Search results

The climate crisis presents a global threat. Research shows the necessity of joint communication efforts across different arenas—media, politics, business, academia and protest—to address this threat. However, communication about social change in response to the climate crisis comes with challenges. These challenges manifest, among others, in public accusations of inconsistency in terms of hypocrisy and incapability against self-declared change agents in different arenas. This increasingly turns public climate communication into a “blame game”.

Strategic communication scholarship has started to engage in this debate, thereby acknowledging climate communication as an arena-spanning, necessarily contested issue. Still, a systematic overview of specific inconsistency accusations in different public arenas is lacking. This conceptual article provides an overview based on a macro-focused public arena approach and decoupling scholarship.

Drawing on a systematic literature review of climate-related strategic communication scholarship and key debates from climate communication research in neighboring domains, the authors develop a framework mapping how inconsistency accusations of hypocrisy and incapacity, that is, policy–practice and means–ends decoupling, manifest in different climate communication arenas.

This framework creates awareness for the shared challenge of decoupling accusations across different climate communication arenas, underscoring the necessity of an arena-spanning strategic communication agenda. This agenda requires a communicative shift from downplaying to embracing decoupling accusations, from mutual blaming to approval of accountable ways of working through accusations and from confrontation to cooperation of agents across arenas.

In this paper, the authors examine the strategies used to reduce labour costs in three public hospitals in South Africa, which were effective and why. In the democratic era, after the revelations of large-scale corruption, the authors ask whether their case studies provide lessons for how public service institutions might re-make themselves, under circumstances of austerity.

A comparative qualitative case study approach, collecting data using a combination of interviews with managers, focus group discussions and interviews with shop stewards and staff was used.

Management in two hospitals relied on their financial power, divisions between unions and employees' loyalty. They lacked the insight to manage different actors, and their efforts to outsource services and draw on the Extended Public Works Program failed. They failed to support staff when working beyond their scope of practice, reducing employees' willingness to take on extra responsibilities. In the remaining hospital, while previous management had been removed due to protests by the unions, the new CEO provided stability and union–management relations were collaborative. Her legitimate power enabled unions and management to agree on appropriate cost cutting strategies.

Finding an appropriate balance between the new reality of reduced financial resources and the needs of staff and patients, requires competent unions and management, transparency and trust to develop legitimate power; managing in an authoritarian manner, without legitimate power, reduces organisational capacity. Ensuring a fair and orderly process to replace ineffective management is key, while South Africa grows cohorts of competent managers and builds managerial experience.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on medical education and training, with many medical schools and training programs having to adapt to remote or online learning, social distancing measures and other challenges. This paper aimed to examine the disruption for clinical training, as it has reduced the opportunities for students and trainees to gain hands-on experience and interact with patients in person.

The ethnographic qualitative research design was chosen as the research methodology. Using Gibbs' reflective cycle, the researcher explored the psychiatry clerks' (final-year medical students) reflections on the disruption of their clinical training during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The findings demonstrated that the students had a significant psychological impact on their coping capacities as the crisis progressed from shock and depression to resilience. The students being the key stakeholders provided a concrete foundation for the development of a framework for improving practices during uncertain times.

Students' reflections provided valuable insight into the pandemic’s impact on their psychosocial lives with uncertainty and incapacity to cope up with changing stressful dynamics. The results will assist in planning how to best support medical students' well-being during interruptions of their educational process brought about by similar future crises.

Crises are moments when citizens are beckoning on the political leaders for necessary action. As a president, one is expected to change the narratives during the pandemic that split the world. This analysis aimed at investigating the American government’s response to the critical crisis of COVID-19 and its policy implementation.

The study explored a case point method using a narrative and qualitative analysis to diagnose the USA’s response to the COVID-19 crisis. An exploratory approach was further adopted to finetune the case study report.

The analysis demonstrates that Trump’s power dynamics were weak in the USA and lacked crisis control even as the President that the entire nations of the world were looking up to. The case study report also showed that Trump did not possess the audacity of resilience to manage the crisis. The analysis provides us with how presidential leadership under Trump placed the USA in a state of colossal failure enmeshed with high rates of COVID-19 cases, deaths and unending incapacity to create a fundamental consensus in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic today. This report shows Trump aged prolonged inability to drive governance mechanisms in the US and illustrated pockets of failures in decision analysis and information dissemination as a leader.

The study revealed how incompetent Trump was in responding to the crisis. This study has provided academia with an understanding of leadership dynamics and behaviour through a Nigerian scholar lens and a sociological perspective.

This study is not intended to be a prescriptive blueprint for any nation or region to fight terrorism, but rather it aims to analyze the development of policies supporting terrorism and their impact on regional as well as international relations. It is an examination of relevant facts, which might hopefully benefit policy makers and practitioners who diligently work on reducing or eliminating terrorist activities.

In order to achieve the objectives of the paper and in light of the pool of the available literature and data, the study adopts the system-analysis method in analyzing the impact of policies supporting terrorism and the countermeasures to apply based on the inputs, outputs and conversions associated with the phenomenon of terrorism.

