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Health care organizational research should pay greater attention to the specific settings where health is practiced. An ethnographic account of humor, ritual and defiance is presented from 29 months spent in a private, concierge-type radiation oncology center. A thick description of the setting and interaction among center staff and patients is offered in an attempt to establish why qualitative research of health care settings is so important. Findings are compared to Ellingson’s work on health care setting. Humor, ritual and defiance have therapeutic value and deserve greater attention in cancer treatment centers and health care organizations more broadly. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

An ethnographic account of humor, ritual and defiance is presented from 29 months spent in a private, concierge-type radiation oncology center through thick description.

This study reinforces the literature on the value of institutionalizing humor and ritual to improve patients’ experience in cancer care given the dominance of large public institutions, most easily accessed by academic researchers. Suncoast Coast Radiation Center’s “institutionalized humor” is an important finding that should be examine further. Scholarship can also illuminate the use of ritual in settings where health care is practiced.

This study is limited to a particular research setting which is a private, concierge care radiation oncology treatment center in the Southeastern USA.

Cancer care centers should consider carefully institutionalizing humor and ritual into their daily practices. Further, patient defiance should be reinterpreted not as a patient deficiency but as a therapeutic coping mechanism by patients.

While nearly half of cancer care in the USA is offered in private, for-profit institutions, the vast majority of the understanding of cancer care comes only from non-profit and government-run institutions. Shining a light of these neglected cancer care settings will add to the understanding and the ability to improve the care offered to patients.

This is the first health ethnography in a concierge care, cancer care treatment setting. It tests the proposition that humor, ritual and defiance play an important role in a private concierge cancer care organization.

All values are really paradoxes since they are contrasts, like courage–caution, diversity–inclusion and define one another. Values are differences at the end of continua. All metaphors are paradoxical being both like and unlike that to which they refer. Emergency management is a paradox. How can you manage something suddenly emerging like Australian bush fires? It is, however, possible to prepare for a range of events, all infections require masks, social distancing, gowns, disinfectant etc. Many East Asians countries have navigated the current COVID-19 pandemic better than many Western countries by such readiness. The key to resolving paradoxes is dynamic equilibrium, wherein opposed values harmonize and grow ever more salient. All innovation is an exercise in resolving paradox, by creating new wholes out of old and existing parts. These ideas are explored via a commentary of three pieces on paradox in relation to logic, Luhman and emergency management.

This tribute essay to Laurel Richardson’s work is composed of a collection poems that respond to her own call for and use of the poetic in sociological and ethnographic research. The piece is divided into four sections (Poeticizing Theory, Poems on Academic Life, Love Poems, and Poems of Evaluation), each with the intent of employing poetry as a creative analytic practice so that I and the reader might take in more fully Richardson’s scholarship.

Discussions about conflict at work generally tend to revolve around examples of overt industrial action, taken against an employer by a group of well‐organised employees. As the service sector becomes increasingly prominent within the UK, this model is no longer adequate – if it ever was – since much action is covert and individualistic in nature. Moreover, managers themselves may also engage in activities designed to defy or subvert central policy initiatives. This monograph is concerned with an analysis of such activities in a night‐club environment, and is based on six years research during which one of the authors worked as an employee for a large service sector organisation. It illustrates graphically the way in which employees resisted management instructions, or sought to “get even” with individuals who had alienated them. The implications which this research suggests for improving systems of management in an environment such as this are assessed.

This paper aims to investigate how firms disclose the presentation and content of business model (BM) information in corporate reports to manage their legitimacy in response to European Directive 2014/95.

Legitimacy theory is used to identify disclosure strategies pursued by firms in reaction to the new regulation. To understand how firms adopt these strategic responses, semiotic analysis is applied to a sample of European companies’ reports through Crowther’s (2012) framework, which is based on a mechanism of binary oppositions.

Half of the sample strategically choose to comply with the European Union (EU) Directive regarding BM information through the use of non-accounting language, figures, and diagrams. Other firms did not disclose any substantive information but managed the impression of compliance with the regulation, while the remainder of the sample dismissed the regulation altogether.

This study demonstrates how organisations use the disclosure of BM information in their corporate reports to control their legitimacy. The results support the idea that firms can acquire legitimacy by complying with the law or giving the impression of compliance with the regulation. This study provides evidence on the first-time adoption of the EU Directive, and therefore, future research can enlarge the sample and conduct the analysis over a broader time frame.

