While many organisations have been quick to jump onboard the ‘sustainability bandwagon’ little appears to have been done to consider the role of, and effect on, the HR function and manager. In fact, organisations have tended to treat sustainability and HR in silo. This paper examines questions such as: How are HR managers defining and enacting corporate sustainability? And what is the effect of...

This year, every political pundit is focused on the U.S. Presidential campaign, namely the incumbent Republican team vs. the Democratic ticket (yet to be named), and the recently announced Independent candidate. The incumbent, as well as each prospective candidate, is on the stump, raising campaign funds, spouting rhetoric from podiums in universities, town squares, and televised debates, and a...

The rhetoric of malpractice reform is at fever pitch, but political advocacy does not necessarily reflect grassroots opinion. To determine whether the ongoing liability crisis has greatly reduced physicians' professional satisfaction, we surveyed specialist physicians in Pennsylvania. We found widespread discontent among physicians practicing in high-liability environments, which seems to be co...

Since the earliest televised debates, cognitive and political sciences have been interested in how voters respond to political candidates and their messages, both verbal and nonverbal. The present work draws from this long tradition and combines it with work on persuasion and rhetoric to inform analyses of a new corpus of debate data: 48 transcripts from the Intelligence Squared U.S. series, te...

This study examines the social construction of collective memory regarding American cities. Inspired by postmodern theory, both critical and urban, it argues that, in its efforts to expand its political power, the Conservative Elite has successfully waged a thirty year “mnemonic war” over the public memory of America’s central cities. It describes how in their attack, the Conservatives strategi...

Theorisation and debate have been going on around the concept of civil society literally for centuries and ‘civil society theory’ could be understood as an umbrella term for the body of theorisation which has emerged. However, the term is used here in a more restricted sense to refer to the contemporary production of an ideological discourse through which academic theory is recycled as the poli...

This paper analyzes the debates surrounding the privatization of health services financing in Quebec. The objective is to clarify policy-making processes with regard to this important issue and, more generally, to provide a realistic understanding of health-related policy processes in Canada. The analysis is based on a large and continuous sample of mass media and National Assembly debates on t...

General practice has entered a period of accelerating change, and those responsible for planning its development now put forward a variety of promising proposals. Unless provision is made for large scale experimentation and scientific evaluation, the direction of future change will be determined not by evidence but by rhetoric. A framework for creating and evaluating a substantial programme of ...

The political rhetoric that accompanied the introduction of eGovernment expected it to produce innovation in the way government agencies conducted themselves with citizen and business alike. It was assumed that innovation was both “good” and inevitable. This paper challenges these assumptions and presents a more realistic model of how innovation might occurs in UK local government. The model is...