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This study aims to investigate the quality of disclosure of a cutting-edge reporting tool – integrated reporting (<IR>) – in terms of its effectiveness to report on COVID-19 pandemic information, its ability to provide forward-looking information and risk impact implications, and its quality determinants in challenging times.

Thanks to a content analysis of 247 <IR> for FY20, an integrated reporting disclosure score was developed to assess the disclosure quality provided by the sampled companies. Three research questions were tested through logistic regressions.

Non-financial disclosure activities struggle to provide adequate information in terms of potential future scenarios, risk assessment and forward-looking analyses. However, companies incorporated in “Anglo-Saxon” territories drafted integrated reports of higher quality. More recently, incorporated companies have made a greater effort to measure and report COVID-19 pandemic impacts on environmental, social and governance and business activities, also increasing their risk assessment and mitigation efforts. Concerning the determinants of disclosure quality, leverage, corporate governance structures, country of incorporation and belonging to “high impact” industries all lead to a higher quality of <IR> disclosure.

Examining in detail corporate social responsibility activities and corporate governance integrity is pivotal to orienting strategy towards sustainable trajectories: to do so, corporate reporting and disclosure practices are essential tools. In this context, corporate governance systems that emphasize board diversity are proven, even in disruptive circumstances, to play a crucial role in providing corporate reports of higher quality. High disclosure quality that goes beyond mere financial results is considered to be necessary to remain competitive strategically, socially and environmentally.

Cyber-attacks that generate technical disruptions in organisational operations and damage the reputation of organisations have become all too common in the contemporary organisation. This paper explores the reputation repair strategies undertaken by organisations in the event of becoming victims of cyber-attacks.

For developing the authors’ contribution in the context of the Internet service providers' industry, the authors draw on a qualitative case study of TalkTalk, a British telecommunications company providing business to business (B2B) and business to customer (B2C) Internet services, which was a victim of a “significant and sustained” cyber-attack in October 2015. Data for the enquiry is sourced from publicly available archival documents such as newspaper articles, press releases, podcasts and parliamentary hearings on the TalkTalk cyber-attack.

The findings suggest a dynamic interplay of technical and rhetorical responses in dealing with cyber-attacks. This plays out in the form of marshalling communication and mortification techniques, bolstering image and riding on leader reputation, which serially combine to strategically orchestrate reputational repair and stigma erasure in the event of a cyber-attack.

Analysing a prototypical case of an organisation in dire straits following a cyber-attack, the paper provides a systematic characterisation of the setting-in-motion of strategic responses to manage, revamp and ameliorate damaged reputation during cyber-attacks, which tend to negatively shape the evaluative perceptions of the organisation's salient audience.

The aim of this paper is to explore the possibility of using the Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control (DMAIC) cycle, process mining (PM) and multi-criteria decision methods in an integrated way so that these three elements combined result in a methodology called the Agile DMAIC cycle, which brings more agility and reliability in the execution of the Six Sigma process.

The approach taken by the authors in this study was to analyze the studies arising from this union of concepts and to focus on using PM tools where appropriate to accelerate the DMAIC cycle by improving the first two steps, and to test using the AHP as a decision-making process, to bring more excellent reliability in the definition of indicators.

It was indicated that there was a gain with acquiring indicators and process maps generated by PM. And through the AHP, there was a greater accuracy in determining the importance of the indicators.

Through the results and findings of this study, more organizations can understand the potential of integrating Six Sigma and PM. It was just developed for the first two steps of the DMAIC cycle, and it is also a replicable method for any Six Sigma project where data acquisition through mining is possible.

The authors develop a fully applicable and understandable methodology which can be replicated in other settings and expanded in future research.

Organizations working in high-hazard environments contribute significantly to modern society and the economy, not only for the valuable resources they hold but also for the indispensable products and services they provide, such as power generation, transportation and defense weapons. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to develop a framework that outlines future research on systems safety and provides a better understanding of how organizations can effectively manage hazard events.

In this research, we developed the high hazard theory (HHT) and a theoretical framework based on the grounded theory method (GTM) and the integration of three established theoretical perspectives: normal accident theory (NAT), high reliability theory (HRT) and resilience engineering (RE) theory.

We focused on the temporal aspect of accidents to create a timeline showing the progression of hazard events and the factors contributing to safety and hazards in organizations. Given the limitations of the previous theories in providing a coherent explanation of hazard event escalation in high-hazard organizations (HHOs), we argue that the highlighted theories can be more complementary than contradictory regarding their standpoints on disasters and accident prevention.

