LGBTQ and finance

Recent changes in workplace and corporate board diversity policies and a series of court rulings have signalled a fundamental change in the treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (henceforth LGBTQ) people in the corporate world. In this paper, we survey the burgeoning literature on the role of sexual orientation in finance. Studies show that there is a positive relationship between the adoption of LGBTQ-friendly policies and firm performance. We identify the factors that influence a firm's decision to adopt LGBTQ-friendly policies. We also provide evidence that sexual preferences play an important role in leadership styles in the household. Overall, our review suggests that LGBTQ research allows novel insights regarding how LGBTQ policies create value for the firm, insights that help us identify several directions for future research.     

Real options in finance

Although the academic literature on real options has grown enormously over the past three decades, the adoption of formal real option valuation models by practitioners appears to be lagging. Yet, survey evidence indicates that managers’ decisions are near optimal and consistent with real option theory. We critically review real options research and point out its strengths and weaknesses. We discuss recent contributions published in this issue of the journal and highlight avenues for future research. We conclude that, in some ways, academic research in real options has catching up to do with current practice.     

Regulating for corporate human rights abuses: The emergence of corporate reporting on the ILO's human rights standards within the global garment manufacturing and retail industry

Despite the ubiquitous nature of the discourse on human rights there is currently little research on the emergence of disclosure by multinational corporations on their human rights obligations or the regulatory dynamic that may lie behind this trend. In an attempt to begin to explore the extent to which, if any, the language of human rights has entered the discourse of corporate accountability, this paper investigates the adoption of the International Labour Organisation's (ILO) human rights standards by major multinational garment retail companies that source products from developing countries, as disclosed through their reporting media. The paper has three objectives. Firstly, to empirically explore the extent to which a group of multinational garment retailers invoke the language of human rights when disclosing their corporate responsibilities. The paper reviews corporate reporting media including social responsibility codes of conduct, annual reports and stand-alone social responsibility reports released by 18 major global clothing and retail companies during a period from 1990 to 2007. We find that the number of companies adopting and disclosing on the ILO's workplace human rights standards has significantly increased since 1998 – the year in which the ILO's standards were endorsed and accepted by the global community (ILO, 1998). Secondly, drawing on a combination of Responsive Regulation theory and neo-institutional theory, we tentatively seek to understand the regulatory space that may have influenced these large corporations to adopt the language of human rights obligations. In particular, we study the role that International Governmental Organisation's (IGO) such as ILO may have played in these disclosures. Finally, we provide some critical reflections on the power and potential within the corporate adoption of the language of human rights.     

Political governance in China’s state-owned enterprises

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are both the economic and political bases of the Chinese Communist Party (the Party) and the Chinese state. The overarching principle of SOE reform is to firmly implement the Party’s leadership and the modern enterprise system. This principle creates a political governance system in China’s SOEs—a Party-dominated governance system characterized by Party leadership, state ownership, Party cadre management, Party participation in corporate decision-making, and intra-Party supervision. This survey explains the logic of political governance in China’s SOEs, presents the evolution and current practices of each element of the system, and discusses findings from both academic research and the field.     

The implementation of a strategic state in a small country setting—the case of the ‘Scottish Approach’

ABSTRACT

This paper is a case study of the establishment of the Scottish Approach to Public Services. This strategic approach to public services was developed through three key activities: reorganization of the Scottish Government; creation of Scotland Performs and the National Performance Framework; and significant investment in leadership development. The research comprised of 11 élite interviews with both current and former civil servants within the Scottish Government. Interviews sought to develop an understanding of the nature and rationale for the Scottish Approach, to explore implementation of the Scottish Approach, and to posit what lasting impact may result from this form of ‘strategic state’ in Scotland. There is a major gap in the academic literature in terms of empirical studies of the strategic state and this paper addresses this gap by presenting the context and background to implementation of a strategic state in a small country setting.     