A more precise indication of the EU Directive regarding “where” firms should report BM information, “how” the description of a BM should refer to the environmental, social, governance (ESG) factors, and a set of performance measures to track the evolution of a company’s BM overtime is needed.

While there has been a notable amount of research that has applied content analysis methodologies to investigate the thematic and syntactic aspects of BM disclosure in corporate reports, only a few studies have investigated BM disclosures in relation to the EU Directive. Furthermore, the application of semiotic analysis extends beyond traditional content analysis methodologies because it considers the structure of the story at many levels, thus developing a more complete textual picture of how BMs are described, allowing an analysis of the reasons behind the disclosure strategies pursued by firms.

Breast cancer support businesses, retail stores selling mastectomy-related products, are playing an expanding role within healthcare in the USA. As commercial spaces separate from the medical settings where most cancer treatment occurs, these businesses have been largely overlooked in studies of medical care providers and their experiences. The purpose of this paper is to seek to bring to light the meanings and dimensions of the care work provided by breast cancer support staff to newly diagnosed patients.

This project employed an ethnographic approach centered on the workers at one breast cancer support business. The first author carried out participant observation over a 20-month period and supplemented the observations with staff member interviews.

The analysis of field notes and interviews revealed two themes or purposes as central to the employees’ understanding of their work: defining the organizational setting as a nonmedical space and balancing image enhancement with comforting care. The findings show how values of client-centered care can be enacted in a for-profit healthcare setting.

This study is limited to one for-profit support business in the southeastern USA.

Mastectomy supply businesses appear to offer a kind of support that patients may not be finding elsewhere or at the particular time they need it. Thus the study holds relevance for practitioners and health policy makers who are seeking to develop more comprehensive care for surgical patients within the established healthcare system.

This study gives a detailed picture of breast cancer support work, including the value premises and meanings it holds for support workers.

The purpose of this paper is to present an evocative story “Resisting the Ban” which illustrates the ethical and pragmatic issues that nurses face when contending with smoking ban policies in inpatient psychiatric settings.

The creative story “Resisting the Ban” was developed based on an organisational auto-ethnographic approach. The story was crafted through employing creative writing techniques and through framing and critiquing memories via several theoretical frames.

The story illustrates how smoking ban policies have created pragmatic and ethical issues on wards. The work practices of nurses have changed as have their relationships with patients. The liberties of involuntary patients have also been infringed.

This approach can illuminate links between acts of resistance and issues associated with public policies.

The effects of smoking bans need to be considered more carefully particularly in relation to their effects on workers and patients. The social meaning of the smoking bans needs closer investigation. Policy needs to be recrafted so that it better addresses the liberties of involuntary patients. Also ward nurses need to be able to carry out their roles in a manner which is consistent with their values.

Public policies, such as smoking bans, can produce negative consequences maligning relationships, practices and cultures. Critical auto-ethnography provides a means of understanding issues that have resulted from problematic policies.

Scholarly work conducted on the relationship between everyday resistance in workplaces and public policies is rare. This study offers new “insider” insights into the negative effects of a smoking ban policy in psychiatric inpatient settings.

Taking a communication perspective, the paper explores management's rhetoric in profit warnings, whose sole purpose is to disclose unexpected bad news.

Adopting a close-reading approach to text analysis, the authors analyse three profit warnings of the now-collapsed Carillion, contrasting the rhetoric with contemporaneous investor conference calls to discuss the profit warnings and board minutes recording boardroom discussions of the case company's precarious financial circumstances. The analysis applies an Aristotelian framework, focussing on logos (appealing to logic and reason), ethos (appealing to authority) and pathos (appealing to emotion) to examine how Carillion's board and management used language to persuade shareholders concerning the company's adverse circumstances.

As non-routine communications, the language in profit warnings displays and mimics characteristics of routine communications by appealing primarily to logos (logic and reason). The rhetorical profiles of investor conference calls and board meeting minutes differ from profit warnings, suggesting a different version of the story behind the scenes. The authors frame the three profit warnings as representing three stages of communication as follows: denial, defiance and desperation and, for our case company, ultimately, culminating in defeat.

The research is limited to the study of profit warnings in one case company.

The paper views profit warnings as a communication artefact and examines the rhetoric in these corporate documents to elucidate their key features. The paper provides novel insights into the role of profit warnings as a corporate communication vehicle/genre delivering bad news.