IMPLEMENTATION OF EVIDENCE‐BASED PRACTICE IN HUMAN SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS: IMPLICATIONS FROM AGENT‐BASED MODELS

Much of the impact of a policy depends on how it is implemented, especially as mediated by organizations such as schools or hospitals. Here, we focus on how implementation of evidence‐based practices in human service organizations (e.g., schools, hospitals) is affected by intraorganizational network dynamics. In particular, we hypothesize intraorganizational behavioral divergence and network polarization are likely to occur when actors strongly identify with their organizations. Using agent‐based models, we find that when organizational identification is high, external change agents who attempt to direct organizations by introducing policy aligned messages (e.g., professional development emphasizing specific teaching practices) may unintentionally contribute to divergence in practice and polarization in networks, inhibiting full implementation of the desired practices as well as reducing organizational capacity to absorb new practices. Thus, the external change agent should consider the interaction between the type of message and the intraorganizational network dynamics driven by organizational identification.     

PRODUCTIVITY BARGAINING IN COMMONWEALTH GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATIONS

Abstract: Despite several experiments with productivity bargaining in the Commonwealth employment sector, the rigidity of employment conditions was considered to be a limiting factor to the wider application of this technique to the public sector. Nor did it appear to be suitable for adoption within the compulsory arbitration system. However the frustrated expectations of blue collar employees in government employment during the Labor government's term of office stimulated the exploration of productivity bargaining as a way of achieving reduced working hours without contravening efforts to restrain wage inflation. The events within the Australian Post Office (later to become the Australian Postal Commission and the Australian Telecommunications Commission), the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories Commission, the Overseas Telecommunications Commission and the Reserve Bank of Australia are described and some differences in the processes involved noted. The nature and significance of productivity bargaining as a technique for the immediate future are also discussed, particularly in the light of continuing stagflation and the interest of the government in wage restraint and national productivity growth.     

KNOWLEDGE AND ORGANIZATIONS

This paper examines two interrelated questions: Knowledge utilization and organizational learning. Whereas most treatments o f these questions have in mind individuals, "decisionmakers," who are supposedly the learning agents, or the potential users of social science knowledge and information, my attempt will be to regard knowledge utilization and learning as organizational phenomena. A s such, the question of knowledge utilization, of learning, of knowledge growth in organizations, calls for the notion of organizational epistemology which has been neglected due to the prevailing view of organizational learning a5 experimental learning. The notion of organizational epistemology, or theory of knowledge, is, in turn, helpful in freeing both organizations from the naive empiricism we have attributed to them, and utilization-minded researchers from the frustration that accompanies the repeatedly documented phenomenon on nonutilization. To better appreciate the role of policy minded social science knowledge and information, my proposal will be to conceptualize learning behavior in terms of "contest" rather than experimentation and verification.