The paradox of greater NGO accountability: A case study of Amnesty Ireland

Despite mounting public, governmental and corporate interest in issues of non-governmental organisation (NGO) accountability, there are few academic studies investigating the emergence of accountability mechanisms in specific advocacy NGO settings. Drawing on the theoretical constructs of hierarchical and holistic accountability, this paper addresses this research gap by investigating recent developments in accountability practices at the Irish section of the human rights advocacy NGO Amnesty International. Through analysis of a series of in-depth interviews with managers in Amnesty Ireland, supported by extensive documentary scrutiny, this study examines reasons why Amnesty’s historical reliance on internal forms of accountability has been augmented with a range of ad hoc external accountability mechanisms. The study reveals that while managers favoured the development of holistic accountability mechanisms exhibiting accountability to a wide range of stakeholders, a hierarchical conception of accountability privileging a narrow range of (potentially) powerful stakeholders, has begun to dominate external accountability discourse and practice. It was widely perceived that this trend could, somewhat paradoxically, prove counterproductive to the achievement of Amnesty’s mission. Resolving this paradox will, at a minimum, involve Amnesty Ireland’s leadership becoming more open to and more knowledgeable about a broader, more holistic accountability conception. The paper considers the possible implications of these findings for the development of NGO holistic accountability practice more generally.     

Managerial discourse and the link between theory and practice: From ROI to value-based management

Building on Thrift's (2005) concept of the cultural circuit of capitalism using critical discourse analysis, the paper investigates the influence of management accounting concepts on practice. The paper proposes that the way that academic theories in management accounting affect practice depends on the origin of the early texts, the extent to which the texts become discourses and the relative institutional support for the discourse. The approach is illustrated by focusing on three particular management accounting concepts: return on investment (ROI), value-based management (VBM) and strategic management accounting (SMA) and empirically contextualised through the case history of GEC/Marconi. The paper explains that, whilst ROI and VBM have, to varying degrees, become part of managerial discourse, SMA has remained a loose collection of academic texts and has had a negligible impact on managerial discourse and practice.     

Producing Spaces for Academic Discourse: The Impact of Research Assessment Exercises and Journal Quality Rankings

This study examines the impact of national research assessment exercises (NRAEs) and associated journal quality rankings on the development, scope and sustainability of the academic journals in which accounting research is disseminated. The reported exploratory study focused on the United Kingdom (UK), Australia and New Zealand as three countries in which NRAEs are well developed or imminent. Data were collected via a survey of authors, interviews with journal editors, and feedback from publishers responsible for producing academic accounting journals.
The findings suggest that, despite cynicism around the reliability of published journal quality rankings, the entrenchment of NRAE 'rules' and journal quality perceptions has changed authors' submission choices and left lower ranked journals struggling with a diminished quantity and quality of submissions. A clear perception is that NRAEs have done little to improve the overall quality of the accounting literature, but are impeding the diversity, originality and practical relevance of accounting research.
Although strategies are suggested for meeting these challenges, they require strategic partnerships with publishers to enhance the profile and distribution of emerging journals, and depend on the willingness of accounting researchers to form supportive communities around journals that facilitate their research interests. The alternative may be a withering of the spaces for academic discourse, a stifling of innovation and a further entrenchment of current perceptions of what counts as 'quality' research.     

Comparing the content of regulatory impact assessments in the UK and the EU

The need for effective leadership in the UK public sector has been a prominent discourse in recent years. One aspect of this is a growing interest in talent management. This article examines the evolution of processes used for managing talent and developing leaders in the UK's National Health Service (NHS) by applying human resource management theory to an empirical case study. Our aim was to provide a constructive, but critical, analysis of the current role of managerial talent management and to comment on the suitability of the adopted approach in the NHS. Over the past three decades the NHS has come to adopt an increasingly ‘hard’ approach to talent management, i.e. rationalistic, managerial and narrowly focused on leadership competencies and senior management roles. This parallels a more general shift in the NHS from its traditional public sector ethos and humanistic values to more business-oriented values and ways of working.     

