Surgical accountability in the 1880s: the death of Susan Nixon

Susan Nixon died in 1881 following a surgical error. Her surgeon, Dr W. E. Warren, excised a normal 7-month gravid uterus under the misapprehension that he was removing a tubular pregnancy. It is believed that Mrs Nixon was the first woman in Australia to have an abdominal hysterectomy and the second to have a live Caesarean section. The surgical misadventure that resulted in Mrs Nixon's death became a public scandal, which gained currency through both parliamentary debate and the popular press.

The purpose of referring to this case is to explore the mechanisms of accountability that surgeons faced in the 1880s − a decade of rapid change in the practice of surgery. The response of late nineteenth century society to surgical error and the resultant reaction of the medical profession have resonances that are relevant to surgeons practising today.

Rugby league: a game in crisis

This study examines the issue of crisis and reputation management strategies in Australian sporting clubs and finds that not only are individual clubs unaware of the potential impact of such crises on their organizations, but that they also have no training, contingency plans, or strategies to handle crises of any sort either at this or at the national league level. It uses the Australian Rugby League organization as a case study f()r examining these issues and concludes with several recommendations for improving crisis management and communications policies in Australian sporting organizations and for their stakeholders.

Many public and private organizations prefer to ignore the reality that "bad things" can happen, either through denial of their vulnerabilities or through myopia about their successes and strengths (Elliott, 2002). A crisis can be defined as any problem or disruption that triggers negative stakeholder reaction and extensive public scrutiny (Newman, 2003). Effective crisis management lies in continuous learning processes designed to equip managers with the capabilities, flexibility, and confidence to deal with sudden and unexpected problems or events (Robert & Lajtha, 2002). Good crisis leaders are those who can make fast decisions under pressure and who can keep the big picture consequences of actions and words in mind when making these decisions 030in & Lagadec, 20(0). In 2004, the Rugby league in Australia was both ill-prepared and ill-advised to effectively deal with a sex scandal involving a number of their players on an official club tour. In classic crisis escalation, what should have been a serious but easily dealt with problem became a major reputational and institutional crisis for the league, its sponsors, its players, and its fans.

The curious case of the Occidental and Regal : the evolution of solvency and disclosure standards in the Australian life insurance industry

In 1990, the Australian life insurance industry was rocked by a scandal that threatened to destabilize consumer confidence in the ability of insurance providers to meet policyholder liabilities. The incident highlighted the nature of the agency problems that arise when conditions of asymmetric information exist. It revealed systemic weaknesses in accounting, solvency and disclosure standards as they applied to life insurers. This article uses an evolutionary concept of agency to analyse government and industry responses to this event. It is argued that initial adaptive responses stabilized the industry and averted a more serious crisis. Longer term innovative responses led to the introduction of a new and more rigorous approach to reporting and solvency standards, which has improved information flows and agency outcomes.

Business ethics and the accounting profession

Business ethics emerged as a major public concern following a spate of corporate collapses during the 1980s and early 2000s, Corporate collapses such as HIH and Harris Scarfe in Australia; Enron, Worldcom and Global Crossing in the US; and Parmalat in Europe, have precipitated questions about the business and accounting practices of these firms and the role played by their accountants and auditors, According to Armstrong et al. (2003, p, 1), one can hardly pick up a business publication today without noting some reference to an accounting scandal....The sheer number of accounting abuses serves as prima facie evidence that something more is needed in terms of accounting ethics.

Scandalous women: gender and identity in top-notch smut

Examining a diverse range of texts offering controversial representations of female sexuality, this paper demonstrates a persistent link between literary scandal and anxieties about women's sexuality. Texts from Madame Bovary (1857) to The Sexual Life of Catherine M (2001) have provoked various arguments, from debates about the need to restrain the unruly bodies of women to contestations about aesthetic merit, morality, and obscenity. Indeed, the scandalous literature of sexual women is distinguished by efforts to reduce its transgressions into something manageable, whether through naming and categorisation (‘chick lit’ and ‘posh porn’), textual analysis, public censure, or critical excoriation. The desire to manage controversial material signifies a discourse of containment that suggests both women and literature require strict control. As this paper will argue, the relationship between women, literature, and scandal is one marked by both intra- and extra-textual efforts to restrain not only the unpredictability and power of female sexuality, but also the unruly energies of literature itself.

The pornography of trauma : faking identity in misery memoirs

Examining hoax memoirs by James Frey (2003), Dave Pelzer (1995) and Kathy O’Beirne (2006), this paper illustrates how anxieties about the inability of representation to provide a direct access to truth are mitigated via an emotional connection with the text. While the degree of faking varies, each scandal reveals concerns about authenticity and the need to find—or feel—something that can be accepted as unquestionably ‘true’. The mimicking performed by a fake unsettles the boundaries between fact and fiction to reveal a public investment in an undisturbed effect of the real, a willingness to accept a blurring of ‘truth’ in the interests of the sensational experience of literature.

