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Taking a communication perspective, the paper explores management's rhetoric in profit warnings, whose sole purpose is to disclose unexpected bad news.

Adopting a close-reading approach to text analysis, the authors analyse three profit warnings of the now-collapsed Carillion, contrasting the rhetoric with contemporaneous investor conference calls to discuss the profit warnings and board minutes recording boardroom discussions of the case company's precarious financial circumstances. The analysis applies an Aristotelian framework, focussing on logos (appealing to logic and reason), ethos (appealing to authority) and pathos (appealing to emotion) to examine how Carillion's board and management used language to persuade shareholders concerning the company's adverse circumstances.

As non-routine communications, the language in profit warnings displays and mimics characteristics of routine communications by appealing primarily to logos (logic and reason). The rhetorical profiles of investor conference calls and board meeting minutes differ from profit warnings, suggesting a different version of the story behind the scenes. The authors frame the three profit warnings as representing three stages of communication as follows: denial, defiance and desperation and, for our case company, ultimately, culminating in defeat.

The research is limited to the study of profit warnings in one case company.

The paper views profit warnings as a communication artefact and examines the rhetoric in these corporate documents to elucidate their key features. The paper provides novel insights into the role of profit warnings as a corporate communication vehicle/genre delivering bad news.

Purpose statements persuade stakeholders of companies' reasons for being. The goal of this study was to analyze how purpose-driven companies craft their purpose, mission and vision statements and whether and how purpose statements differ from mission and vision statements.

This quantitative content analysis explored the brand personality traits, mission statement components and corporate ethos appeals that purpose-driven companies included in their purpose, mission and vision statements.

Results provide implications for corporate leaders and communicators who write these statements as well as theoretical implications related to brand personality, rhetorical theory and corporate ethos.

This research provides practical implications for corporate leaders and communication professionals about how to craft these statements, what components they might include and the potential benefits and downfalls of not clearly differentiating among purpose, mission and vision statements.

While several studies have compared differences between mission and vision statements, there is a lack of academic literature on how companies craft purpose statements. This study added to this body of knowledge on corporate communication.

Retail organizations that consider a service ecosystems view of sustainability focused on transformation have the potential to contribute to the wellbeing of individuals, business and society. The purpose of this paper is to explore the transformative nature of sustainable retail fashion organizations and their impact on wellbeing within a sustainable retail service ecosystem.

A qualitative in-depth case study research design was implemented using four sustainable fashion brands. Data were collected from multiple sources including secondary data from company websites and publicly available reports and interviews with founders and/or high-ranking managers within the organization.

Three overarching themes critical to transformation in sustainable retail service ecosystems were identified: (1) embedded core purpose or ethos, (2) relevance of fit and (3) breadth and depth of message. Corresponding wellbeing elements were found within the three themes – community and society wellbeing, environmental wellbeing, business strategy wellbeing, consumer wellbeing, leadership wellbeing, employee wellbeing, stakeholder and value chain wellbeing and brand wellbeing.

Future research offers an important opportunity to further explore the relationships between sustainability, TSR and wellbeing in other service contexts.

The paper contributes to transformative service research literature by conceptualizing a sustainable retail service wellbeing ecosystem framework.

This paper has two purposes. First, it aims to explore how Australian universities used calculative rhetoric and practices through accounting numbers to persuade employees and legitimize their financial recovery plans to alleviate the financial hardship caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, it aims to analyze how the accounting-based solutions were legitimized through a well-blended pathos, logos and ethos rhetoric.

Building on a rhetorical theory of diffusion, we employed a qualitative research design within all 37 Australian public universities involving Internet-based documentary analysis.

This study finds that in an urgent crisis like the fiscal crisis caused by COVID-19, universities again found rescue in accounting tools, in particular budgets, as a rhetorical device to justify their operational and strategic choices such as job-cuts, programs closures and staff pay-cuts. However, in this crisis, the same old accounting-based solutions were even more quickly to be accepted by being delivered in management’s colorful blending of pathos–logos–ethos rhetoric.

While this study is constrained to Australian public universities’ financial responses, its findings have implications for university decision-makers and higher education policymakers across the globe when it comes to university management using calculative devices in persuading employees to work their way through financial hardship caused by an extreme health crisis-like COVID-19 pandemic.

This study adds more evidence that the use of budgets as a calculative tool continues to play a key role in organizations in the construction, mobilization and preservation of certain strategic and operational choices during volatilities. Especially, the same way of creating calculative-based solutions can be communicated via the colorful blending of different rhetoric to make it acceptable.

This paper aims to explore the problematic of public policies and leadership challenges for socio-economic transformation in South Africa. The paper illustrates that policies and laws of socio-economic reform have been introduced in democratic South Africa. However, socio-economic transformation remains a challenge. Lack of trust in the leadership relationships amongst political and economic agents is pointed as a contributing factor. Hence, LE emerges as a leadership strategy to help mitigate the problem.

The paper starts by presenting the current economic situation of South Africa touching on some important economic indicators to illustrate the consequences of poor leadership in public policy implementation process. The paper then analyses the leadership challenges to drive socio-economic reforms that have been introduced in South Africa since the end of apartheid with focus on the current National Development Plan. Lack of trust in leadership is identified as a problematic factor and leadership ethos (LE) emerges as a leadership strategy to enable the building of trust in leadership for the purpose of a successful implementation of public policies.

