Blame Game Research Articles

Beyond the blame game: a restoration pathway reconciles ecologists’ and local leaders’ divergent models of seasonally dry tropical forest degradation

Jara-Guerrero, A. K., D. Maldonado-Riofrío, C. I. Espinosa, and D. H. Duncan. 2019. Beyond the blame game: a restoration pathway reconciles ecologists’ and local leaders’ divergent models of seasonally dry tropical forest degradation. Ecology and Society 24(4):22. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-11142-240422

A probe into the policy framework of solid waste management: it‘s applicability in Darjeeling Municipality

The management of municipal solid waste is a topic that has moved to the forefront of infrastructural agenda and embarrassment to most of the ULBs. The authorities are struggling to grapple with the rising heap of garbage. They are yet to come up with a magic wand to ward away this pervasive problem. The waste is an offshoot of unplanned urbanization, unstoppable population growth and a reckless lifestyle change. Despite the promulgation of various policies, the picture of their implementation seems very dismal. Moreover, when it comes to hill areas the overall waste scenario and its management becomes bleak. The authorities have limited themselves to collect and dispose indiscriminately without the waste being processed. The million dollar question is who is to be blamed for the system failure. The policy, the institutional debilities, the public or the mismatch. The blame game goes on. It is in this regard, the paper makes a humble endeavor to touch upon the policies of municipal solid waste management and cite possible reasons of systemic failure specifically in hill area with reference to Darjeeling Municipality. It calls for the inclusive policies to have hill perspective based on the local need.

Application of the Theory of Convenience to a Case of Illegal Public Procurement of Health Care Services

We address the following research question in this article: how can convenience theory in terms of motive, opportunity, and willingness explain deviant behaviour in the case of public procurement of healthcare services in a Norwegian municipality? This research is important, as it can identify motives at the individual and organisational level, opportunities at the organisational and societal level, and willingness at the individual level, even when there is not necessarily corruption involved. The application of convenience theory is by no means an excuse for violations of laws and regulations. Rather, this article demonstrates where prevention of misconduct and crime needs attention. It is particularly at the organisational level, where opportunity structures tend to enable commitment and concealment of illegitimate financial transactions. When auditing and other forms of control are de facto absent, where the blame game occurs, and where it is impossible to trace events because documents and e-mails have disappeared, then misconduct and crime become convenient options.

Application of the theory of convenience to a case of illegal public procurement of healthcare services

We address the following research question in this article: how can convenience theory in terms of motive, opportunity, and willingness explain deviant behaviour in the case of public procurement of healthcare services in a Norwegian municipality? This research is important, as it can identify motives at the individual and organisational level, opportunities at the organisational and societal level, and willingness at the individual level, even when there is not necessarily corruption involved. The application of convenience theory is by no means an excuse for violations of laws and regulations. Rather, this article demonstrates where prevention of misconduct and crime needs attention. It is particularly at the organisational level, where opportunity structures tend to enable commitment and concealment of illegitimate financial transactions. When auditing and other forms of control are de facto absent, where the blame game occurs, and where it is impossible to trace events because documents and e-mails have disappeared, then misconduct and crime become convenient options.

I don’t experience any insults but my wife does”: The blame game of male infertility in Ghana

Background. African men with infertility appear to be concerned about the blame for male infertility falling on their wives. Objective. To explore the concerns of men with infertility about the blame for male infertility falling on their wives. Methods. Participants were recruited through their wives, who were receiving treatment for infertility from the obstetrics and gynaecology unit of a public hospital in Ghana. The men had been identified as having male factor infertility. A semi-structured interview guide was designed and used to conduct in-depth interviews. Each participant was interviewed twice. The first interview lasted ~20 - 30 minutes. The second was by telephone, for validation of the findings, and lasted ~10 minutes per participant. Each interview was transcribed verbatim for conventional content analysis. Results. The findings revealed that the men described three main concerns: traditional influences, emotional disturbances and pressure on wives. Conclusion. The men’s narrations of their experiences indicated that they were very concerned about the blame for male infertility falling on their wives. There is a need for health education on male infertility in Ghana.

Second victims need emotional support after adverse events: even in a just safety culture.

Second victims need emotional support after adverse events: even in a just safety culture.

Het monstertruckdrama in Haaksbergen en het vertrek van burgemeester Gerritsen

Following a crisis, questions are often raised about how this crisis could have happened and whether someone is to be blamed for the crisis or its bad management. The blame game can become fierce as actors try to avoid, shift or mitigate blame in order to stay in office. In 2014, a festival took place in Haaksbergen where a monster truck drove into the audience, killing three people and injuring many others. Not enough safety measures had been taken to prevent the tragedy. Many actors were to blame for that, including the local authority which had granted the permit. Other actors blamed for the events were the mayor, the monster truck driver, and the organization organizing the festival. In the end, the mayor of Haaksbergen resigned. Instead of becoming more accommodative in his response as his blame levels increased, the mayor continued to be quite defensive, stating that the permit would be granted again – even with today’s knowledge. As one council member stated it, one cannot defend something which cannot be defended.

