This volume is a collection of critical ideas relating organization science to both operations and accomplishments in the health care environment. A thematic guide for current leaders and practitioners, as well as health administration, business administration and organization development professors and students alike, this work pulls in a broad cross-section of perspectives on the important linkage of scholarship and practice with a solid global perspective. Covering key themes from culture, change, leadership, teams, IT and a systemic perspective of health care overall, it provides both practical insights and theoretical perspectives that will support immediate improvements and encourage longer term dialogue on how organization science can impact the delivery, structure and operations of health care systems globally. "Advances in Health Care Management" provides a forum for leading research on health care management with previous volumes providing reviews of the field, conference papers and research on selected topics including bioterrorism, international health care management, entrepreneurship, patient safety and nursing and health professional shortages.

Increasingly, there is a need for managers operating in the complex and dynamic health care environment to better understand the competitive nature of the health care industry and the opportunities that potentially exist within it. In response, this sixth volume of "Advances in Health Care Management" is dedicated to strategic thinking and entrepreneurial action in the health care industry.
As implied in the title, this volume of eleven independent chapters is arranged in four sections. The first section is composed of three chapters, focusing on the health care industry itself. The first of these serves as an introduction for this volume, with the other two chapters taking an historical and futuristic perspective of the health care industry, respectively. These two chapters serve as solid contextual reference points for which we can position the remaining manuscripts. The second section contains two chapters that more explicitly examine strategic issues within a specified health care context. The first of these examines strategy and structure fit in a large sample of physician organizations, while the latter studies a single, large medical center to demonstrate the impact culture and human capital have on strategic outcomes. Four chapters make up the third section, which focuses on innovation and entrepreneurship. The first two chapters in this section focus on the processes of entrepreneurship in the health care environment, with both the similarities and dissimilarities between the health care industry and other contexts being discussed. The latter two chapters of the third section, on the other hand, principally demonstrate the activities and implications associated withentrepreneurship, or the lack thereof. Finally, the fourth section contains two chapters that integrate both strategic and entrepreneurial perspectives. One of these chapters creates a typology of new biotechnology ventures; the focus in this chapter is on how such firms exploit opportunities. The final chapter, then, examines strategic corporate entrepreneurship by comprehensively studying one major organization??'s entry into the health care services marketplace.
Collectively, these multi-faceted chapters help to recognize and address the often elusive phenomenon of successful strategic choice over environmental determinism, which is aided by quality strategic thinking and decisive entrepreneurial actions. In summary, these chapters help to emphasize the importance of these issues to the health care industry and the managers operating within it.
*Examines the health care and hospital industries and their relation to entrepreneurial action and strategy
*Provides 11 valuable chapters for scholars and researchers in sociology and healthcare

This fifth volume of Advances in Health Care Management examines international health care management. It consists of 12 papers, one of which serves as an introduction, with the other papers arranged into three sections. The first section on patients and providers focuses on such issues as how socio-cultural forces affect the health care experience; how hospital providers function differently under various governance structures; how global strategies affect providers and patients; and why and how provider organizations should consider integrating within a health delivery system. The second section on policy and management addresses such dilemmas as whether some health care issues are impossible to solve through traditional policy reforms; how international refugees should receive health care; and whether policy reform lessons from other countries can be adapted and applied to transform another country's health system. The third and final section on performance and management addresses issues such as whether the quality of care can be managed at the hospital level, how human resource management can be benchmarked within and across health care organizations, how health care informatics and telemedicine can improve the continuity of care, and whether different ways of accessing care within health systems can be systemically compared and improved.

Authors from Australia, Chile, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, South Africa, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America contributed to this volume. They explore the delivery and organization of care in health systems from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America, encompassing more than 20countries in their comparisons. The papers included in this volume were only accepted following a rigorous peer review process. Each paper, whether solicited or responding to our open call, went through a double-blind review and revision process. The result is a select collection of outstanding papers.

Section one, a special research forum on management issues in nursing, examines the causes of the nursing shortage and its impact on performance, as well as how wage increases, staffing increases, empowerment, and organizational design might address and alleviate some of the root causes for this problem. Section two focuses on how health care costs can be lowered and the quality of care can be improved through better clinical and technological management, exploring population health management, patient-centered care management, and the impact of regulations on medical innovations. Section three addresses how health service organizations can improve their performance, and includes a field study of managers' capabilities and hospital success, a critical review of academic health centers, a theoretical model of post-bankruptcy organization performance, and a secondary data analysis that supports a new organizational typology for managing stakeholders.

The papers included in this volume may be categorized loosely into four general thematic sections: theoretical perspectives on the field of health care management; the role and impact of managed care; evolution of the health professions; enhancing health care organizational performance. The three papers in the first general section deal with a range of theoretical issues related to health care management, from complexity science to a theoretical comparison of integrated networks against systems, to how health care management researchers think about the research process. The three papers in the second section address the significant challenges faced by health care managers as they attempt to respond to the increasing impact of managed care. The third section's three papers look at the evolving roles of the health professions, including those of physicians as clinicians and as executives. The four papers in the final section focus on various approaches, from total quality management to use of work groups and transformational leadership, to enhancing health care organizational performance.

Hardbound. Dramatic social, political, technological, and economic changes are occurring in the health care industry. The Advances in Health Care Management research series was developed in response to this ongoing turbulence in the health care industry coupled with the decreasing number of scholarly outlets for complex and originative health care management research. The field needs new perspectives on organization, innovative management theory and superior empirical research that offer exciting ways to approach existing and emerging problems in health care management. Management scholarship should benefit from diverse conceptual and empirical health care research that examines all levels of analysis. The series provides a forum for the highest quality research, whether theoretical or empirical, in the field of health care management. It is endorsed and supported by the Health Care Management Division of the Academy of Management.