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Many public service institutions are constrained by their own routines and past practices, which in time affects the internal audit function. In the interests of service effectiveness recommends establishing an overseer of internal auditing matters to take the place of the statutory shackles which are currently binding. First, organizations must clarify their individual missions, if internal audit is to confirm its position as a constructive and purposeful function. Sees a need for market research and intelligence gathering and a widening of internal audit′s horizons. Concludes that public authorities must address the question of whose needs to assess and how.

The quality of strategic decisions made at the helm of corporations matters a great deal. Predominantly, research on strategic decision-making has focused on CEOs as if they decide alone. Yet in reality, even the most powerful CEO makes strategic decisions together with an executive board. This chapter offers a theoretical explanation of strategic board decision-making through the emotional contagion between the CEO and board members.

We used both previous research and qualitative material – two case studies and interviews with several dozen CEOs of large corporations as well as the board members of one of them – to build our theoretical model.

Our inBoard Emotional Contagion Model (inBECM) specifies the following individual–collective emotional dynamics: After a strategic affective event has triggered an affective discussion within the boardroom, the emotionally intelligent CEO communicates verbally in order to – through an emotional contagion – homogenize board members’ emotional states leading to shared sense-making of the event and – potentially – to improved decision-making.

Suggestions are made for the inBECM contribution to emotion theory. Implications are stated for the key role of emotion in improving board decision-making and strategizing.

In an article, explanatory of the System of Permanent Analytical Control and of the methods of working, the Daily Mail has observed :—

The authors explore several aspects of communications theory to identify their relevance to managing a project-based productivity improvement intervention. The literature on communication accommodation theory, groupthink and trust appear to have important implications for improvements. The purpose of this paper is to develop a research methodology used in conducting empirical data collection in the field to test the developed conceptual framework. The authors emphasize the importance of management theory to project-based interventions. The focus of this work is summarized by the research question: “what facets of communication impact on the success of a project-based improvement intervention?”.

Following a focused literature review, learnings from specific research were used to identify a series of propositions. The scope of the work was established to limit the range of issues under review. Next, a conceptual framework was designed that allowed a case study to be tested with regard to validity of the propositions. Further testing will be undertaken in a single company.

There is clear evidence showing the relevance of effective communication when executing an intervention to seek performance improvement. In particular, understanding the need of stakeholders’ is paramount that allows the design of a communications strategy. Each phase in a project-based intervention requires different styles of communication. There is also a need to have varying degrees of trust. Total unchallenged trust invariably leads to groupthink that hinders critical decision making.

The work contributes to the understanding of the application of communication theory to project-based interventions – that invariably aim at performance improvement initiatives. While currently the work is in the early stages of research, it does nevertheless show some useful early findings. Clearly further work is needed in international projects in the context of multi-cultural teams and external stakeholders.

With many interventions failing to meet their planned objectives there is a need to isolate possible reasons and to rectify or mitigate the causes. Project management and change management training should include a comprehensive understanding of management theories. This research will contribute to this knowledge base.

Project-based activities are used in most walks of life; the need for excellent management is therefore important. Invariably interventions involve considerable capital investment and their success advances productivity of nations. Understanding and integrating communication theories to their management, therefore, has significant social benefits.

The importance of communications is identified in the project management literature and adjunct disciplines. Professional associations and leading bodies in performance and project management, while emphasizing the need for excellent communication, have not adequately addressed underpinning theories. There is little research focusing on communication accommodation theory, groupthink and risk in the context of project management. The authors’ have not been able to identify any research on an integrated framework that combines these theories with managing a project-based performance improvement intervention.

The purpose of this theoretical chapter is to rework a promising but limited theory of the foundations of reciprocity. Reciprocity is often attributed to an “internalized norm of reciprocity” – a deeply felt moral obligation to help those who have helped us in the past. Leifer's theory of local action develops a radically different and compelling foundation for reciprocity – one in which the impetus for reciprocity is a thinly veiled battle for status. We rework the theory to offer a new one that addresses its limitations. The key idea is that the impetus for reciprocity is the desire to signal that one intends to create joint value rather than to capture it from the counterparty.

Our analytical approach rests on close examination of a puzzling and underrecognized feature of social exchange: people who initiate social exchange routinely deny giving anything of value (“it was nothing”) while the receiver inflates their indebtedness to the giver (“this is too much!”). We refer to this negotiation strategy as reverse bargaining and use it as a window into the logic of social exchange.

We develop a more general theory of how people manage the threat of opportunism in social exchange that subsumes local action theory. The key insight is that people who initiate social exchange and seek reciprocity must balance two competing objectives: to ensure that the person receiving a benefit recognizes a debt she must repay; and to mitigate the receiver's suspicion that the giver's ulterior motive is to capture value from the receiver.

Chemistry as an applied science suffers from the fact that its necessarily close connection with various branches of industry is ill defined and generally very unsatisfactory in character. One result of this is that those who have made chemistry their profession find themselves more often than not in the position of having to subordinate their professional instincts to the temporary exigencies of some particular branch of trade and to find their professional status called in question and criticised by those who are not in the profession itself and who have no right to criticise.

In this chapter, I reflect on the impact my Estuary English accent has had on me, both personally and professionally as a former social worker, now social work academic, and the impact it appears to have on others. From parental chastisement for dropping my ‘T’s, attributions of being ‘Cockney’ and ‘Essex’, with associated assumptions made about my educational background, class and indeed my very moral character. My accent appears at times, to disrupt some peoples' presuppositions – about who or what I am. I discuss some of the linguistic features of my accent and some ‘critical accent incidents’. I reflect on the challenges of managing academia as someone with an accent that I argue, is underpinned by gendered and classist assumptions. I argue why a critical focus on accentism remains important, generally and within social work education. The chapter utilises theory from a wide range of disciplines, including cultural theory, linguistics, education studies and autoethnography.

This paper aims to look into changing future landscapes of business interaction, relationships and networks using the lens of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and his key notions of polyphony, heteroglossia and dialogism.

This is a conceptual paper exploring the complex dualities of Bakhtin’s approach involving eternally competing, paradoxical forces of unity and fragmentation; continuity and change; and coherence and incongruity.

Bakhtin’s approach suggests that all phenomena at all levels involve a complex struggle between organizational unity and dis-organizational fragmentation. Bakhtin provides theoretical support for David Boje’s notion of “antenarratives” as key in the making of socially constructed futures. Antenarratives are bridging “tropes” between unifying narratives and fragmented stories.

Antenarratives need to be a focal interest in researching Bakhtinian dualities because they are a catalyst and chiasmus traveling between and inter-animating relations between narratives and stories.

The Bakhtinian schema suggests that practitioners need to maintain a reliance upon “phronesis” or practical wisdom and dexterity that allows them to adapt and improvise in fast-changing and multiple situations and contexts. To enable them to do this, such practical capabilities need the combined cultivation of appropriate embodied skills, capabilities in communicative and symbolic persuasion, as well as analytical reasoning.

Bakhtin’s concepts provide a unique and operationalizable approach to encompassing duality, which addresses the increasing need in business marketing to understand and adapt within increasingly complex and changing landscapes of business interaction, relationships and networks.