The ‘becoming’ of collective action: a social movement perspective on large-scale organisational change: the NHS Change Day social movement

Moskovitz, Liora (2018) The ‘becoming’ of collective action: a social movement perspective on large-scale organisational change: the NHS Change Day social movement. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

Text - Submitted Version Download (20MB)

Abstract

The research presented in this PhD aims to understand how collective action can be mobilised through social movements to introduce improvements in large healthcare systems. This research uses the English National Health Service (NHS) and the NHS Change Day (NHSCD) social movement as a case study to investigate these processes. By examining the development of the NHSCD movement from the perspective of process and practice theory, this research proposes to understand collective action as a constantly evolving mobilisation practice, which is both driven and restricted by inherent tensions. The research was designed as a longitudinal qualitative project conducted over a period of three years, which followed the movement’s development and explored its engagement with organisational change, generating field participant observations, narratives from interviews, ‘Stories of Change’ and narratives of ‘pledges’, and a variety of documents, artefacts and digital collected data. The data corpus was approached using thematic, narrative and frame analysis. The analysis of the emergence and development of the NHSCD movement highlights the strategising practices that mobilise grassroots activism. Four collective narratives of health guided the initiation and implementation of multiple small-scale changes in daily working practices, highlighting a multifaceted ‘Logic of Care’. Enactment within a supportive group context is shown to be inextricable to participants’ motivation to take part in collective action and to the mobilisation of change. The NHSCD movement managed to successfully mobilise collective knowledge through framing practices, suggesting ‘framing' as a distributive, agentic and voluntary dynamic that supports organisational change processes. This thesis expands our understanding of the mobilisation of collective action by conceptualising it as a process of ‘becoming’. In situating the NHSCD social movement within both organisational and social movement studies, this research aims to bridge the historical divide between the academic fields, highlighting grassroots practices within organisations.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2018 Liora Moskovitz
Library of Congress subject classification:	H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform J Political Science > JA Political science (General) R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine
Sets:	Departments > Psychological and Behavioural Science
Supervisor:	Garcia-Lorenzo, Lucia
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/3953

Actions (login required)

Record administration - authorised staff only