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The study examines how calculative practices and accountability appear in a rural community of marginalised people in Egypt who depend on jasmine plantations that contribute to the production of global essences.

The data were collected from various sources, namely conversations with villagers, documents and relevant videos and news available on social media and the Internet. This study draws on the concepts of social accountability, the politics of blame avoidance and using calculative practices as a language to explain accountability in context.

The author found a lack of accountability on the part of the government and business owners, with serious implications for the livelihoods of people in a community that has been wholly dependent on jasmine plantations for a century. Power holders have deployed a blame-shifting game to avoid social responsibility. In response, calculative practices rather than advanced accounting tools are used by the poor in the community to induce power holders to be accountable.

The findings of this study show that authorities need to take proactive steps to address the disadvantaged position of powerless people in the lower echelons of society, recognising their accountability for those people.

This paper enhances the understanding of the status of calculative practices and accountability in a community of marginalised people who contribute to the production of global commodities. The paper also enhances the understanding of what goes on behind the scenes with popular and prestigious commodities, whose development is initiated in poor countries, with the end product marketed in rich Western countries.

The paper examines how oil multinational companies (MNCs) in Nigeria framed accounts to dissociate themselves from causing oil spills.

The authors utilised data from relevant corporate reports, external accounts and interviews, and used sensegiving with defensive behaviours theoretical framing to explore corporate narratives aimed at altering stakeholders' perceptions.

The corporations gave sense to their audience by invoking scapegoating blame avoidance narrative in attributing the cause of most oil spills in Nigeria to outsiders (sabotage), despite potentially misclassifying the sabotage-corrosion dichotomy. Corporate stance was reinforced through justifying narrative, which suggested that multi-stakeholders jointly determined the causes of oil spills, thus portraying corporate accounts as transparent, credible and objective.

The socio-political dynamics in an empirical setting affect corporate accounts and how those accounts appear persuasive, implying that such contextual factors merit consideration when evaluating corporate accounts. For example, despite contradictions in corporate accounts, corporate attribution of oil spills to external factors appeared persuasive due to the inherently complicated socio-political dynamics.

With compensation to oil spills' victims only legally permitted for non-sabotage-induced spills alongside the burden of proof on the victims, the MNCs are incentivised to attribute most oil spills to sabotage. On policy implication, accountability would be best served when the MNCs are tasked both with the burden of proof and a responsibility to demonstrate their transparency in preventing oil spills, including those caused by sabotage.

Crisis situations generate multiple and competing perspectives, but sensegiving and defensive behaviours lenses enrich our understanding of how crisis-ridden companies frame narratives to alter stakeholders' perceptions. Accounts-giving therefore partly satisfies accountability demands, and acts as sensegiving signals aimed at reframing/redefining existing perceptions.

Public trust in institutions in Iceland plunged after the country’s banking sector collapsed. The political system wobbled under outrage and anger when the general public took to the streets. The Parliamentary Special Investigation Commission conducted a ground-breaking crisis-induced investigation, delivering a report that was a milestone in Iceland’s history of politics and public administration. Yet, despite this endeavour and the fact that subsequent investigations have disclosed ample information intended to restore trust in institutions, public trust remains unsteady. This chapter addresses the following questions: How has public trust in institutions progressed after the crash? Why is it taking so long for trust to return? In Chapter 3 in this volume, we examine data on public trust in Icelandic institutions from Gallup surveys over the 15 years from 2002 to 2017 in order to identify and explain patterns of trust in the aftermath of the crisis. Our interpretation of theory in this chapter suggests that elements of mistrust inherent in the principal–agent approach to accountability in public administration, implemented in previous New Public Management reforms, undermined the creation of a climate of trust necessary to ensure effective accountability mechanisms. We argue that in the absence of a climate of trust, accountability mechanisms of culpability that conflict with mechanisms of answerability, combined with a succession of post-crisis scandals, mainly explain the slow return of the public’s trust.

The aviation industry has traditionally been good at learning from its accidents: a global network of government run accident investigation organizations and the high media profile given to any major aviation disaster helps to ensure this. As commercial aviation successfully reduces its accident rate the opportunity for learning from accidents diminishes and learning from potential accidents becomes more important. Ironically, however, this success can generate a culture that minimises the perceived potential of incidents and becomes less likely to learn from them. The key to overcoming this is in generating a culture that has the desire to maximize the lessons for safety from any opportunity and openly share that learning. To succeed, this culture has to overcome the human and organizational desire to find a single cause and attribute blame. Invariably any accident is a chain of events and occurrences that come together in a tragic way and there are often many solutions to even the simplest incident. An incident that doesn't lead to a loss of life or significant financial burden should be seen as a “free lesson”, simply an opportunity to see how the system and its components broke down to allow the event, or more importantly one worse, to happen. Any system and ultimately any person is prone to failure and hence blame is of no value, understanding where the failures are likely to occur and how to minimise their potential is important.