Hazing in the ADF: a culture of denial?

Hazing, or bastardisation, has been the subject of repeated scandal in the Australian Defence Force (ADF) for at least 40 years. At its most serious, as documented in the 2011 Piper Report, hazing is clearly criminal behaviour. This article uses the techniques of criminology to explore hazing as a group social practice in the ADF, and considers whether the response of the ADF to hazing can be characterised as collective denial.

Conclusion : democratising the history of democracy

The aim of The Secret History of Democracy has been to open debate on a larger view of democratic practice than that encapsulated by its wellknown standard history. The book came about from a concern that, while democracy was experiencing an ascendancy that began in the aftermath of the Second World War and intensified with the end of the Cold War, the global uptake of this particular form of governance came at the very moment when its limitations were becoming clearer: in its European and American heartlands there was less interest in participating in democracy; Clinton began in hope but ended in scandal; 9/11 was a victory for intolerance precisely because Western democracy restricted its own freedoms; the Bush, Blair and Howard governments became less relevant to their constituents and waged unpopular wars; the global financial crisis revealed democracy’s dependence on a flawed economic model; and difficulties in dealing with the global impact of climate change showed the limitations of national democracies, hostage to sectional interests. The exemplars of democracy were not having an easy time.

Our Sherlockian eyes: the surveillance of vision

or this inter-disciplinary article, we undertook a pilot case study that eye-tracked the ‘Holmes Saves Mrs. Hudson’ sequence from the episode, A Scandal in Belgravia (Sherlock, BBC, 2012). This small-scale empirical study involved a total of 13 participants (3 males and 10 females, mean age was: 27 years), comprised of a mixture of academics and undergraduate students at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. The article examines its findings through a range of threaded frames – neuroscience, forensics, surveillance, haptics, memory, performance-movement, and relationality – and uniquely draws upon the interests of the authors to set the examination in context. The article is both a reading of Sherlock and a dialogue between its authors. We discover that the codes and conventions of Sherlock have a direct impact on where viewers look but we also discover eyes emerging in the periphery of the frame, and we account for these ways of seeing in different ways.

A economia política da corrupção: o escândalo do orçamento

A abertura democrática no Brasil criou um otimismo com a possibilidade do resolver seus problemas crônicos como inflação e corrupção. Foi feita uma panacéia sobre democracia; da democracia surgiriam as soluções para todos os males. Entretanto, a história recente mostra que a democracia não coincide com a eliminação da corrupção e inflação crônicas. Ao contrário, a corrupção causou danos a algumas instituições fundamentais da democracia como o Presidente e o Congresso. Infelizmente, a corrupção é muito perigosa para a democracia. Como observou Tocqueville, com sua perspicácia natural, o povo ate tolera a corrupção numa tirania, por ser um fato comum neste tipo de governo. Não obstante, em uma democracia, a corrupção e inaceitável porque pessoas comuns são eleitas para representar cidadãos, e não para trabalhar contra eles. Os últimos escândalos envolvendo corrupção no Brasil, como o caso Collor e principalmente o uso "inadequado" do orçamento nacional foram importantes porque mostraram a incapacidade da sociedade para controlar este fator de risco institucional. É interessante notar que em outros grandes casos de corrupção na América Latina, como no Gráu, Cuba, Portillo, México ou mesmo na Venezuela, durante os eufóricos anos 70, a situação econômica e até mesmo política não eram ruins. Entretanto, no Brasil, aparentemente, a corrupção política cresceu num período de crises estruturais. Infelizmente este fato tem um resultado considerável: o crescente pessimismo do homem comum sobre o futuro. Entretanto a corrupção pode ser estudada cientificamente. Pode ser vista como uma escolha racional de comportamento compelido por instituições e esquemas de incentivos. Talvez alguns resultados interessantes possam emergir deste tipo de especulação histórica e teórica sobre o comportamento corrupto. Este é o maior objetivo deste estudo.

