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The paper is centred through an examination of a short piece of recorded talk between managers and shop stewards within a UK National Health Service (NHS) Trust, relating to the manner in which one of the shop stewards attempted to get the managers to accede to a request he made for changes to the wording of a section of the Trust’s disciplinary procedure. In examining this piece of talk, the paper first contextualises the Trust through the decentralisation process of the early 1990s. The decentralisation process clearly did not introduce formal negotiation into NHS units, but instead increased the scope of formal negotiation encounters. The paper argues that there was an increased importance for persuasion as the need to gain others’ assent on industrial relations matters at the local level was significantly increased. The paper analyses the dynamics of one particular negotiating encounter between two managers and two shop stewards. In analysing this, the paper focuses through rhetoric. In coming through a rhetorical framework, the paper highlights the need for managers, when negotiating, to be alert to the implied elements of the arguments of those across the negotiating table. Concludes by also understanding the rhetoric of the encounter in the light of the marketisation of the NHS during the 1990s.

The purpose of this paper is to look at opportunities for Kazakhstan to participate in voluntary carbon markets by submitting forest protection, afforestation and reforestation projects that can be offered to domestic or foreign participants willing to take corporate social responsibility (CSR) and reduce their anthropogenic impact on the climate system by buying these projects.

The study applies a qualitative approach which is based on analysis of scientific articles, entity reports, and national legislative framework related to the topic of the research.

The findings reveal that the issues of CSR, participation in voluntary carbon markets and domestic forestry sector may be integrated if addressed properly. However, Kazakhstan lacks the level of understanding and acceptance of social or environmental responsibilities necessary to engage in CSR practices. In addition, participation of project developers from Kazakhstan in voluntary carbon markets is a subject to the complicated project submission process. Although voluntary carbon markets are not driven by specific regulations and do not require national legal frameworks to enter the voluntary market system, participation may still be a subject to other national legal aspects.

The study shows how CSR actions may bring win‐win situations both for entities’ sustainability reporting which undertake these actions, and for the forestry sector of Kazakhstan. Therefore, a specific strategy should be customized to reflect national circumstances, and which provides assistance for and enhance discussions about CSR, voluntary carbon markets, and their overall contribution to sustainable development.

The paper addresses the aspects of taking CSR in a developing country as Kazakhstan where the concept of CSR still lacks supportive legal and promotional mechanisms. It introduces the possible relation of the voluntary carbon markets to the forestry sector of Kazakhstan.

The paper's principal focus of analysis is an equalities framework introduced into the UK National Health Service in April 2000. This framework, called “The Vital Connection” is first contextualised against the background of long standing concerns and debates relating to equal opportunities within the NHS. In going on to examine the framework document the paper conducts a rhetorical analysis of the document which this paper treats as a piece of instrumental discourse. In doing this, the intent of the paper is an examination of how the rhetoric of the document attempts to generate support and identification in attempting to move equal opportunities further up the managerial agenda.

Attributing blame for performance failure and credit for success is ubiquitous in organizations. These responsibility attributions can play an important role in aligning individual and organizational performance expectations, but may also exacerbate conflict in groups and organizations. Theory suggests that an actor's organizational role will affect blame and credit attributions, yet empirical work on this prediction is lacking. This article tests an organizational role approach by assessing the effect of the responsible actor's hierarchical position and whether he or she acted as an individual or as part of a group on blame and credit attributions. The study finds that in response to organizational failures and successes leadership roles attract more blame than other positions, but in contrast to previous predictions, these roles do not attract more credit than lower level roles. In addition, upper level positions tend to be assigned greater blame than credit, while lower level positions show a reversed pattern: they attract more credit than blame. Groups are less likely to be assigned blame and more likely to be credited than are individuals, and occupants in flat organizational structures are assigned higher levels of blame and credit than are occupants in taller organizational structures.

Intersectionist, unionist and relabelling models have largely superseded the subsumption of supply chain management within logistics that formed the basis of the traditionalist model. As there is little congruence between logistics and supply chain management in the emergent intersectionist model, this is eliminated from consideration at the outset. However, an examination of the new unionist and relabelling models, offering differing permutations of the relationship between logistics and supply chain management, suggests that they offer a misleading foundation for examining the costs involved with the dispersal of supply chain activities across the world. The root problem is the failure to integrate the industrial goods transformation network operated by multinational corporations with the global transport and communications network. Reverting to privileging the global transportation and communications network over the industrial goods transformation network in a revamped traditionalist model can overcome this difficulty and open up new research vistas.