A proper appreciation of the hazard nature of organizations can help reduce their susceptibility to failure, prevent outages and breakdowns of systems, identify areas for improvement and develop strategies to enhance performance.

By developing HHT, we contribute to systems safety research by developing a new, refined theory and enrich the theoretical debate. We also expand the understanding of scholars and practitioners about the characteristics of organizations working in high-hazard environments.

The study focuses on drug safety regulation capture, reveals the inner mechanism and evolutionary characteristics of drug safety regulation capture and provides suggestions for effective regulation by pharmacovigilance.

The article introduces prospect theory into the game strategy analysis of drug safety events, constructs a benefit perception matrix based on psychological perception and analyzes the risk selection strategies and constraints on stable outcomes for both drug companies and drug regulatory authorities. Moreover, simulation was used to analyze the choice of results of different parameters on the game strategy.

The results found that the system does not have a stable equilibrium strategy under the role of cognitive psychology. The risk transfer coefficient, penalty cost, risk loss, regulatory benefit, regulatory success probability and risk discount coefficient directly acted in the direction of system evolution toward the system stable strategy. There is a critical effect on the behavioral strategies of drug manufacturers and drug supervisors, which exceeds a certain intensity before the behavioral strategies in repeated games tend to stabilize.

In this article, the authors constructed the perceived benefit matrix through the prospect value function to analyze the behavioral evolution game strategies of drug companies and FDA in the regulatory process, and to evaluate the evolution law of each factor.

How can large international financial firms go green in authentic ways? What enhances ‘Net Zero action’? Changes in global banks, fund managers, and insurance firms are at the heart of green finance. External change pressures – combined with problematic firm predispositions – exacerbate barriers to change and promote scepticism about authentic Net Zero change. Field research reveals main elements, connections, and interactions of this question by considering financial firms as complex socio-technical systems (Mitleton-Kelly, 2003). An interdisciplinary/holistic narrative approach (De Bakker et al., 2019) is adopted to design a conceptual framework that can support a green ‘behavioural theory of the financial firm’ (green BTFF). The BTFF presents an international version (Peng, 2001) of the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm (Barney, 1991; Hart, 1995; Teece et al., 1997).

The approach of this chapter is aimed at closing knowledge gaps and realign values in financial markets and society. By raising awareness about organised hypocrisy and facades (Brunsson, 1993; Cho et al., 2015; Schoeneborn et al., 2020) in financial firms the chapter aims at overcoming the gap between ‘talking’ and ‘walking’ in the financial sector. The chapter defines testable firm-level hypotheses for ‘Green Finance’ (Poterba, 2021) as well as – by implication – tests for ‘greenwashing’.

The US platelet supply is almost exclusively dependent on apheresis donors who are “aging out.” As a result, blood centers and hospitals have been experiencing spot shortages and have resorted to transfusing low-dose platelets. This paper explores using whole blood–derived platelets (WB-PLTs) to supplement the apheresis platelet (APH-PLT) supply.

This paper reviews the history leading to the current state of the US platelet supply and includes the impact of recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the implementation of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-mandated bacterial mitigation strategies.

WB-PLTs represent a viable source of platelets that can be used to supplement the APH-PLT supply. Whole blood automation represents a new methodology to more easily prepare WB-PLTs. Advances in donor testing and screening as well as pre-storage leukoreduction have improved the safety of WB-PLTs to the same level as APH-PLTs. Blood services in the US and abroad transfuse WB-PLTs interchangeably in all patient populations.

This paper highlights how the US blood industry is essentially “sole-sourced” in terms of APH-PLTs. In this post-COVID-19 period, when most industries are building redundancies in their supply chains, blood centers should consider WB-PLTs as an additional source of platelets to bolster the US platelet supply.

This chapter is focused on what we can learn from oppressive governance, in this case specifically relating to university governance in terms of vice chancellors and presidents, to the deputy vice chancellor and deputy president and down the ever-growing university hierarchy to deans and heads of schools and their deputies, from a Freirean perspective. Freire wrote at length about how leaders ‘controlled’ education and why they did so, but he also wrote at length about how governments control populations – himself being both a political prisoner and a person in exile to escape persecution. This chapter subsequently examines Freire's ideas around what techniques people employ to control populations and applies them to a higher education setting because the similarities are numerous and the tactics familiar.