Stephen Gourlay

Kingston University

Background In response to concerns about high hospital mortality rates, patient and carer complaints, a Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust public inquiry was conducted at the request of the UK government. This inquiry found serious failures in the quality of basic care provided and as a consequence, recommended that patients should have more re...

Crown copyright 2013. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0 © Queen’s Printer and Controller of HMSO 2019. This work was produced by Harris et al. under the terms of a commissioning contract issued by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. This issue may be freely reproduced for the purposes...

The overall aim of the study was to investigate the impact and effectiveness of IR in hospital wards in England on the organisation, delivery and experience of care from the perspective of patients, their family member (hereafter referred to as ‘carers’) and staff. The research question was: ‘What is it about IR in hospital wards that works, for wh...

Background Intentional rounding (IR) is a structured process whereby nurses conduct one to two hourly checks with every patient using a standardised protocol. Objective A realist synthesis of the evidence on IR was undertaken to develop IR programme theories of what works, for whom, in what circumstances and why. Methods A three-stage literature...

The possible role of job satisfaction (JS) on organizational commitment (OC) has been a very important and hotly debated topic among experts. However, existing studies have yielded mixed results potentially due to utilization of small datasets, different methodological designs, estimation techniques that do not control for potential endogeneity bet...

Background: Nurses leaving their jobs and the profession are an issue of international concern, with supply-demand gaps for nurses reported to be widening. There is a large body of existing literature, much of which is already in review form. In order to advance the usefulness of the literature for nurse and human resource managers, we undertook a...

Background Nurse turnover is an issue of concern in health care systems internationally. Understanding which interventions are effective to reduce turnover rates is important to managers and health care organisations. Despite a plethora of reviews of such interventions, strength of evidence is hard to determine. Objective We aimed to review litera...

Introduction Intentional rounding (IR) is a structured process whereby nurses in hospitals carry out regular checks, usually hourly, with individual patients using a standardised protocol to address issues of positioning, pain, personal needs and placement of items. The widespread implementation of IR across the UK has been driven by the recommenda...

Summary Background The term information behaviour covers the range of activities from awareness of a need for information or evidence to inform decision-making, through to the activities of searching, collecting, evaluating and using such information. It also includes the role that information intermediaries (knowledge managers, librarians) play...

Knowledge management theory and practice is dominated by two over-arching concepts: tacit and explicit knowledge. It is argued in this chapter that tacit knowledge is poorly conceptualized, and applied to disparate phenomena. Other disciplines testifying to action without awareness manage without invoking tacit knowledge, a course of action advocat...

Tacit knowledge is important for organizations and management, but we lack adequate theory, and find conflicting claims about the concept. A review of empirical studies of tacit knowledge phenomena found the term has been applied to both articulable and inarticulable knowledge. It is suggested that in the interests of clarity use of the term should...

Nonaka's proposition that knowledge is created through the interaction of tacit and explicit knowledge involving four modes of knowledge conversion is flawed. Three of the modes appear plausible but none are supported by evidence that cannot be explained more simply. The conceptual framework omits inherently tacit knowledge, and uses a radically su...

Discussion of tacit knowledge shows much ambiguity over key aspects of the concept. Rather than turning to further theory, this paper examines how the phrase has been applied in empirical research. Eight different uses of the term are identified, six concerning individual level and two collective level notions. Focusing on individual level notions...

The importance of tacit knowledge in and for organizations is widely attested to. As Baumard (1999: 8, 22) wrote, tacit knowledge is the basis of expertise, it is critical to daily management activities, and is a firm’s source of competitive advantage (see also Wagner and Sternberg, 1986; Lubit, 2001; Ambrosini and Bowman, 2001; Johannessen et al.,...

Knowledge management has emerged as a growing field of practice and research but the concept of knowledge itself remains vague. This is an unsatisfactory situation that may well hinder the development of knowledge management theory and practice. In this paper Alexander et. al.'s (1991) educational knowledge framework is combined with Clancey's (199...

This paper makes the case for a rigorous analysis of HR outsourcing, and reports preliminary findings of research into HRD outsourcing in the UK. Results cover the scope and extent of outsourcing, reasons for outsourcing, how outsourcing decisions are taken and by whom, and reported effects from outsourcing.

The phrase 'tacit knowledge' is used in a wide range of disciplines. Examination of definitions and usage in knowledge management, AI, sociology of science, and psychology reveals common aspects, but significant variations. It is a concept without consistency, or clear foundation. Polanyi in fact wrote of 'tacit knowing', a process, and so may have...

Knowledge management is introduced and it is suggested there are two main models, the dominant technology-focused one and a people-oriented one. Neither model recognizes that HRD might play a role in knowledge management; HRD writers have also ignored knowledge management. Knowledge management rests implicitly on a definition of 'knowledge'. Three...

It is widely recognised that if unions are ultimately to stem the trend in membership decline then they must move beyond what Willman (1989) terms ‘market share’ unionism, whereby unions compete with each other within an existing and declining membership base, to seek to recruit in unorganised sectors which are now the focus of employment growth. I...

Employee relations in non-union settings remain largely uninvestigated by industrial relations researchers. This article examines the management of employee relations in establishments in high technology industries in the Southeast of England - a sector and locality frequently identified with high levels of non-unionism. Moreover, high technology f...

Non-unionism and non-union firms have been an increasing focus of interest since the early 1980s, and indeed for some constitute an emerging model of employee relations which could (or should) become dominant in an ‘enterprise culture’, This view is prompted by a belief that trade union organisation is in terminal decline; a lasting transformation...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of London, 1983.

Motor skills are held to provide paradigm examples of tacit knowledge but knowledge management researchers have overlooked decades of research and theorising on motor skills. A review of this field shows it to be undergoing considerable intellectual debate between information-processing and dynamic systems models. The former support the notion of t...

ABSTRACT Knowledge transfer literature treatst he transfer of explicitk nowledge‘ embodied’ in documents and the like as unproblematic. Noe mpiricalgr oundsar e given for this assumption, and someauthors ha ve recently expressed reservationssugg esting that complex cognitiveand social processar e involved. Readingth eory and research is an obvious...

Knowledge management has emerged as a growing field of practice and research but the concept of knowledge itself remains vague. This is an unsatisfactory situation that may well hinder the development of knowledge management theory and practice. In this paper Alexander et. al.'s (1991) educational knowledge framework is combined with Clancey's (199...

The core of Nonaka and Takeuchi's (1995) model of knowledge-creation is flawed because of ambiguities in the conceptualization of knowledge, and tacit knowledge, and their failure to specify clearly the nature of 'explicit' knowledge. It is argued that tacit knowledge must be viewed as irreducibly tacit, not specifiable in words, while 'explicit kn...

Community of practice' is a relatively new term for an apparently new discovery - groups inside workplaces and elsewhere through which individuals learn a practice, simultaneously developing their own identities, and reproducing the practice. It has been hailed as significant for understanding organizational learning and knowledge management. This...