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The COVID-19 pandemic has caused severe challenges to ethnic minorities in the UK. While the experiences of migrants are both complex and varied depending on individuals' social class, race, cultural proximity to the host country and acculturation levels, more in-depth studies are necessary to fully understand how COVID-19 affects specific migrant groups and their health. Taiwanese migrants were selected because they are an understudied group. Also, there were widespread differences in pandemic management between the UK and Taiwan, making this group an ideal case for understanding how their acculturation journey can be disrupted by a crisis.

Qualitative data were collected at two different time points, at the start of the UK pandemic (March/April 2020) and six months on (October/November 2020), to explore migrant coping experiences over time. Theoretically, the authors apply acculturation theory through the lens of coping, while discussing health-consumption practices, as empirical evidence.

Before the outbreak of the pandemic, participants worked hard to achieve high levels of integration in the UK. The pandemic changed this; participants faced unexpected changes in the UK’s sociocultural structures. They were forced to exercise the layered and complex “coping with coping” in a hostile host environment that signalled their new marginalised status. They faced impossible choices, from catching a life-threatening disease to being seen as overly cautious. Such experience, over time, challenged their integration to the host country, resulting in a loss of faith in the UK’s health system, consequently increasing separation from the host culture and society.

It is important to note that the Taiwanese sample recruited through Facebook community groups is biased and has a high level of homogeneity. These participants were well-integrated, middle-class migrants who were highly educated, relatively resourceful and active on social media. More studies are needed to fully understand the impact on well-being and acculturation of migrants from different cultural, contextual and social backgrounds. This being the case, the authors can speculate that migrants with less resource are likely to have found the pandemic experience even more challenging. More studies are needed to fully understand migrant experience from different backgrounds.

Public health policymakers are advised to dedicate more resources to understand migrants' experiences in the host country. In particular, this paper has shown how separation, especially if embraced temporarily, is not necessarily a negative outcome to be corrected with specific policies. It can be strategically adopted by migrants as a way of defending their health and well-being from an increasingly hostile environment. Migrants' home country experience provides vicarious learning opportunities to acquire good practices. Their voices should be encouraged rather than in favour of a surprising orthodox and rather singular approach in the discussion of public health management.

The paper has clear public health policy implications. Firstly, public health policymakers are advised to dedicate more resources to understand migrants' experiences in the host country. Acknowledging migrants' voice is a critical first step to contribute to the development of a fair and inclusive society. Secondly, to retain skilful migrants and avoid a future brain-drain, policymakers are advised to advance existing infrastructure to provide more incentives to support and retain migrant talents in the post-pandemic recovery phase.

This paper reveals how a group of previously well-integrated migrants had to exercise “coping with coping” during the COVID crisis. This experience, over time, challenged their integration to the host country, resulting in a loss of faith in the UK’s health system, consequently increasing separation from the host culture and society. It contributes to the understanding of acculturation by showing how a such crisis can significantly disrupt migrants' acculturation journey, challenging them to re-acculturate and reconsider their identity stance. It shows how separation was indeed a good option for migrants for protecting their well-being from a newly hostile host environment.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate what happens when a lack of role-sending results in ambiguous change agent roles during a large scale organisational reconfiguration. The authors consider the role of sensemaking in resolving role ambiguity of middle manager change agents and the consequences of this for organisational restructuring.

Data were collected from a case study analysis of significant organisational reconfiguration across a local National Health Service Trust in the UK. Data consists of 82 interviews, complemented by analysis of over 100 documents and field notes from 51 hours of observations collected over five phases covering a three year period before, during and after the reconfiguration. An inductive qualitative analysis revealed the sensemaking processes by which ambiguity in role definition was resolved.

The data explains how change agents collectively make sense of a role in their own way, drawing on their own experiences and views as well as cues from other organisational members. The authors also identified the organisational outcomes which resulted from this freedom in sensemaking. This study demonstrates that by leaving too much flexibility in the definition of the role, agents developed their own sensemaking which was subsequently very difficult to manipulate.