Turnaround de empresas com problemas de compliance - o caso Siemens

It is very relevant, for academic or for society purposes as a whole the subject "corruption", a recurring problem that plagues companies and Governments in various parts of the world. Many recent cases draw attention to this topic, but one in particular, the case of corruption of the company Siemens AG, that resulted in the payment of the largest fines in the history on your model, based on the terms of the FCPA since it became law in 1977. This event caters specifically to the objective of this work which is to make an analysis based on agency theory and the codes of good practices of corporate governance on how large companies revising their corporate management systems and practices aiming at the recovery of its institutional image after significant impact on the company, such as the corruption scandal in which Siemens was involved. For this study, we opted for qualitative research as a methodological path contemplating the single case study. In the process of data collection were used data obtained through documentary research about the corruption scandal on public collection available in the internet. Open conversations were made with 3 compliance Department officials of Siemens for the purposes of understanding the case with. At the end of this work, it was observed in the Siemens turnaround process a correlation between what was proposed by the Agency Theory about internal control Systems based on what was accomplished by the company when promoted an extensive restructuring of the Department of compliance and corporate governance system, the improvement of internal controls, as well as the creation of detection tools , control, analysis and prevention of fraud, which were used to minimize the effects generated by the conflict of interest covered by the theory of Agency. KEY WORDS: Corporate Governance; Compliance; Corruption; Turnaround, Agency Theory

Social media crises in the organization: exploring management strategies through cases from France and Brazil

The aim of this Master’s thesis has been to shed light on the response strategies that organizations are implementing when facing a crisis created on or amplified by social media. Since the development of social media in the late 1990s, the interplay between the online and the offline spheres has become more complex, and characterized by dynamics of a new magnitude, as exemplified by the wave of “Twitter” Revolutions or the Wikileaks scandal in the mid 2000s, where online behaviors deeply affected an offline reality. The corporate world does not escape to this worldwide phenomenon, and there are more and more examples of organizational reputations destroyed by social media “fireballs”. As such, this research aims to investigate, through the analysis of six recent cases of corporate crises (2013-2015) from France and Brazil, different strategies currently in use in order to identify examples of good and bad practices for companies to adopt or avoid when facing a social media crisis. The first part of this research is dedicated to a review of the literature on crisis management and social media. From that review, we were able to design a matrix model, the Social Media Crisis Management Matrix, with which we analyzed the response strategies of the six companies we selected. This model allows the conceptualization of social media crises in a multidimensional matrix built to allow the choice, according to four parameters, of the most efficient (that is: which will limit the reputational damage) response strategy. Attribution of responsibility for the crisis to the company by stakeholders, the origin of the crisis (internal or external), the degree of reputational threat, and the emotions conveyed online by stakeholders help companies determining whether to adopt a defensive response, or an accommodative response. The results of the analysis suggest that social media crises are rather manichean objects for they are, unlike their traditional offline counterparts, characterized by emotional involvement and irrationality, and cannot be dealt with traditionally. Thus analyzing the emotions of stakeholders proved to be, in these cases, an accurate thermometer of the seriousness of the crisis, and as such, a better rudder to follow when selecting a response strategy. Consequently, in the cases, companies minimized their reputational damage when responding to their stakeholders in an accommodative way, regardless of the “objective” situation, which might be a change of paradigm in crisis management.

The impact of corruption on the performance of state-owned companies: case of Petrobras Brasil

As empresas estatais são freqüentemente consideradas como componentes cruciais da economia de um país. Eles são responsáveis pela criação de vários postos de trabalho e proveem serviços essenciais que exigem um grande investimento de capital. Porém, em países com instituições fracas, onde a responsabilidade dos políticos é limitada e a gestão dos recursos financeiros das empresas estatais sofre pouco controle, os funcionários são muitas vezes tentados pela corrupção. Enormes quantidades de fundos públicos são facilmente desviados, e dinheiro que deveria ter sido investido nas despesas de capital, no pagamento de dívida da empresa ou no aumento do retorno para os acionistas, é usado para aumentar a riqueza privada de indivíduos ou para financiar ilegalmente partidos políticos. O desempenho da empresa sofre com essas alienações visto que parte dos lucros da empresa não são reinvestidos na empresa e dado que incentivos dos gestores estão desalinhados com os interesses dos acionistas. Petrobras, a maior empresa da América Latina em termos de ativos e receitas anuais, sofreu em 2014 e 2015 um escândalo de corrupção imenso, cujo impacto económico foi considerável, levando ao enfraquecimento da confiança de muitos investidores no Brasil após o evento. O escândalo expôs um extenso esquema de corrupção através do qual os contratantes foram conspirando para aumentar os preços de contratos de construção, com a aprovação da administração da Petrobras que pediu em troca ganhos pessoais ou fundos para o Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT). A exposição do escândalo na imprensa brasileira teve um grande impacto sobre a credibilidade da Petrobras: as contas da empresa estavam escondendo imensas irregularidades dado que a empresa tinha pago demais para os contratos de construção que não foram precificados no valor do mercado. Ao longo deste estudo, usamos o exemplo da Petrobras para ilustrar como a corrupção dentro empresas estatais prejudica o desempenho da empresa e como ela afeta as várias partes interessadas da empresa.

O escândalo do mensalão em revistas semanais: uma análise de enquadramento

Pós-graduação em Comunicação - FAAC