Financialization: Towards a new research agenda

Although the concept of ‘financialization’ has become increasingly popular across a wide range of social sciences, it is largely excluded from the discourse of financial economists. The objective of this paper is to provide the basis for its incorporation in academic finance. This first involves removing the existing meta-theoretical obstacles to the acceptation of the concept in the discipline. We then connect financialization with the concomitant development of cyberspace, the global deregulation of financial markets, and the rise of shareholder governance. We identify a corresponding set of changes in the financial and the real sectors, which we support with a series of stylized facts, and situate within current literature. Finally, we put forth a list of relevant research questions for the study of financialization in the context of academic finance.     

Targeting Social Assistance

This paper reviews the normative welfare economic literature on income‐based targeting and contrasts its assumptions with those underlying current policy discourse. One current policy debate concerns the potential role for Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) income tests. In general, economic models within the standard (for economists) ‘welfarist’ approach provide little support for such policies. However, much policy discourse is explicitly non‐welfarist, placing a negative social value on the leisure or home production of the poor. From this perspective, EITC or workfare‐type programmes may be socially optimal. The normative foundations of this policy discourse, however, have yet to be subject to the rigorous analysis that underlies the welfarist approach.     

Mobile banking and consumer behaviour: New insights into the diffusion pattern

Technological advancement has challenged the providers of financial services; the very nature of selling and buying financial services has changed. Mobile devices are among the newest channels to conduct banking electronically. This paper focuses on studying diffusion and adopters of mobile banking services. Previous research has identified the typical characteristics of a potential adopter in the electronic services era; this paper explores some contradictory empirical findings drawn from a mobile banking survey. The results provide an indication of the characteristics of potential subsequent adopters of mobile banking, and of differences between user segments. Consequently, the authors are able to comment on the influence of certain demographic characteristics and the preferred communication mode of customers on the adoption and future usage of mobile banking services. The quantitative survey that sheds more light on this researched issue employed a traditional method of postal questionnaire. The data were collected in Finland during May–July 2002 and include 1,253 survey responses.     

Antecedents of Budget Participation: Leadership Style,Information Asymmetry,and Evaluative Use of Budget

This study explores the causes or antecedents of budget participation to understand more fully the role of participation in the workplace. The study focuses on the reasons why superiors encourage the budget participation of their subordinates and draws upon several theoretical perspectives including leadership theory, agency theory and organizational justice. To examine the issues, a survey was administered to managers and supervisors in several companies. Results of path analysis suggest that superiors encourage subordinate participation when the superior's leadership style is considerate. This implies that budget participation may mediate the relation between leadership style and work outcomes. Results also suggest that superiors encourage participation when budget goals are used in the performance evaluation of subordinates, in which case, the study argues, the superiors encourage participation because of concerns about organizational justice. This finding implies that budget participation may mediate the relation between the evaluative use of budget and those work outcomes that prior research has linked to organizational justice. The proposed relation between information asymmetry and budget participation is not supported.     

The Status Of Women Academic Accountants in Australia

This paper reports the findings of a survey of the attributes, career satisfactions and aspirations of Australian Academic Women Accountants (AAWA). The survey sought information about personal characteristics, institutional role expectations and perceptions of gender-related issues involving recruitment, promotion and retention of AAWAs. The data provide not only an interesting insight into respondents' perceptions of a career in academic accounting, but also a comparative measure against which future progress of AAWAs can be evaluated. The paper makes suggestions for facilitating the career paths of AAWAs at both institutional and individual levels.     

An historical perspective on governmental accounting education

This paper presents a senior governmental accounting educator’s perspectives on how governmental accounting education has changed over the past 35 years and what we can expect for the future. Having begun my academic career during the 1970s, a period of turmoil and debate about the deficient state of governmental accounting, I look at how events of this period influenced my personal decision to specialize in governmental accounting education and how those events led to a path of dramatic improvement in governmental accounting standards, practice, and education. Key trends in governmental accounting education are discussed along with major changes in practice guidance over the years that have challenged textbook authors and faculty in staying abreast of change. The paper identifies many governmental accounting educators who have made significant contributions to governmental accounting and auditing policy and encourages current educators to seek ways to participate in the policy-making process. Finally, the paper discusses the future outlook for governmental accounting education and concludes that governmental accounting educators are well positioned to contribute to achieving the recently released recommendations of the Pathways Commission (2012).     