Organizational convenience for white-collar crime: opportunity expansion by offender behavior

ABSTRACTThe theory of convenience suggests that the extent of white-collar crime is dependent on financial motive, organizational opportunity, and willingness for deviant behavior. Organizational opportunity is at the core of convenience theory, where privileged and powerful offenders have legitimate access to resources in their professions to commit and conceal financial crime. This article introduces a dynamic perspective of organizational opportunity where a white-collar offender can cause opportunity expansion over time. Based on agency theory, social disorganization theory, and blame game theory, a case study is presented. The case study is concerned with a chief financial officer (CFO) who applied several opportunity expansion techniques before he conveniently was able to commit and conceal embezzlement in the business where he was employed.

The discursive micro-politics of blame avoidance: unpacking the language of government blame games

Policymakers often engage in blame avoidance behaviour that affects the ways in which they structure their organisations, adopt policies and operating routines, and present their work to the public. The linguistic aspects of such behaviour have received relatively little academic attention. In this paper, I seek to advance blame avoidance scholarship by introducing to its analytical toolbox useful conceptual instruments from linguistically informed discourse studies. Based on a multidisciplinary literature review, I show how the discursive study of policy-related blame games is situated within the wider scholarship dealing with a variety of blame phenomena. I provide an inventory of the micro-level building blocks of blame games: discursive strategies of persuasion, and narratives of cause, failure, and scandal. I suggest that by treating government blame games as mediated ‘language games’, policy scholars can complement the analysis of various political variables traditionally discussed in policy literature with detailed understanding of the micro-politics of presentational blame avoidance.

Personal Reflections on the Blame Game: The Game Everyone Loses

Personal Reflections on the Blame Game: The Game Everyone Loses

The ‘blame game frame’: Ethical blame patterns and media framing upon negotiations failure in the Middle East

To understand the relationship between ethical basis of blame, framing and its impact on future negotiations in protracted conflicts, we examined the blame occurrences (n = 721) in written press coverage of the 2014 Israeli–Palestinian and the 2016 Syrian Civil War mediation efforts. Through quantitative and qualitative analyses, our study found that episodic framing is exclusively utilized when presenting action-based blame, which explicitly casts blame upon acts, while thematic framing can be utilized to present (1) action-based blame; (2) virtue-based blame, which casts blame on the personality traits of the actor; and (3) conflict-essence based blame, a meta-discourse critical of the assumption that rational, right action or virtue based on a universal ‘good’ have the potential to solve an intrinsically intractable conflict. Our data challenge the dichotomy of episodic framing/conflict escalation coverage versus thematic framing/conflict de-escalation. We illustrate that in the case of blame, thematically presented blame is more destructive for future relations and potential negotiations between the actors. These findings provide valuable insights for understanding the relationship between journalism, blame, and conflict resolution.

The Blame Game: War and Violence in Dilruba Z. Ara’s <I>Blame</I>

Contemporary studies pertaining to the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh by South Asian women writers have ignited reinvestigation into the intensity of violence, rape and attribution of blame. Ethnicity based gendered violence in 1971 and the sudden shift in the attribution of the blame are some of the issues that have also been dealt with by a few Bangladeshi diasporic women novelists such as Tahmima Anam and Dilruba Z. Ara in their post-2000 novels written in English. Dilruba Z. Ara, a Swedish-Bangladeshi novelist, in her novel Blame (2015) emphasises that the blame game is a significant repercussion of war. Ara clarifies that Bengali people blamed Pakistanis for the 1971 genocide whereas Pakistanis blamed Bengali nationalists for not abiding by the Pakistani nationality. This novel, in the form of a Bildungsroman, is divided into three parts which narrate the journey of the female protagonist from the bondage of patriarchy towards a liberal life, her engagement in the war and her sexual victimisation in the same war. The mass killing of civilians, plundering of the country and victimisation of women do not end with the war; rather the blame game continues during the war resolution process. Courageous women in the war such as Ara’s protagonist Laila and her friend Gita are blamed for their own victimisation. In the context of how the blame game became an important tool to nullify gendered violence in the 1971 war, the paper intends to reread Ara’s novel Blame.

Viewpoint: The blame game.

The most hurtful thing someone said to me after my son died was: ‘Was it caused by all the medication you took when you were pregnant?’ (I suffered with appendicitis when 6 weeks pregnant, and I admit I did need analgesia to cope with the excruciating pain.) Why did my friend feel the need to assign blame to the cause of my son’s death? Why could she not accept that it was simply bad luck? My already disproportionate guilt was heightened by her comments and the dagger of grief in my chest had been twisted further. I’ve since noticed this blame game is universal. It is not only commonly talked about for victims of crime (the rape victim who was wearing a short skirt), but also in the context of ill health (the patient with …

The blame game: news, blame, and young homicide victims

ABSTRACTMedia have represented blame in homicide cases as attributable to a victim or an offender; we provide a more nuanced category of shared blame. We examine stories covering young homicide victims to demonstrate how shared blame is operationalized in print news, noting stark differences across a victim’s race and gender. We conduct a content analysis of the Orlando Sentinel newspaper and police reports from Seminole County and Sanford, Florida, from 2000 to 2012. Stark racial and gender differences are apparent in the way the content is framed and how the victims are depicted. The newspaper’s representation of young African American males is consistent with existing stereotypes of the “criminal black man.” We discuss the larger implications of our findings and how our results apply to high-profile killings of young homicide victims including Trayvon Martin.