The publication of the Turnbull guidance represented a radical redefinition of the nature of internal control as a feature of corporate governance in the UK, explicitly aligning internal control with risk management. This paper explores this change, using sociological perspectives on risk and its conceptualisation to frame the debate about internal control and risk management within the UK corporate governance arena – the most recent manifestation of an ongoing competition for the control of economic and social resources. The paper demonstrates that developments in corporate governance reporting requirements offer opportunities for the appropriation of risk and its management by groups wishing to advance their own interests. This is illustrated by a review of recent changes in internal audit.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the dynamics of budgetary biasing in the context of public hospitals.

The study applies theories of accounting and budgeting behaviors in the specific institutional context of health care systems. Based on the theoretical framework, data from interviews with hospital budget officers were analyzed using qualitative content analysis.

A typology of biases is provided. It proved to be useful and highlighted the central empirical assumptions and preliminary results of biasing dynamics.

Understanding the logic of budgeting actors and the drivers of bias may help explain why bias so often appears in health care budgeting. It further contributes to understanding whether the bias is functional or dysfunctional.

The concepts of budgetary bias are rarely used in the context of health care budgeting, so the study fills a gap in research knowledge.

Product harm crises are becoming increasingly common, and recent examples include Toyota and Vioxx. This chapter examines country differences that impact consumer blame attributions for an ambiguous product harm crisis, and proposes a framework for a crisis response strategy. The first step involves assessing the level of uncertainty avoidance and crisis severity which serve as an indicator of the urgency felt by consumers to assess blame. The second step involves examining consumer beliefs and information processing biases to determine who consumers will most likely blame in order to resolve the uncertainty. Based on information gathered from these steps, a crisis response strategy is suggested for global brand managers.

The research framework of this study is based on tri-component attitude model (cognition-affect-conation) which explores consumers’ positive or negative emotions, as well as various types of thoughts and actions, triggered by their perceived justice in the context of service failure. This study aims to probe the possible mediating and moderating effects caused by the process where consumers form their thoughts and actions.

This study conducts a survey to consumers after restaurant dining. This study collects data from 262 respondents and analyzes the data with the structural equation modeling.

The results indicate that perceived justice has significant effect on empathy, anger, positive word-of-mouth, repurchase intention and revenge. Empathy has a significant and positive effect on positive word-of-mouth. Anger has significant and positive effects on revenge and avoidance. Empathy is a mediator between perceived justice and positive word-of-mouth. Blame attribution and service failure severity are the moderators in the relationship between perceived justice and empathy/anger.

Consumers might have experienced the scenarios described in the questionnaire and their responses might be based on recall of their previous dining experiences in other restaurants, thereby resulting in a time lapse problem and affecting the conclusions of this study.

It is not adequate to gain consumers’ choices just demonstrate favorable customer perceived justice and empathy in today’s industrial highly competitiveness because blame attribution and perception of service failure severity result in different positive and negative emotions and behavioral intentions. Therefore, food and beverage industry must have a various recovery approaches to recover service failure and create a more appealing relationship with consumers.

This study investigates the relationships among perceived justice, emotions and behavioral intentions which are seldom discussed in the past studies. In addition, this study investigates the mediating effect of empathy in the relationship between perceived justice and positive word-of-mouth. The results of this study indicate that blame attribution and service failure severity are the moderators between perceived justice and emotions (empathy/anger). The mediator of empathy and the moderators of blame attribution and service failure severity can enhance the research gap in the context of service recovery for the tri-component attitude model.

Examines the ways in which reporters from differing fields of work in a high‐risk environment (the Aviation Safety Reporting System in the USA) strive through narrative to present and maintain a coherent sense of self through face‐work involving blame acceptance or avoidance. Proposes not to locate specific and final locations for blame, but to instead recognize risk as an underlying factor in a discourse about error and blame in an increasingly global society. In the case examined discourses of blame varied in different worlds of work. Concludes that the approach taken of mapping blame options within different work worlds within a larger context can provide a foundation for ongoing risk assessment through the tracking of shifting blame options over time or the ways in which options are interwoven between work worlds. Maintains that this study may aid in the development of new approaches to risk.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the complexity of the network governance setting affects accountability practices. The authors pay particular attention to the organizational characteristics that may enable a common understanding of multiple accountability relationships, or lead to problems in reconciling competing forms of accountability, thereby appearing as blame game-type behavior.

The authors conducted a case study with 31 semi-structured interviews in a Finnish health care organization (FHC) that offers basic public health care services. The organization represents a co-operative arrangement with the main city and three smaller municipalities. The FHC has faced difficulties in balancing budget constraints with the provision of statutory care to citizens. This case is analyzed with the help of theories relating to accountability, the blame game, and dialogue.

The authors found that in the FHC operating under austerity constraints, attempts to reconcile financial, professional, and democratic accountability were made but, instead of dialogue and consensus, the different stakeholder groups resorted to defensive tactics in order to protect their resources, position, or sense of professional obligation. The authors suggest that in a context of network governance, accompanied by an increasing emphasis on financial accountability, organizational practices are susceptible to conflicting accountabilities and behavior characterized in this paper as a blame game.

The study contributes to the empirical studies on accountability in the new public governance context by analyzing the complex accountability relations between stakeholder groups with different agendas. The authors suggest organizational characteristics that may exacerbate conflicts between different stakeholder groups and prevent constructive dialogue. Furthermore, the study analyzes the composition of democratic accountability within the studied organization.