The ethnographer as health service leader: An insider's view of organisational change

The conceptual presentation of a detailed case study of structural reorganisation in the English NHS illustrates what factors lead to productive or unproductive organisational change.

This autoethnography of a NHS Trust chair provides an account of two reorganisations over an 8-year period. The paper is based on diaries that allow for the presentation of examples that highlight different processes and outcomes. The various actors in the two reorganisations gave complex and multilayered meanings to structural changes and their impact. Two theoretical frameworks helped to analyse the dynamics of productive and unproductive changes.

It is argued that structural change rarely delivers and that working through people and paying due attention to their motivations and moral imperatives will more likely produce benefits to organisations, staff, and patients.