... question: RQ1. What is the essence of the terms accountability and responsibility that can define their meaning across all fields of study and without restriction to an organisational ambit? Our approach and method for addressing this question is explained in the following sections...

... and activity. This avoids all extensions of meaning introduced by defining particular types of stakeholders and/ or their degrees of impact. It also resolves the multiplicity of conflicting meanings possible when silent or assumed qualifiers of a word are ignored, restricting definition to, for example...

.... Design/methodology/approach – Review literature on definitional confusion in general and on governance in particular and develop a method for defining an internally consistent group of terms, then apply this to a group of terms in the governance arena. Findings – Several important subjects...