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Circular HM (72) issued by the DHSS in September 1972 set out the importance to the National Health Service of the establishment of a comprehensive approach to the development of the personnel function by the reorganised hospital authorities. The circular placed the responsibility for "effective personnel management" on the shoulders of line management and stressed the "supportive role" of the Personnel Officer. The future importance of the Industrial Relations function in the reorganised service was clearly not anticipated, and it is now evident that the demands and constraints experienced by Personnel Officers have produced important changes in the comprehensive nature of their role - in many cases industrial relations has become their primary responsibility. The period 1974 until 1980 was one of major change and pressure, and the growing awareness of structural faults in the National Health Service. In 1975 Lord McCarthy was appointed to investigate the continued functioning of Whitley Council machinery, and in 1976 Sir Alec Merrisan was commissioned to consider the working of the National Health Services. There was an obvious concentration on structure and structural modification. The relationships both inter and intra-organisational were not always objectively considered.

The purpose of this thesis is to develop a model of the role of a senior management services officer in one part of the National Health Service. It puts forward and discusses the deficiencies of other models of this role in order to identify parts of the role which a new model must seek to describe more adequately. The main parts of the role explored can be described as political and the expertise required to carry them out is usually said to be based on experience. The model put forward in the thesis is a two part model. The first part consists of a set of categories which describe the events which make up all the various aspects of the activities of a management services officer. The general properties and characteristics of these event categories are developed. The second part of the model is concerned with how such events fit together into projects. The main theme of this fitting together of events is the negotiation of order in large complex organisations. The model is based on a record of the change agent activities of one management services officer over a long period of time. Because of the present lack of understanding of this role and in order to include a wide variety of events in the analysis, an unstructured data collection method was used. Qualitative data is used in this study and appropriate grounded theory data analysis methods are used in the analysis. The generality of this model outside the context in which it has been developed is discussed.