Drilling their own graves:How the European oil and gas supermajors avoid sustainability tensions through mythmaking

This study explores how paradoxical tensions between economic growth and environmental protection are avoided through organizational mythmaking. By examining the European oil and gas supermajors’ ‘‘CEOspeak’’ about climate change, we show how mythmaking facilitates the disregarding, diverting, and/or displacing of sustainability tensions. In doing so, our findings further illustrate how certain defensive responses are employed: (1) regression, or retreating to the comforts of past familiarities, (2) fantasy, or escaping the harsh reality that fossil fuels and climate change are indeed irreconcilable, and (3) projecting, or shifting blame to external actors for failing to address climate change. By highlighting the discursive effects of enacting these responses, we illustrate how the European oil and gas supermajors self-determine their inability to substantively address the complexities of climate change. We thus argue that defensive responses are not merely a form of mismanagement as the paradox and corporate sustainability literature commonly suggests, but a strategic resource that poses serious ethical concerns given the imminent danger of issues such as climate change

Why Do Patients Leave against Medical Advice? Reasons, Consequences, Prevention, and Interventions

Background: A patient decides to leave the hospital against medical advice. Is this an erratic eccentric behavior of the patient, or a gap in the quality of care provided by the hospital? With a significant and increasing prevalence of up to 1–2% of all hospital admissions, leaving against medical advice affects both the patient and the healthcare provider. We hereby explore this persistent problem in the healthcare system. We searched Medline and PubMed within the last 10 years, using the keywords “discharge against medical advice,” “DAMA,” “leave against medical advice,” and “AMA.” We retrospectively reviewed 49 articles in our project. Ishikawa fishbone root cause analysis (RCA) was employed to explore reasons for leaving against medical advice (AMA). This report presents the results of the RCA and highlights the consequences of discharge against medical advice (DAMA). In addition, the article explores preventive strategies, as well as interventions to ameliorate leaving AMA

Enterprise Architecture: A pillar in an integrated framework to measure the Internal Control Effectiveness in the Oil & Gas Sector

International audienc

Enterprise Architecture: A pillar in an integrated framework to measure the Internal Control Effectiveness in the Oil & Gas Sector

International audienc

Enterprise Architecture: A pillar in an integrated framework to measure the Internal Control Effectiveness in the Oil & Gas Sector

International audienc

Dialogism in Corporate Social Responsibility Communications: Conceptualising Verbal Interactions between Organisations and their Audiences

We conceptualise CSR communication as a process of reciprocal influence between organisations and their audiences. We use an illustrative case study in the form of a conflict between firms and a powerful stakeholder which is played out in a series of 20 press releases over a 2-month period to develop a framework of analysis based on insights from linguistics. It focuses on three aspects of dialogism, namely (i) turn-taking (co-operating in a conversation by responding to the other party), (ii) inter-party moves (the nature and type of interaction characterising a turn, i.e. denial, apology or excuse) and (iii) intertextuality (the intensity and quality of verbal interaction between the parties). We address the question: What is the nature and type of verbal interactions between the parties? First we examine (a) whether the parties verbally interact and then (b) whether the parties listen to each other. We find evidence of dialogism suggesting that CSR communication is an interactive process which has to be understood as a function of the power relations between a firm and a specific stakeholder. Also, we find evidence of intertextuality in press releases by six firms which engage in verbal interaction with the stakeholder. We interpret this as linguistic evidence of isomorphic processes relating to CSR practices resulting from the pressure exerted by a powerful stakeholder. The lack of response by ten firms that fail to issue press releases suggests a strategy of ‘watch-and-wait’ with respect to the outcome of the conflict