Policies supporting terrorism differ from a state to another starting from providing safe haven to terrorist groups to providing direct finance and armaments to directly intervening militarily in a targeting country. Or deter such policies. This raised the concerns of many States in the region regarding the domination tendency of Turkey and called for a firm and pragmatic international, regional and Arab stand beyond verbal condemnation to deter Turkey from pursuing such policies.

The importance of the academic study stems from the importance of addressing one of the central issues in the field of regional and international relations, which is the policies some states adopt to support terrorism, not only by financing terrorism but also by incubating terrorism. Most studies on terrorism focus on the concept and situations and not on policies that support terrorism and their impact on regional and international relations and the means of encountering terrorism.

This paper examines the relevance of Public-Private-Community Partnerships (PPCPs) as an alternative mechanism in enhancing food security during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond in Zimbabwe. It also draws attention to the complexities of adopting PPCPs, and proposes possible options to improve their effectiveness.

The study applied concurrent mixed research methods. The sample population comprised multiple stakeholders in the area of food security and agricultural financing in Zimbabwe. The research adopted purposive and snowball sampling techniques. Data were collected through questionnaire, in-depth interviews, focus group discussions (FGDs) and documentary analysis. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse quantitative data, while qualitative data analysis was conducted thematically.

Prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, food insecurity was a consistent challenge in Zimbabwe. The pandemic has worsened the situation by further disruption of food systems and limiting people's access to food. PPCPs could be feasible alternative as they enhance value chain collaboration, improve access to inputs, reduce information asymmetry, ensure trust and facilitate risk sharing. PPCPs require proper design, control of transaction costs, clear definition of partners' roles, fair risk sharing, trust, and flexibility.

PPCPs are yet to be adopted in the Zimbabwean agricultural sector. The research informs policymakers on the need to implement multi-stakeholder collaborations in food production.

This study attempts to figure out the factors that contributed to deposing certain elected presidents before the end of their constitutional terms, alongside tracing the new political context that prevailed in Latin America since 1978 and its impact on direct political participation and military behavior during presidential crises.

The paper uses the comparative method to investigate the causes of presidential instability in three case studies.

The likelihood of presidential instability increases when a president enacts austerity economic policies that marginalize large sectors of the citizenry, becomes implicated in acts of corruption and develops a hostile relationship with members of the ruling coalition.

This study integrates the social movement theory with analytical perspectives from parliamentary behavior to explain presidential instability. It attempts to investigate the dynamics of interaction between the acts of furious citizens and disloyal legislators through the in-depth analysis of three case studies.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of the studies about workaround behavior in the Information Systems (IS) area, addressing its positive and negative aspects and raising the key related issues.

A systematic literature review was conducted to verify how workaround behavior has been approached in IS studies. A qualitative method was adopted and implemented in two stages: selection of articles from the time period 2007-2017 in the databases Web of Science, ScienceDirect and Scopus and analysis of the selected articles.

The results showed that many studies have been concerned with identifying the principal reasons for the manifestation of workaround behavior and the measures taken to reduce its impacts. Many studies from international journals examined the implementation of an ERP along with the workaround behavior. The need to expand the national studies on workaround behavior is emphasized, because the majority of the identified studies are international.

The key limitation is related to the period of analysis, because only articles published since 2007 were selected.

This paper contributes to both theory and practice, bringing relevant concepts about workaround behavior, and corroborating the importance of the studies on workaround in the IS area. The literature review of the 20 articles analyzed reveals the main features in each article, such as theoretical and methodological aspects that support the research. Based on this analysis, a conceptual map was developed presenting the most relevant points about workaround behavior, where the causes, the negative and positive consequences, the types of solutions and the organizational and individual impacts are presented.

Research into workaround behavior has increased in recent years, however very few studies have been conducted in Brazil. To the best of the authors' knowledge, no articles regarding Brazil and this subject were published between 2007 and 2017. Thus, this paper seeks to redress this imbalance.

Managers’ work is surrounded by complex environments, from which they need to learn, in order to understand them. However, complexity poses several challenges to managerial learning, for which usually management educational programs have not prepared managers. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to explore such challenges and possible ways to overcome them.

This is a conceptual paper that explores in depth the issue of managerial learning challenges in a complex world. Managers face these challenges during their practice, yet sometimes management education has not prepared them for this.

Three managerial learning challenges due to complexity are identified. First, through cognition and cognitive structures, managers simplify the world around them. Nevertheless, biases, inertia and inaccuracy emerge, as managers’ mental models are not truly capable of capturing complexity. Second, managers look for information to aid them in their learning processes, but the information they gather is sometimes bogus, invalid or unfounded. Third, managers could seek for support from management research to improve their learning. However, given management research intricacies, limitations and particularities, a learning challenge emerges as well, as management research has been rarely capable to capture complexity.

Having explored these managerial learning challenges due to complexity, this paper discusses a carefulness-based management learning ideal, which by being underpinned by the quality of carefulness and the related concepts of critical thinking, negative capability and a deep learning style, suggests a potential new way to approach management learning in light of complexity.