Understanding Power: Bringing about Strategic Change

Success in today's competitive and complex world depends upon the ability to bring about effective strategic change. Much of the business literature has been preoccupied with finding more sophisticated techniques to formulate better strategies. But business success depends not only on finding the right strategy, but also ensuring it materializes in the form of a pattern of appropriate strategic actions. We know relatively little about this part of the strategy-making process. This article shows how a better understanding of the use of power can provide the energy to ensure strategic action by driving the organization and its members through the strategy-making process.     

Book notes

The Social Mind: Language, Ideology and Social Practice By James Paul Gee. New York: Bergin & Garvey, 1992. 175 pages. $14.95 (paper).

The Afterlife of the Life History. A special issue of the Journal of Narrative and Life History, 2(1). M. Blackman (Ed.), Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1992. 79 pages, $17.50.

Teaching Thinking: An Agenda for the 21st Century. C. Collins & J. N. Mangieri (Eds.). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1992. 362 pages, $69.95; $34.50 (paper).     

Challenges faced by inpatient child/adolescent psychiatric nurses

Inpatient nurses work to engineer an environment in which patients and staff are physically and psychologically safe. A recent research study on an adult psychiatric unit examined the dimensions involved in keeping the unit safe. The four dimensions included ideology, people (staff and patients), space, and time. In this article, we discuss how these dimensions apply to real-world efforts to keep child and adolescent inpatient units safe. We also discuss the challenges nurses face within each of these safety dimensions, including those arising from fluctuating acuity, staffing formulas, surveillance of physical space, and entrenched unit cultures.