In the wake of neo-liberal informed global trends to set performance standards and intensify accountability, the Dutch government aimed for ‘raising standards for basic skills’. While the implementation of literacy standards was hardly noticed, the introduction of numeracy standards caused a major backlash …

In newsrooms journalists encounter numerous constraints accelerated by increasing technological and economic pressures. The complexity of the job and the need for (constant) innovation coupled with the rising call for transparency and accountability ask for journalists who “reflect-in-action”. Newsroom …

Human rights groups are increasingly calling for the protection of their right to privacy in relation to the bulk surveillance and interception of their personal communications. Some are advocating through strategic litigation. This advocacy tool is often chosen when there is weak political or public …

Sustainability challenges are among the most complex and difficult problems facing businesses today. These challenges involve many actors and interests and overlapping concerns, and addressing them requires significant investments and out-of-the-box thinking. Issues such as safety, supplier compliance, …

Purpose: This study aims at a sociological understanding of the concept of (un)motivation in order to provide clues for improving vocational rehabilitation (VR) support. Method: (Un)motivation is understood as the product of the interaction between clients and professionals in an institutional context. …

Assessing the effectiveness and progress of efforts to ‘build states in order to build peace’ (Call and Wyeth, 2008) is inevitable for several reasons. Politicians want to know what is being achieved with the resources that they have allocated to the state building endeavours abroad. They want to judge …

De afgelopen decennia lijkt de kritiek op de media en de journalistiek in Nederland toe te nemen. Politieke actoren verwijten hen de feiten te overdrijven en mediahypes te creëren. Ze zouden te veel nadruk leggen op strategie en conflict, meer oog hebben voor amusement dan voor informatie en hun toegenomen …

Pressure from politics and the public has created a greater demand for the media to be more accountable. Moreover, growing structural changes in the media landscape – including media concentration, commercialization, fiercer competition, an increasingly fragmented public, and the advent of new media …

In this paper I describe the ways in which the communication discipline can make a hidden crisis transparent. For this purpose I examine the concept of crisis entrepreneurship from a communication point of view. Using discourse analysis, I analyse the discursive practices of crisis entrepreneurs in the …

News media in The Netherlands show great variety in the extent and ways, in which they realize media accountability online in terms of actor transparency, product transparency and feedback opportunities online. It is suggested that even those news rooms that seem to adhere to transparency and public …