Inside the Compassionate Organization : Culture, Identity, and Image in an English Hospice

The focus of this book is care and compassion within the context of organization and management studies. The book aims to understand how members of an English hospice identify or fail to identify with an organization where issues of life and death take centre stage and explores problems it faces regarding its representation in society.

Alan Baron is a Visiting Fellow of the Health Services Research Centre, University of Manchester, and a member of the Manchester Ethnography Network. His professional background is general management in financial services, retail and commerce with a focus in recent decades on third sector organizations. He holds a PhD from the University of Salford and his research interests are in organization culture, strategic positioning, healthcare management, and the sociology of end of life care.

John Hassard is Professor of Organizational Analysis at Manchester Business School, Manchester University. Previously he taught at the London Business School and universities of Cardiff and Keele. From 2000-11 he was the Fellow in Management Learning at the Judge Business School, Cambridge University (visiting position). He has published 19 books and over 150 research articles. His books include the monographs Sociology and Organization Theory (1993), Disorganization Theory (2008) and Managing in the Modern Corporation (2009) and the edited volumes The Theory and Philosophy of Organizations (1991), Postmodernism and Organizations (1993), and Actor Network Theory and After (1999).


Dr Fiona Cheetham is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing and a member of the Centre for Sustainable and Resilient Communities at the University of Huddersfield. Prior to this she held academic posts at the University of Hong Kong and Keele University, where she completed her PhD. Fiona's research focuses on the intersection of community, volunteering, and the third sector, and more recently the sharing/collaborative economy. She favours ethnographic research approaches and has become increasingly interested in multi-sensory research methodologies. Her research has been published in journals such as Consumption, Markets and Culture, Journal of Consumer Behaviour and Marketing Theory.

Sudi Sharifi is Senior Lecturer in Organization Theory at Salford University. She holds a PhD from Aston University and has worked previously at the universities of Birmingham and Manchester. She has been a researcher for projects sponsored by the EPSRC, ESF, and ESRC, and her current research interests are in organization culture, managerial work, and the third sector.