The first men in leadership positions in the american association of nurse anesthetists.

PURPOSE: This exploratory study focuses on the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists. It sheds light on the process by which men gain access to leadership positions in a female-dominated setting. It also expands the narrative of the professional association's history. CONCLUSIONS: As soon as men became eligible for membership in 1947, they gained access to leadership positions in disproportionate numbers and at a faster pace than women at the national level and in a number of states. The specific pattern of findings is consistent with volitional relational practices, suggesting that women facilitated the integration and empowerment of male colleagues who constituted a small minority in the association. MANAGEMENT IMPLICATIONS: The paper discusses the need to understand and manage the interactions between relational practices that are gendered female and views of leadership as male-gendered.

Evidence-based management in health care organizations: a cautionary note.

BACKGROUND: Health care managers are urged to adopt evidence-based management as a new and exemplary decision-making process. Three assumptions underlie advocacy for the practice: (a) Decisions based on evidence will yield anticipated results, (b) these results are generalizable across organizations, and (c) evidence is objective and context free. PURPOSE: This article explores evidence-based management through contextual and conceptual lenses that question these underlying assumptions. METHODS: A review of extant literature on evidence-based management was conducted. FINDINGS: Calls for evidence-based management are based mostly on conceptual arguments that it constitutes best practice because there is not yet any empirical research that demonstrates its effectiveness. We raise a cautionary note about the assumptions underlying the calls for evidence-based management. Given the complexity of decision making and of the health care environment, as well as differences among health care organizations, decisions do not necessarily lead to expected outcomes, and results may not be replicable across organizations. Moreover, evidence is an artifact of social interactions and limited by the difficulties inherent in studying complex organizational phenomena. CONCLUSION: Research is needed into the diffusion of evidence-based management in health care and into the results achieved by organizations that used the practice compared with organizations that did not. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS: Managers should use all available information and data when planning and implementing decisions, and evidence from research should play a role in that. At the same time, in a turbulent and uncertain environment, creativity and risk taking also will be important, and unanticipated outcomes may result from, among other factors, limits on human cognition, unknowable differences in initial conditions in organizations, and adaptive responses to change as it is implemented.

Hospital administration in the early 1900s: visions for the future and the reality of daily practice.

This article explores the first vision of modern hospital management as it was advanced by the American Hospital Association in the early 1900s and compares it with the reality of daily practice at the time. The findings show a wide gap between vision and reality. They also show that many of the issues faced by hospital administrators a hundred years ago remain relevant today. They include the tension between adoption of new technology and the cost of hospital care, advocacy for business practices from the private sector, and the administrator's responsibility in the area of quality of care.

Toward the creation of an institutional logic for the management of hospitals: efficiency in the early nineteen hundreds.

This research focuses on the creation of an institutional logic--efficiency--and on its organizing principles of standardization and business practices through a study of the American Hospital Association and its publication, the Modern Hospital. In the early years of the 20th century, efficiency began to emerge as a first institutional logic for the management of hospitals. The term was defined broadly, encompassing not only economy but also quality and breadth of services, as well as access to care. This early emphasis on efficiency foreshadowed three issues that affect health policy and hospital management to this day: the pressure on hospitals to introduce new technology while containing cost, the assumption that hospitals should act like businesses, and the practice of offering large hospitals as the model for other providers.

Teaching evidence-based management: where do we go from here?

Recently we talked with executive directors of healthcare organizations about the sources of information they use when conducting research. The responses were very similar. They preferred "googling," reading trusted trade journals, and reading more generic business literature such as Harvard Business Review. When asked if they ever read and used healthcare management research, they said the articles were often inaccessible. First, as CEOs faced with the responsibility for their organization's performance, they want to know whether there is anything in the research that will help them run their organizations better. Unfortunately, as observed by Gary Mecklenburg in this issue, the focus in healthcare research is too frequently on research implications, not on what a CEO wants and needs to know. As a result, the research is not always relevant. Further, by the time the research is conducted and published (it is not infrequent for more than a year to elapse from submission to actual publication in a journal, and by then the data may be two or more years old), executives have moved on to other decisions. As one of the CEOs observed, there is a gap between what she needs to know and what the health management literature has to say. Second, managers have limited time, and information needs to be succinct and to the point if it is to be useful. Research articles are very time consuming to read, and as the CEOs commented, time is a precious resource. Research articles frequently devote considerable space to conceptual development and methods, and even when managerial implications are addressed, managers