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This chapter explores some of the risks and constraints associated with defendants’ apologies during allocution at sentencing. It argues that defendants’ stigmatized institutional role identities in conjunction with the constraints imposed by the discursive context of allocution function to limit both the effectiveness with which defendants can speak on their own behalf and the kinds of things that they can say. Allocution has long been understood as a protection for defendants. This chapter proposes that the ideologies associated with this turn at talk have functioned to obscure the ways in which allocution preserves existing power configurations instead of challenging them.

The social ritual of apology is highly nuanced in Western cultures. At its profoundest, it represents felt and displayed feelings of remorse for injuring another party and transgressing a central moral code. The felt regret is accompanied by a strong impulse to right the wrongs caused. The absence of such apology is taken as denial or devaluation of the moral worth of the harmed party, hence the restorative significance of a sincere apology. The restoration, however, is likely to be more symbolic than literal for a deep hurt, as the injury itself cannot be reversed. What is restored by the apology is the dignity of the victim; recognition that they should not have been treated in the way they have been. The moral and relational value of such apologies is nicely captured by Kathleen Gill:The apology is not a thing; it is an act that displays a certain set of beliefs, attitudes, etc. experienced by the offender. More importantly, an apology is not a mechanism for offsetting losses. The apology does not compensate for loss; it is instead a way to acknowledge the value of what was lost. ( Gill, 2000, p. 16 )It follows that this kind of apology implicates emotions beyond feelings of remorse and regret. It involves the expression of feelings of empathy and shame, the former placing the perpetrator in the victim's shoes, the latter signaling ownership and responsibility for having crossed a moral line — and wishing to do something about it. Yet what is felt has also to be performed, and convincingly so if the apology is to provide what Goffman terms a “remedial exchange” (Goffman, 1971). Acts of apologizing are in part cultural and in part institutionalized. In the traditional Catholic Church, for example, the apology ritual contains a confession of sins, plus an act of prayer or restoration to the wronged party. It once also involved penances, such as fasts, sexual continence, pilgrimages, or floggings.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine public apology as a socially acceptable means of institutional communication and the renegotiation of social relations that seeks to redress the power imbalance between the parties to this interaction. After presenting a basic definition of an apology as a communicative act and discussing the social relational implication of the public form of such an act, the paper examines one particular grouping of public apologies – those coming from Canadian Christian church denominations or communities seeking a renewed relationship with Canadian Aboriginal communities. A comparative analysis of the text and context of several of these apology interactions can provide some fascinating hints about the role of public apology in creating a new joint social narrative, affirming common moral norms, clarifying accountability for past relations and empowering the marginalized community through some form of compensation.

Given the fierce competition in financial services, service failure management and trust restoration tactics are becoming strategic priorities. Studies investigating trust restoration have increased over the years due to the significance of trust in services and the frequency of trust violations. Drawing on the sense-making and defensive approaches of attribution theory, this study aims to explore the effectiveness of various trust recovery tactics (e.g. apology, explanation, and investigation) in financial services considering the prevalence of service failure severity.

Based on a scenario-based survey, this study gathered data from 402 consumers of different banks in Pakistan. The study analyzed the data using ordinary least square regressions and structural equation modeling.

The study indicated that explanation is more effective in repairing character-competence and commitment-based trust, while investigation remained highly effective for inducing congruence-based trust. Interestingly, an apology was more effective for communication-based trust repairing, while context-based trust recovery was unaffected against all recovery tactics. Despite the prevalence of severe service failure, recovery actions proved fully effective for character-competence and commitment-based trust while partially effective for congruence-based trust recovery. This study also found that severe service failure undermines the effectiveness of recovery actions in repairing communication and context-based trust.

The study extends the literature on trust recovery by integrating sense-making and defensive attribution theory. The sense-making approach contributes to the existing knowledge on trust recovery by elucidating how consumers and service providers develop a shared understanding to facilitate the recovery mechanism of multidimensional trust in financial services.

The present study examines the nexus between workplace relationship conflict, perceived sincere apology, interpersonal forgiveness, trust restoration and future cooperation at work after a trust violation episode has occurred.

The data for the analysis were collected from 226 employees using scenarios and survey methods and quantitative techniques were applied to analyze the data.

The results show that perceived sincerity of apology serves as a mediating variable in the link between workplace relationship conflict and interpersonal forgiveness. Interpersonal forgiveness is found to be positively related to future cooperation at work with the mediating role of trust restoration.

The findings of the study have practical implications for strategy makers, human resource managers and practitioners interested in stimulating future cooperation at work after a trust violation episode has occurred. The study advocates that sincere apology and interpersonal forgiveness serve as an important link to recovering from trust violation damages and cultivating future cooperation at work after a relationship conflict has occurred.

The findings of the present study bring new insights on the role played by sincere apology and interpersonal forgiveness in facilitating trust restoration and future cooperation at work after a relationship conflict episode has occurred.

Corporate apologies, relative to other responses to well-publicized past transgressions, have distinct implications, sparking a rich tradition of apology research. But in addition, each apology is unique, such that it becomes critical to address individual content (what), spokesperson (who), timing (when) and delivery (how) elements. This paper aims to clarify how people evaluate key apology elements (individually and collectively) and the associated trade-off between short-term risks (e.g. business costs) and long-term benefits (e.g. relational assets), in light of key contingency factors that represent the level of the transgression-related threat to the firm.

An in-depth conceptual review, analysis and synthesis of corporate apology theories, research, business practices and case examples underlie the development of a conceptual framework that features 6 key tenets and 16 formal, testable propositions.

