Introduction: Events, Themes, and Progress

The chapters in this second edition of Advances in Health Care Organization Theory are original essays in the broad realm of organization theory applied to health care organizations. In the first edition of this book, the authors explored what could be gleaned from the 1990s to inform and update organization theory in health care. The same pattern and goal applied to the Innovations in Health Care Organizations (Mick and Associates, 1990): chapter authors probed the events of the 1980s to determine what new might be written about organization theory as it was informed by the events of that time. We feel the need for a third in a series of books exploring the evolution of organization theory in the health care sector because organization theory in health care remains a work in progress. Although the field is highly developed outside health care and is routinely applied in business and commercial organizations, advances in organizational analysis in health care have lagged behind the general field. This situation exists for a complicated set of reasons