Professor Damian Hodgson, Dr Cate Goodlad and Dr Diane Burns from the Organisation Studies Research Cluster have all received best paper awards at the 14th Organisational Behaviour in Health Care (OBHC) international conference, which took place at BI Norwegian Business School in Oslo, Norway in April 2024.
Organised by the Learned Society for Studies in Organising Healthcare (SHOC) since 2004, OBHC is the leading international conference for research relating to the management and organisation of health and care. At the 14th conference, 117 participants attended, representing 12 countries including the U.S., Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, France and the Netherlands. Previous OBHC conferences have been held in Montreal, Sydney, Copenhagen, Dublin, Calgary and Oxford, among other venues.
Professor Hodgson, Chair in Organisation Studies, was awarded the best paper award for his paper The Role of Routines in the Implementation of Skill-mix Change in General Practice, co-authored with colleagues at Alliance Manchester Business School. Based on an NIHR-funded research project studying how new roles are introduced into primary care to address the current workforce crisis, the paper argues that existing models are too static to capture the complexity of these changes, proposing instead a processual perspective based on an understanding of changes to routines which primary care relies upon. This perspective reveals the additional work generated when adding new staff to general practice and the need to consider this when implementing change.
The OBHC 24 Scientific Committee’s Best Paper judges commented that this paper “explores an important topic, which is also of great practical interest to those leading the organisation of primary healthcare in the context of an ongoing workforce crisis. It is novel and original in its attempt to leverage the routine theory for illuminating the issues related to skill-mix, and the authors should be commended for collecting, analysing and presenting a rich data set.”
Dr Goodlad, Research Associate and Dr Burns, Senior Lecturer in Organisation Studies, alongside Professor Kate Hamblin from the Centre for Care, were awarded the best paper-runner up award, for the paper “I’d kind of found my tribe in a way”: Values-based recruitment (VBR) in independent homecare providers in England. Based on an ESRC-funded project examining how emerging models of provision are delivering homecare, the paper argues that while VBR strategies can increase the recruitment of people who would not have traditionally thought of caring as a profession, in practice, some homecare agencies are implementing VBR in ways that serve to filter and advantage more middle-class candidates. The paper discusses how such practices risk reinforcing a class-based stratification of the care workforce employed by agencies commissioned to provide local authority-funded care, and those serving a more affluent private market.
The judges awarding the best paper runner up prize to Cate Goodlad, Diane Burns and Kate Hamblin commented that the “paper addresses a novel topic of values-based recruitment, and the authors should be commended for problematising this phenomenon and exploring it from a critical angle. The research setting for the paper is extremely interesting, and it provides a very rich empirical analysis enabling the authors to shed light on the hidden aspects of value-based recruitment in the unique context of homecare provision.”