The holistic apology framework details how and why different corporate apology elements individually and collectively influence firm performance, in the presence of key transgression-related factors. The outlined tenets and propositions, in turn, provide clear guidelines for how to design and implement effective corporate apology strategies in response to publicized transgressions, as well as a platform for academics to advance research in this domain.

This paper contributes to apology theories by proposing 6 key tenets and 16 formal, testable propositions, incorporating apology mechanisms, contingencies and strategies (i.e. corporate apology typology), thus providing a more comprehensive view of corporate apologies in the marketing discipline.

This paper introduces 6 official tenets and 16 associated propositions that collectively (and interactively) serve as strategic guidelines for managers and opportunities for academics to advance research in this domain.

The proposed conceptual framework offers a novel, holistic understanding of the fundamental components of a corporate apology.

The main purpose of this work is to evaluate the different psychological impacts of two initial verbal recovery strategies (gratitude vs empathetic apology) on the consumers' loyalty after a service failure. The proposed theoretical model also appraises the mediating role of two emotional responses (consumer forgiveness, consumer anger) and consumer self-esteem and the moderating role of self-oriented perfectionism.

Two studies (i.e. an experimental design and a field study) are considered for this investigation to assess the effectiveness of gratitude expression versus empathetic apology on post-recovery loyalty and test the effects of mediators and the moderator applied between the verbal recovery strategies and post-recovery loyalty.

The results of Study 1 revealed the supremacy of gratitude to empathetic apology in maintaining consumers' loyalty after service failure recovery. The better impact of gratitude expressed in increasing post-recovery loyalty is mediated through the elevation of consumers' forgiveness, the reduction of consumers' anger and consumers' self-esteem. The findings of Study 2 indicated that gratitude increases more post-recovery loyalty through individuals with a high level of self-oriented perfectionism.

Future research could examine other service failure situations, different types of service recovery, mediators or moderators, which contribute to the service marketing literature.

After a service failure, using gratitude expressions to consumers often makes them feel better and more valuable.

This work increases service providers' knowledge in using proper expressions after a service failure to help elevate consumers' positive reactions resulting in maintaining their loyalty.

The purpose of this paper is to examine when (i.e. after a shorter or longer length of time) organizations should offer an apology or a promise of non-recurrence of a failure to recover trust following a failed service recovery (a double deviation).

This paper reports the results of a pilot study with a convenience sample and two experiments with samples from different populations, students and employees of a financial institution in one study and workers recruited through Mechanical Turk in the other.

An apology was most effective to recover trust when offered shortly after the double deviation (e.g. Study 1: after two days; Study 2: immediately and after two days), while making a promise was most effective when offered at a later time after the double deviation (e.g. Study 1: after 30 days; Study 2: after 15 days). Consumers consider an apology offered shortly after the double deviation as a sign of integrity and a promise communicated sometime after the double deviation as a sign of competence.

This paper complements prior research that demonstrates the effectiveness of apology and promise as trust recovery tactics. The findings show that managers should carefully consider the time at which they use these tactics to recover trust following a double deviation.

This experimental study examined how the three dimensions of fairness (distributive, procedural and interactional) influence consumers' attributional processes, their post‐recovery satisfaction and behavioral responses (repatronage intent and negative word‐of‐mouth) in a service failure context that does not involve monetary costs to the consumer. Our results indicate that recovery outcomes (e.g. compensation), procedures (e.g. speed of recovery) and interactional treatment (e.g. apology) have a joint effect on post‐recovery satisfaction. Specifically, our findings suggest that compensation may not enhance satisfaction when the recovery process is well‐executed (an immediate response combined with an apology). Similarly, compensation failed to lessen dissatisfaction with a poor recovery process (a delayed response without apology). It thus seems that compensation is a poor substitute for a good recovery process. However, offering compensation was effective in increasing satisfaction in mixed‐bag recovery situations (delayed recovery with an apology, or immediate recovery without apology). Furthermore, we found that service recovery satisfaction acted as a full mediator between service recovery attributes (compensation, recovery speed and apology) and behavioral intentions (repurchase intent and negative WOM). Finally, our findings suggest that consumer attributions for stability and controllability for the failure vary across recovery efforts. Managerial implications for these findings are discussed.

This paper aims to clarify the relationship between conflict, apologies, forgiveness and willingness to cooperate after a conflict event.

The paper used scenarios and quantitative measures to examine the connection between conflict, perceived apology sincerity, forgiveness and willingness to cooperate in 358 business undergraduates.

Data revealed that relationship conflict was significantly but negatively associated with forgiveness and willingness to cooperate. Additionally, attitudes toward forgiveness were directly and positively related not only to forgiveness but also to willingness to cooperate. Finally, forgiveness mediated the link between both perceived apology sincerity attitudes to forgiveness and willingness to cooperate.

Data were cross-sectional and may be subject to bias. Longitudinal studies are needed to further tease out the connection between the variables in the current study. Similarly, future research should explore the role of climate and individuals’ disposition and readiness to apologize, forgive and their willingness to cooperate at work.

The paper includes practical implications for managers interested in eliciting cooperation after a workplace conflict. Specifically, apology and forgiveness should be included in managers’ conflict management training programs.

Our findings indicated that apology and forgiveness are social skills that are important for conflict management and cooperation after a workplace conflict.

Beyond reconciliation, the current study provides new insights into the important role of actual forgiveness in whether employees are willing to cooperate after conflict at work. Practical assistance is offered to managers who are interested in fostering cooperation and increased performance after conflict episodes.