Purpose: Taking a communication perspective, the paper explores management's rhetoric in profit warnings, whose sole purpose is to disclose unexpected bad news. Design/methodology/approach: Adopting a close-reading approach to text analysis, the authors analyse three profit warnings of the...

Purpose: A doctoral dissertation is a challenging undertaking requiring determination, persistence and resilience over a long time: four to six years’ study or more. These PhD “rules of the game” are intended to help students successfully navigate this challenge....

Purpose: There are several basic, and at times minor, pedantic principles required to successfully publish in good-quality international peer-reviewed journals. These are what the author calls the “rules of the game”. Many are so basic, so taken-for-granted, tacit knowledge, that at times...

Purpose: While clinical governance is assumed to be part of organisational structures and policies, implementation of clinical governance in practice (the praxis) can be markedly different. This paper draws on insights from hospital clinicians, managers and governors on how they interpret the...

Purpose: A royal charter of incorporation imposing public benefit/social responsibilities established the privately owned British South Africa Company (BSAC), in return for power to exploit a huge territory using low-cost local labour. This study explores the dual principal–agent problem of...

Purpose: The paper examines interviewee insights into accountability for clinical governance in high-consequence, life-and-death hospital settings. The analysis draws on the distinction between formal “imposed accountability” and front-line “felt accountability”. From these insights,...