In creating new roles, management first needs to have a realistic vision of the task and roles that their agents will perform, and second, to communicate these expectations to both those responsible for recruiting these roles and to the agents themselves.

Much of the focus in sensemaking research has been on the importance of change agents’ sensemaking of the change but there has been little focus on how change agents sensemake their own role in the change.

The purpose of this paper is to better understand how and why adoption and implementation of healthcare IT innovations occur. The authors examine two IT applications, computerised physician order entry (CPOE) and picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) at the meso and micro levels, within the context of the National Programme for IT in the English National Health Service (NHS).

To analyse these multi-level dynamics, the authors blend Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory (DoIT) with Webster’s sociological critique of technological innovation in medicine and healthcare systems to illuminate a wider range of interacting factors. Qualitative data collected between 2004 and 2006 uses semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 72 stakeholders across four English NHS hospital trusts.

Overall, PACS was more successfully implemented (fully or partially in three out of four trusts) than CPOE (implemented in one trust only). Factors such as perceived benefit to users and attributes of the application – in particular speed, ease of use, reliability and flexibility and levels of readiness – were highly relevant but their influence was modulated through interaction with complex structural and relational issues.

Results reveal that combining contextual system level theories with DoIT increases understanding of real-life processes underpinning implementation of IT innovations within healthcare. They also highlight important drivers affecting success of implementation, including socio-political factors, the social body of practice and degree of “co-construction” between designers and end-users.

The originality of the study partly rests on its methodological innovativeness and its value on critical insights afforded into understanding complex IT implementation programmes.

As management innovations become more complex, infrastructure needs to change in order to accommodate new work practices. Different challenges are associated with work practice redesign and infrastructure change however; combining these presents a dual challenge and additional challenges associated with this interaction. The purpose of this paper is to ask: what are the challenges which arise from work practice redesign, infrastructure change and simultaneously attempting both in a single transformation?

The authors present a longitudinal study of three hospitals in three different countries (UK, USA and Canada) transforming both their infrastructure and work practices. Data consists of 155 ethnographic interviews complemented by 205 documents and 36 hours of observations collected over two phases for each case study.

This paper identifies that work practice redesign challenges the cognitive load of organizational members whilst infrastructure change challenges the project management and structure of the organization. Simultaneous transformation represents a disconnect between the two aspects of change resulting in a failure to understand the relationship between work and design.

These challenges suggest that organizations need to make a distinction between the two aspects of transformation and understand the unique tensions of simultaneously tackling these dual challenges. They must ensure that they have adequate skills and resources with which to build this distinction into their change planning.

This paper unpacks two different aspects of complex change and considers the neglected challenges associated with modern change management objectives.

The widespread deployment of telehealth (TH) has been conducted in the absence of any clear understanding of how acceptable these devices are to patients. One potential limitation of the widespread deployment of TH is that patients may refuse. Moreover an understanding of the reasons for refusing to use TH devices will provide an understanding of the barriers.

This investigation from the Whole Systems Demonstrator (WSD) programme, a pragmatic cluster randomised controlled trial into the effectiveness of TH, examined reasons for patients in the intervention cohort of the trial refusing TH, and the potential barriers to its deployment.

Active rejection of the TH intervention was the most frequent reason for withdrawal. After examination of trial-related, health, socio-demographic, cognitive, emotional and behavioural factors, patients diagnosed with diabetes, as opposed to heart failure or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and patients’ beliefs about the acceptability of the intervention predicted whether or not they withdrew from the trial because of the intervention.

Beliefs that the TH intervention resulted in increased accessibility to care, satisfaction with equipment and fewer concerns about the privacy, safety and discomfort associated with using TH equipment predicted continued participation in the WSD trial. Findings suggest that potentially modifiable beliefs about TH predict those more likely to reject the intervention. These findings have important implications for understanding individual differences in the acceptance of TH and subsequent success in mainstreaming TH in healthcare services.