Lack of trust in leadership is identified as a problematic factor contributing in the absence of cooperation and collaboration in the leadership relationship amongst public servants (from up to bottom) and citizens for the purpose of successful implementation of public policies. Hence, there is need for a new leadership paradigm that would enable the building of trust in these leadership relationships. LE emerges as such a leadership strategy.

The paper calls for an exploration into the understanding and practice of LE and its inherent critical success factors (CSFs) considered as a leadership strategy that can help drive particularly public policies implementation process. LE intends to promote moral leadership that helps public servants to build good character and thus the will to do the right thing, and mutually trusting relationship is a CSF of LE. Therefore LE enables build the much needed trust in leadership relationships for a successful organisational leadership and management.

This paper provides significant implications by identifying lack of trust as a problematic factor in the leadership relationships amongst political and economic agents in South Africa, contributing thus in the poor implementation of public policies. LE emerges as a leadership strategy that would help mitigate the problem by enabling the building, the maintenance and restoration of trust in organisational and or institutional management for a successful public policy implementation process.

The purpose of this article is to consider cultural ethos of philanthropy that has proved effective in minimising the plight of the vulnerable in general and particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. By discussing the divergent philanthropic approaches that have been adopted to counter the challenge of the pandemic, this article fulfils one of comparative laws' crucial tenets to improve the local environment by learning from other jurisdictions.

An exploratory and qualitative method through categorical and theoretical analysis of recent and historical scholarship on the Islamic culture is undertaken. An extensive use of journalistic and editorial reports on the South Af rican context is explored to demonstrate the plight of the vulnerable during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed how economically and structurally fragmented South African society is. More specifically, it has reinforced the existence of an “invisible” group of people – the poor and vulnerable – who have been hit harder by the government's responses aimed at containing the spread of the COVID-19 virus. The depiction of an unequal and uncaring society has spurred extensive rhetoric and reflection centred on the need to regain society's conscience as regards the plight of the poor. This article finds that much as there has an awakening towards societal inequality and vulnerability, there are, however, no concrete suggestions upon which change of attitude can be founded. Further, it can be argued that the plight of the vulnerable could have been softened had society cherished a culture of charity. Taking a cue from Islamic culture, this article avers that there is a need to embed philanthropy within society's cultural norms so as to forge effective bonds and maintain social cohesion.

The practical implications of this article relate to the need for the revaluation of the moral campus of South African communities. It supports calls for the alignment of community attitudes with humanity so as to improve the lives of the less privileged members of the society. Additionally, this discussion adds value to the scholarship, which aims to engender community-based welfare schemes for the benefit of the vulnerable.

By highlighting socio-economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on the vulnerable and highlighting the Islamic approaches to ameliorating the condition of the poor, it is hoped that this article will stimulate debate that can bring change for marginalised groups. The analysis provides some crucial discussions for potential societal interventions, which could assist in revisiting how society takes care of the poor and vulnerable.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the under-considered perspectives of service users engaged in various community sentences based on a “strengths-based” approach to desistance. Further to recent changes in the sector, the paper considers service user views for programmes delivered by combinations of agencies from private, public and third sectors.

The paper is based on analysis of 64 semi-structured interviews with users of four programmes, accompanied with informal fieldwork observations by the researchers as they carried out the research at the premises of service providers.

The research finds that service user perceptions of the legitimacy of programmes are closely related to their understanding of three key dimensions: first, the “authenticity” of those delivering the service; second, the instrumental (in broad terms) gains they expect from engagement; and third, their understanding of the identity and ethos of the programme.

The paper adds important understanding based on service user perceptions in a period when service provision is being diversified. Further directions for other research are identified and it is recognised that a limitation of the current study is that it incorporates a sample drawn from one area.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the graduate assistants (GAs) are inducted into the system and ethos of the institutions of higher education (IHE) in Eritrea. The paper serves in the purpose of creating more conducive and supportive work environment in IHE facilitating the socialization of junior faculty members to the culture, standards and system of the institutions.

The research adhered a combined approach of quantitative and qualitative research methods. Data were gathered through a Likert scale questionnaire and in-depth interviews. The study was conducted in seven IHE involving 165 participants.

The GAs’ knowledge of job description, access to institutional information, sharing of resources, the quality of guidance and support provided, supervised teaching and feedback are discussed in detail. Results revealed that the GAs shoulder vital responsibilities but they receive poor induction at individual and institutional levels. GAs complain for lack of job description clarity and lack of transparent institutional communication at work. Holding first degree, GAs teach senior courses without any prior induction, pedagogic trainings and unsupervised. The GAs are recruited on the basis of the colleges’ long-term staff development plan, but little is done.

Despite their academic rank, the GAs represent 64 percent of the national academic staff (ADF, 2010). Creating conducive work atmosphere for the junior faculty members in the institutions is a long-term investment on institutional capacity building and quality assurance of the institutions’ performance.

Induction of the newly recruited junior faculty members to the social, professional and the institutional ethos is a socialization process that would minimize the professional isolation and inefficiency of new recruits.