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Data, either in primary or secondary form, represent the core strength of quantitative research. However, there is significant difference between collected data and the final researchable data. The data collection is driven by objectives of the research. The data also could be in various formats at different sources. The collected data in its original form may contain systematic and random errors. Such errors need to be cleaned from the data which is termed as data cleaning process.

The present chapter discusses about the different methodologies and steps that may be helpful for fine tuning the data into researchable format. The discussions are instantiated with the applications of methodologies on a set of financial data of companies listed in Bombay Stock Exchange. Various steps involved in transformation of collected data to researchable data are presented. A schematic model including data collection, data cleaning, working with variables, outlier treatment, testing the assumption of statistical test, normality, and heteroscedasticity is presented for the benefit of research scholars. Beyond this generic model, this paper focuses exclusively on financial data of listed companies in the Bombay Stock Exchange. The challenges involved in various sources, data gathering and other pre-analysis stages are also considered. This is also applicable for research based on secondary data sources in other fields as well.

A long period of capitalist crisis has amplified uneven and combined development in most aspects of political economy and political ecology in most parts of the world, with a resulting increase in the eco-social metabolism of profit-seeking firms and their state supporters. This is especially with the revival of extraction-oriented corporations, especially fossil fuel firms, which remain the world’s most profitable. What opportunities arise for as multi-faceted a critique of “extractivism” as the conditions demand? With ongoing paralysis of United Nations climate negotiators, to illustrate, the most critical question for several decades to come is whether citizen activism can forestall further fossil fuel combustion. In many settings, the extractive industries are critical targets of climate activists, for example, where divestment of stocks is one strategy, or refusing access to land for mining is another. Invoking climate justice principles requires investigating the broader socio-ecological and economic costs and benefits of capital accumulation associated with fossil fuel use, through forceful questioning both by immediate victims and by all those concerned about GreenHouse Gas emissions. Their solidarity with each other is vital to nurture and to that end, the most powerful anti-corporate tactic developed so far, indeed beginning in South Africa during the anti-apartheid struggle, appears to be financial sanctions. The argumentation for invoking sanctions against the fossil fuel industry (and its enablers such as international shipping) is by itself insufficient. Also required is a solid activist tradition. There are, in 2014, two inter-related cases in which South African environmental justice activists have critiqued multi-billion dollar investments, and thus collided with the state, with two vast parastatal corporations and with their international financiers. Whether these collisions move beyond conflicting visions, and actually halt the fossil-intensive projects, is a matter that can only be worked out both through argumentation – for example, in the pages below – and through gaining the solidarity required to halt the financing of climate change.

This study explores the nature and role of CEO discourse in mergers and acquisitions (M&A), and especially during the highly complex post-merger integration process. Abstraction from two extensive empirical data sources suggests that executive discourse in M&A can be seen as fitting a taxonomy involving four categories: dubbed the cartel, aesthetic, videogame and holistic communicator. It is furthermore purported that executive sense-making through discourse may need to be monitored around an ideal and permanently oscillating distance between the executive promise and the many different realities that stakeholders experience in the post-merger process: too little distance prevents change from happening, too much distance erodes the belief in the promised possibilities. This distance, named the promise–realities gap, is different for each (type of) stakeholder, as stakeholders perceive both the discoursed promise as also their everyday corporate realities in different manners. This individual perception of discourse and of the multitude of perceived realities and the volatility of their influencing variables exacerbate the successful management of the promise–realities gap.

President John F. Kennedy navigated through the Cuban missile crisis with the help of his advisers in the so-called ExComm. While ExComm attendance was very stable and its goal, the removal of the missiles, clear, true to the garbage can model the options available were socially constructed and were ambiguously related to the objective they purportedly served. An analysis of the recorded discussions reveals that Kennedy's choice of a blockade required the ExComm to suppress talk about the perils it entailed; his decision not to intercept a Soviet tanker was based less on caution than unsustainable indecision; and when Kennedy squared off against his advisers regarding the best way to respond to Khrushchev's conflicting offers on October 26 and 27, the latter worked to exclude him from the very decision he was about to make. The analysis points to a natural affinity between the garbage can model and ethnomethodological attention to the fine-grained details of deliberative talk.