Implementing continuous quality improvement in hospital departments seems to be an interesting alternative to organization-wide implementation strategies. However, these results need to be confirmed by long-term evaluations and by deploying the program i n other departments.
This article addresses the issue of organizational resilience in a structural context marked by complexity, change and distribution of activities between interdependent occupational groups. We adopt an interactionist approach, relying mostly on the works of E.C. Hughes and A. Strauss to show how articulation within and between groups can affect the achievement of organizational goals (safety and production) in the face of unexpected events. The paper is based on an empirical study of teams involved in major modernization projects of the rail transport system and facing critical, risky and very constrained work situations. Our empirical results describe in depth the nature of arrangements and negotiations made within and between occupational groups to articulate the work. We show how organizational conditions affect these arrangements and finally the resilience of the project organization and groups within it. We then discuss our results in four main points, aiming to give a more general scope to our results. Our first two points demonstrate how professional rivalries and asymmetric relations lead to a displacement in organizational goals and affect resilience. Our third point assesses the role and the limits of both informal and formal arrangements in articulation and resilience. We finally show how adopting an interactionist perspective questions the notion of resilience for an organization as a whole.
The development of markets for the poorest populations (Base of the Pyramid [BOP]) has become important for multinational companies (MNCs), nongovernmental organizations, and public policies. Assuming that there is demand for very low price consumer products and that the main problem is one of access to those products, the challenge for MNCs is to reconfigure the whole of the corporate process accordingly. The article follows BOP theory and companies' actual innovation. It looks at the definitions of the BOP market, the representation of BOP consumers, and local heterogeneous configurations of actors. Based on fieldwork with an MNC (specializing in electrical equipment) investigating a BOP business, it investigates the work undertaken by managers to build this market innovation. It explores the paradoxical frontiers of consumption and aid to the poorest populations and feeds the reflexion of BOP policies by opening it up toward a diversity of alternatives and possible configurations.
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