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This article aims to investigate the application of re‐engineering methodology to public sector health care, in order to determine if increasing demands for customer satisfaction resource cuts in this sector can be addressed. Public sector health care faces large scale change owing to increasing Government performance targets, resource cuts and increasing customer/patient demands. Re‐engineering is a large‐scale change philosophy and methodology that has been applied with varying degrees of success and failure in the private sector. In public sector health care there is a paucity of in‐depth case study research to determine key success factors for re‐engineering in this sector. There is a need to determine the appropriateness of re‐engineering for helping to address the challenges faced in public sector health care. This article presents the results from a case study application of re‐engineering in a public sector health care Trust. The area re‐engineered was that of telecommunications. The methodology applied and the key success factors determined by the study are discussed in detail.

Purpose: The purpose of the chapter is to provide an overview of sustainability debates and a rationale for the book.

Method: A literature review was conducted prior to starting this book project, and this literature review is analysed and situated within a debate the book fosters.

Originality/Value: The paper outlines debate in the field of sustainability and provide a rationale for the book focusing on human sustainability, thus contributing towards extending knowledge on the sustainability concept and debates.

The research is based on the analysis of recent experiences of participative processes in the reuse and maintenance of contexts considered as “urban waste,” focusing on their role in smart sustainable development processes. The recognition of discarded urban spaces/buildings as regeneration opportunities opens up new perspectives on the communities’ commitments and responsibilities, in new governance models. These experiences, better known as “commons,” highlight the active role of communities in establishing new unconventional forms of value creation and production based on circular processes and interdependences between city and communities. Circularization and synergies are the fundamental precondition for smart sustainable development. Assuming the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) approach as general framework, the phenomenon of commons represents an opportunity to make it operational through an integrated methodology based on the recovery of the environment built according to an inclusive and hybrid approach, configured by culture and shared with local communities. In this perspective, this contribution proposes an evaluation framework not only to monitor the results and impacts produced by these experiences, but also to stimulate and improve awareness, self-learning and self-evaluation processes of the actors involved in regeneration processes toward a smart sustainable development.

Needs of people following acquired brain injury vary over their life-course presenting challenges for community services, especially for those with “hidden” neuropsychological needs. Characterisation of subtypes of rehabilitation service user may help improve service design towards optimal targeting of resources. This paper aims to characterise a neuropsychologically complex group of service users.

Preliminary data from 35 participants accepted for a holistic neuropsychological rehabilitation day programme were subject to cluster analysis using self-ratings of mood, executive function and brain injury symptomatology.

Analysis identified three clusters significantly differentiated in terms of symptom severity (Cluster 1 least and Cluster 2 most severe), self-esteem (Clusters 2 and 3 low self-esteem) and mood (Cluster 2 more anxious and depressed). The three clusters were then compared on characteristics including age at injury, type of injury, chronicity of problems, presence of pre-injury problems and completion of rehabilitation. Cluster 2 were significantly younger at time of injury, and all had head injury.

Results suggest different subgroups of neuropsychological rehabilitation service user, highlighting the importance of early identification and provision of rehabilitation to prevent deterioration, especially for those injured when young. Implications for design of, and research into, community rehabilitation service design for those with “hidden disability” are considered.

The paper findings suggests that innovative conceptual frameworks for understanding potentially complex longer term outcomes are required to enable development of tools for triaging and efficient allocation of community service resources.

Communications are important when you are a National Health Service Trust caring for a remote and largely rural community in Northern Ireland. On top of that you are responsible not only for acute hospital care, but also community care services, mental health and elderly care. So when the Trust decided to upgrade and modernize its system, it was very important to get it right. To that end a re‐engineering approach was adopted, which was divided up into five phases.

This paper aims to explore the turn in management and organization studies (MOS) and reflect on “history as theory” versus “history as method”.

Looking at previous research and the evolution of MOS, this paper situates the special issue papers in the current climate of this area of research.

The special issue papers included here each make a theoretical contribution to methodology in historical organization studies.

The eight articles featured in the special issue offer examples of innovative and historically sensitive methodology that, according to the authors, increase the management historian toolkit and ultimately enhance the methodological pluralism of historical organization studies as a field.