Organization Studies and the Medical Humanities: A New Lens for Organizing, Managing and Understanding Health and Healthcare

This book explores the under-researched theoretical and empirical intersection between organization studies and the medical humanities, highlighting cutting-edge work on complex healthcare organizations using methods and theories from the humanities.

Showcasing an emerging sub-field, this book begins by developing an original definition of the medical humanities and problematizing the relationship between it and organization studies. Looking at hospitals, national health services, pharmaceutical firms and professional healthcare bodies, this book explores constructs, variables and categories such as autonomy, centralization, efficiency, power, politics, conflict, subcultures, employment relations, quality improvement, participation, and managerialism.

Making a case for the important role that organization studies can play in the medical and health humanities, this book is a valuable contribution to students and scholars with an interest in both fields and healthcare management more generally.

Andrea Bernardi is Associate Professor of Organization Studies at the School of Advanced Defence Studies (CASD) in Rome. Previously he was Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University, UK. His previous positions include Manchester Metropolitan University, University of Nottingham Ningbo China, University of Rome, Roma Tre. In 2019 in Oxford, with Beijing University, he convened the conference ’Healthcare in China, a medical humanities perspective’. He is associate editor for the Review of Evolutionary Political Economy. With Federica Angeli, Barbara Quacquarelli and Roberto Lusardi, he convened a sub-theme devoted to the Medical Humanities at the 2022 and 2024 editions of the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) colloquia.

Barbara Quacquarelli is Associate Professor in Organisation Studies at the University of Milano Bicocca and Professor of Public Management at Scuola Nazionale dell’Amministrazione in Rome, Italy, a government institution for the selection and training of top managers of the Italian civil service. She is a faculty member of MIP, business school of Politecnico di Milano. She was founder of a research centre, BTDC, focused on emerging trends in organizational development. She is responsible of a summer school on Global Diversity Management with Caledonian University in Scotland. Barbara has been attending EGOS for about 15 years. She was the chair of the 2024 edition of EGOS Colloquium in Milan.

Federica Angeli is Professor of Management at the University of York Management School, York, UK. She obtained her PhD in Management from the University of Bologna and held positions at Tilburg University (School of Social and Behavioural Sciences), Maastricht University (Care and Public Health Research Institute) and at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. Federica has served as Associate Editor for BMC Health Services Research and is currently an Academic Editor for PLOS One. She is also a Fellow of The Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. Federica has been an EGOS member since 2007. She has organized and co-convened four EGOS sub-themes between 2014-2019, all examining opportunities and challenges facing contemporary healthcare organisational and systems.

Roberto Lusardi is associate professor of Sociology at the Department of Management of the University of Bergamo. He obtained his PhD in Sociology and social research from the University of Trento. His main research interests concern the relation between knowledge, work and innovation in organizations, especially in the fields of healthcare and biomedicine. He is member of several scientific communities (European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS), European Sociological Association (ESA); Italian Sociological Association (AIS), Italian Society of Sociology of Health (SISS)) and is in the scientific board of the Italian Society of Sociology of Health and senior editor for the scientific journal Tecnoscienza. In the last years he published monographs, essay and articles in Italian and international journals such as Current Sociology, Forum - Qualitative Sociological Research, Frontiers in Sociology, Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia, Salute e Società and Studi organizzativi. He is the chair of the 2026 edition of EGOS Colloquium in Bergamo