The collection of papers in this special issue has primarily been drawn from the papers representing the ‘‘Corporate Governance and accountability in the Public Sector’’ stream of the Seventh International Critical Management Studies Conference (CMS 7), which was held at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy, in July 2011. The stream was inspired by international reforms focussed on the m...

What should a scientist do with an anomalous experimental result (one which flies in the face of prevailing theories), which is statistically significant (at the five sigma + level), yet which cannot be repeated at will? This is the problem which plagued us early on in our non-plasma or "cold" fusion experiments which began in spring 1986 at Brigham Young University, 2.5 years before we heard o...

The applause stunned me. I simply hadn’t expected the chief financial officers of our 41 hospitals to respond to a community benefit presentation with such affirmation. When I asked what had prompted their reaction, they told me that for the first time, they had heard the business case for community benefit programming. This was language they understood. It was a major turning point for me and ...

This thesis is composed by three independent essays on the limits of political accountability. In the first essay I analyze an extremely stylized model of political agency with two dimensional outcomes. I show that the non-contractible nature of rewards to the agent (the politician) is especially taxing when the voters want to control outcomes in more than one dimension. I compare and contrast ...

Being at the doorstep of the 21st century it is imperative to take stock of prevailing psychiatric practices so that the profession is adequately prepared to face the challanges ahead. Psychiatry has advanced rapidly during the last few decades and today our armamentarium includes an array of effective pharmacological and psychological methods to modify behaviour. Since more powerful the tool g...

Nodes in distributed systems can become faulty due to multiple reasons: software or hardware bug, node misconfiguration or node being compromised by an attacker. Often such faulty nodes can be difficult to detect and localize. An approach to solve this problem is to hold each node accountable for its actions i.e. each node is required to provide verifiable evidence for its actions and detect a ...

Background: Professional ethics has been considered by many Iranian organizations in the last decade. Because the roots of many behaviors and activities of managers and professors should be sought in ethics and moral values. Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between professional ethics and individual accountability of professors with the mediating role o...