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: 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,...