada. Her research interests lie principally in the area of innovation, change and healthcare studies, and she has led a number of research projects in the health service sector. Her most
recent research commission is concerned with increasing the motivation and ability of healthcare
managers to access and use management research. She has published widely, and her research has
appeared recently in Human Relations, Organization Studies and Journal of Public Administration
and Policy Research. [Email: Sue.Dopson@sbs.ox.ac.uk]
Louise Fitzgerald is Visiting Professor (Organizational Change) at Saïd Business School, University
of Oxford and Emeritus Professor at De Montfort University, UK. Her research interests focus on
the following: the implementation of organizational change in complex, professionalized
organizations in the public sector; innovation adoption and diffusion; and knowledge mobilization
across sectors. She has published widely, and her research has appeared in Leadership Quarterly,
Academy of Management Journal, British Journal of Management and Human Resource
Management. [Email: louise.fitzgerald@sbs.ox.ac.uk]
Chris Bennett is a research psychologist and works as an independent research consultant. She was
previously employed by the Medical Research Council and as a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre
for Corporate Strategy and Change, University of Warwick, UK. Most of her research and
publications have involved looking at different aspects of change within the NHS and other public
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sector bodies. She has a longstanding interest in risk and decision-making and is currently
investigating the effect of perceptions of risk on the behaviour of hospital staff in relation to patient
safety. [Email: chris.e.bennett@btinternet.com]
Ewan Ferlie is Professor of Public Services Management at King’s College London, UK. His field is
the study of organizational change and restructuring in public services settings, notably health- care
and higher education. He has an interest in knowledge mobilization processes in organizations. He
uses mainly qualitative methods, including comparative case studies and documentary analysis. He
has published widely in journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Public
Administration Research and Theory, Organization Studies and Public Administration, and has
authored or co-authored handbooks, monographs and editions with Oxford University Press,
Routledge and Palgrave. [Email: ewan.ferlie@kcl.ac.uk]
Jean Ledger is a Research Associate at the School of Management & Business, King’s College
London, UK. She specializes in healthcare policy and reforms, public sector management and
knowledge mobilization. Her PhD focused on understanding knowledge dynamics in primary
healthcare during a period of large-scale service restructuring, and she is now working on a study of
Academic Health Science Networks (AHSNs). She is an experienced qualitative researcher using
case study research, interviews and ethnography. Before joining King’s College London, Jean
worked at a research consultancy specializing in deliberative research and public engagement. [Email:
Jean.Ledger@kcl.ac.uk]
Gerry McGivern is Professor of Organisational Analysis at Warwick Business School, UK. His
research focuses on professionals’ knowledge, practice, identity, leadership and how they are
affected by regulation and organization, primarily within healthcare. He has led NIHR and ESRC
funded research projects focused on these topics. He has previously published in Human Relations,
Organization Studies, Leadership Quarterly and Journal of Public Administration Research and
Theory. [Email: gerry.mcgivern@wbs.ac.uk]
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