Analyzing Context in Health Care Organizations

Abstract

This chapter reprises and reflects on Pettigrew, Ferlie, and McKee’s Shaping Strategic Change (1992), which analyzed processes of strategic change in the health care sector in England, based on a set of eight comparative and longitudinal case studies of management teams in English District Health Authorities attempting to accomplish large-scale service-level change. Further, it derived a more general and inductive model of receptive and nonreceptive contexts for change. The strengths and the limitations of this text are considered, along with a possible contemporary research agenda. Present day conditions for such research projects may not be as favorable as they were then.