Fanning the Blame: Media Accountability, Climate and Crisis on the Australian “Fire Continent”

ABSTRACTThis paper raises questions of media coverage of “compounded crises” related to extreme weather disaster, in the context of urgent calls to address the implications of a changing climate. Through media analysis, it examines the ways debate over bushfire protection policy was framed and made culturally meaningful, thereby politically consequential, in the wake of the worst bushfires in modern Australian history, Black Saturday (2009). The fires, in which 173 people died, led to a Royal Commission and fierce debate over the use of prescribed burning to reduce bushfire hazard. Longitudinal analysis of local, state and national mainstream media coverage (2009–2016) reveals blame games that targeted environmentalists and the government, which near-silenced meaningful discussion of the complexity of fire science, impacts of climate change on weather conditions, and calls for adaptation. By exploring the media’s constitutive role in crisis response, the paper highlights the legacy and potency of ideological conflict that shapes the media-policy nexus in Australia.

A New Demand-Supply Model to Enable Sustainability in New Australian Housing

Sustainability implementation in new housing in Australia lags much of the developed world’s standards and implementation levels for residential sustainability. Various reasons for this are offered via a ‘blame game’ in a sector plagued by lack of demand, prohibitive costs, and poorly implemented existing energy efficiency regulations. Multiple gaps in traditional supply-led procurement theory inhibits sustainability’s implementation in the Australian mass production residential construction system. Once-off consumers are not the key demand actor due to their inability to demand sustainability in a system that limits consumers’ choice and demand. Warren-Myers and Heywood (2016) theorized that the mass-producing Volume Builders are the pivotal demand-side actor in mainstreaming sustainability in the Australian new housing system. This paper investigated the Volume Builders’ roles and relationships with traditional demand-side actors, housing consumers, and the supply-side’s subcontractors and suppliers, to identify the ultimate demand actor that drives the housing industry. The investigation used semi-structured interviews with Volume Builders. The results demonstrated Volume Builders’ dominance of the Australian residential mass production construction industry validating their pivotal role as a demand-side actor in a consumption-based demand and supply model. This identifies Volume Builders as the key actor who could then drive wide-spread adoption of sustainability innovation in Australian mass-produced housing.

Complicating the Blame Game: New York Politics, Baseball Fans and the Dodgers’ Move Out of Brooklyn

Complicating the Blame Game: New York Politics, Baseball Fans and the Dodgers’ Move Out of Brooklyn

No blame game: giving pharmacists a 'safe space' to discuss errors

No blame game: giving pharmacists a 'safe space' to discuss errors

Will Automated Trucks Trigger the Blame Game and Socially Amplify Risks?

This study explores how US car drivers respond to a hypothetical but plausible news story about an incident involving an automated truck. We also evaluate the degree to which drivers intend to communicate risk perception through word of mouth and social media. Although industry expects automated trucks to increase safety, lower energy consumption, and alleviate transportation bottlenecks, prior studies of public perception of automated trucks have identified concerns about safety and job losses. We employed a between-subjects experiment to evaluate both the perception of risk and blame and the intent to communicate concerns by word of mouth and social media. Participants were exposed to a hypothetical news story regarding an automated truck accident without including cues on fault. The appearance of the truck was varied between experiment conditions, testing both human-driven and automated trucks. While we successfully manipulated perceptions of the design of the truck using several areas of literature, we did not find distinct risk and communication responses between different designs of the truck. We did find substantial differences in risk perception, blame, and intent to communicate risk between a human-driven and automated truck in an otherwise identical scenario.

Issues and Challenges in Countering Transnational Organized Crimes: Implications on Peace Conditions in Af-Pak Region

Insecure borders always provide passage to criminals for their institution. Borders depict the geographical limits of a particular state and determine its power and functioning in a region. Internal security of the country cannot be assured until its boundaries are not regularized. Countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan having numerous social, economic, and security challenges serve as an avenue for traffickers. A disputed border is waning the bilateral relations and promoting the narco-economy in the Af-Pak region. The Afghan opiate is also serving as solid financial support for the Taliban and other terrorist groups. The existence of persistent mistrust and blame game policy is contagiously affecting the lives of ordinary people. The political leadership of Afghanistan and Pakistan should learn a lesson from their past to protect their nationals from economic disasters and smugglers. In addition, the nature of this study is qualitative. Both primary and secondary data prove the main agenda of this study by highlighting the deep and robust linkage of the border dispute in the spread of drug trafficking in both countries. Moreover, there is a dire need for Pak-Afghan border management to provide shelter to the locals and the legal economy. For gaining mutual economic benefits, both states can utilize borders by articulating the mechanism for border regulation.