In 1976, in a speech at Ruskin College, Oxford, Prime Minister James Callaghan asked ‘Why is it that such a high proportion of girls abandon science before leaving school?’ (Gillard, 2018). Little has changed over the last 40 years; a recent report from the National Audit Office (2018, p. 28) stated that only 8% of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) apprenticeships were taken up by women in 2016/2017 and that the shortage of STEM skills in the workforce is a key UK economic problem. However, just as the Aldridge marriage has been the source of considerable interest and the site of significant financial investment in terms of designer kitchens and expensive holidays, so has the issue of ‘girls in science’ been a consistently debated topic and taken up a large chunk of government and industry spending. Research (Archer et al., 2013) suggests that although children enjoy their science experiences in school, too few pupils aspire to a STEM career. It reveals that the pupils most likely to aspire to careers in science are those whose families have high ‘science capital’ which ‘refers to the science-related qualifications, understanding, knowledge (about science and “how it works”), interest and social contacts (e.g. “knowing someone who works in a science-related job”)’ (Archer et al., 2016, p. 3).

Episodes of The Archers are full of scientific talk, from herbal leys to plate meters. This chapter looks at how the science capital in Ambridge is shared. Why is Alice Carter an engineer and not Emma Grundy? Will Kiera Grundy choose physics A level? Who are the female STEM role models? How can the concept of science capital help us to understand the career paths of Ambridge residents? Will the young girls of Ambridge remedy the gender imbalance in STEM careers?

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on how the UK’s Trade Union Congress, in the 150th year of its formation, has been responding to the significant changes in the labour market, working practices and union decline. The paper considers Trades Union Congress (TUC) initiatives to recruit and organise new groups of workers as it struggles to adapt to the new world of work many workers are experiencing. Although the paper reviews progress in this regard it also considers current and future challenges all of which are becoming increasingly urgent as the current cohort of union membership is aging and presents a demographic time bomb unless new strategies and tactics are adopted to bring in new groups of workers – particularly younger workers.

This is a review paper so it mainly draws on writings (both academic and practitioner) on trade union strategy and tactics in relations to organising approaches and in particularly the TUC’s initiatives from the period of “New Unionism” onwards.

The authors note that while unions have managed to retain a presence in workplaces and industries where they membership and recognition, there has, despite a “turn to organising” been less success than was perhaps hoped for when new organising initiatives were introduced in 1998. In order to expand the bases of organisation into new workplaces and in new constituencies there needs to be a move away from the “institutional sclerosis” that has prevented unions adapting to the changing nature of employment and the labour market restructuring. The paper concludes that in order to effect transformative change requires leaders to develop strategic capacity and innovation among staff and the wider union membership. This may require unions to rethink the way that they operate and be open to doing thing radically different.

The paper’s value is that it provides a comprehensive overview of the TUC’s role in attempting to inject an organising culture with the UK union movement by drawing out some of the key debates on this topic from both scholarly and practitioner writings over the last few decades.

This chapter explores the empowering potential of research conducted with an activist orientation. It focuses on the story of four migrant workers employed in a Norwegian fish-processing plant, who, supported by the local trade union and along with 67 colleagues, resisted against exploitative working, employment, and living conditions. Meant as a study of the emergence and dynamics of criminological activism, this chapter reflects the capacities in which researchers tend to act to challenge the normalisation of state-corporate harms and to empower those victimised by these harms, as well as on the pitfalls of these approaches. In so doing, this chapter points to the parallels between state-corporate criminology, labour perspective on human trafficking, social harm, and zemiology. Ultimately, it calls for heightened reflexivity and critical intellectual distance from activist researchers.

Well‐founded complaint has recently been made concerning the characters of the various forms of “candy,” or, as we should term them, “sweets,” that are manufactured in great quantities in the United States.