Exploring professional identity: The perceptions of chartered accountant students

The aim of this paper is to explore the developing professional identity of the Chartered Accountant Student. It explores professional training through analysing the narratives of students. This qualitative study shows how students begin to develop their sense of professional identity through membership of communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) within the training organisations, rather than through the professional body. This novel approach to further understanding the professional development of the accounting trainee adds to current academic knowledge as the role of communities of practice, in this context, has not been previously explored. The views and perceptions of Chartered Accountant Students are also relevant to accounting professional bodies, training organisations and to those considering embarking on accounting training. In understanding this process those involved in training can facilitate and, therefore, potentially influence the process because understanding how trainees learn to be professional is central to how they will learn to contribute to professional life and to their future in society.     

Getting the truth into workplace surveys

There's no doubt that companies can benefit from workplace surveys and questionnaires. Good surveys accurately home in on the problems the company wants information about. They are designed so that as many people as possible actually respond. And good survey design ensures that the spectrum of responses is unbiased. In this article, the author, a former research scientist at the University of Michigan and currently the president of a survey design firm, explores some glaring failures of survey design and provides 16 guidelines to improve workplace assessment tools. Applied judiciously, these rules will not only make a tangible difference in the quality and usefulness of the data obtained but will also produce an increased response rate. The guidelines--and the problems they address--fall into five areas: content, format, language, measurement, and administration. Here are a few examples: Survey questions should require people to assess observable behavior rather than make inferences; each section should contain a similar number of items and each item should have a similar number of words; words with strong associations to gender, race, or ethnicity should be avoided; the wording in one-third of the questions should be changed so that the desirable answer is a negative one; and response scales should provide a "don't know" or "not applicable" option. Following the guidelines in this article will help you get unbiased, representative, and useful information from your workplace survey.     

The workplace politics of U.S. accounting: Race,class and gender discrimination at Baruch College

There are significant differences between the U.S. and European academic workplaces (and therefore the way struggles against class and race discrimination are waged) however there are also important commonalities and convergences. This shared experience may be accentuated in the U.K. as a post-research assessment exercise (RAE) era approaches. This paper offers an account of U.S. workplace politics at a macro and micro level. We introduce our paper through a macro approach providing context for our analysis via a brief overview of a progressive research journal assessment exercise, designed to assist critical accounting faculty in promotion, tenure, hiring, and firing struggles. We then report our findings from our survey of progressive academics’ views on journal assessment and the implications of for higher education staff and students and potential students alike. Through our micro focus we present an in-house expose of the anatomy of discriminatory practices at the largest accountancy department, and the largest business, in the U.S.: Baruch College at the City University of New York (CUNY). There are specificities that are unique to the U.S. (and even between Baruch and other U.S. schools) however these differences should not be overstated. Nor should we minimize the possibility of distilling some broad lessons: the systematic subordination of education and research to capital accumulation processes and market pressures that evoke similarities that span academic workplaces across the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Australasia.     

From change to progress: critical spirituality and the futures of futures studies

This paper argues that for futures studies (FS) to have a future that is relevant to current shifts in meaning and consciousness, then it must incorporate into its methods and practices a sense of mystery founded on a critically spiritual sensibility. Critical spirituality redefines rationality and empiricism by including within their framework both the somatic and the meditative as valid and necessary components of any research activity. In the short term this means a shift away from the current Western obsession with change and a stepping back to allow for critical distance in order to understand that it is in the appreciation of progress — a fundamental shift in consciousness to include the spiritual dimensions of human experience — that discourse will emerge to take FS to the heart of civilisational renewal. In allowing for mystery, silence and the meditative empiricism required to access these categories, critical spirituality lessens the gap between thought and action and thus enables truly transformative academic practice to emerge.The idea of progress has been central to the unfolding of the modernist project over the previous century. Yet as the century drew to a close it became increasingly hard to keep faith with the idea in the face of growing disillusionment and the obvious failure of modernism to deliver what people most wanted: happiness born of personal fulfillment. A growing range of voices in the critical futures field have been questioning the assumption that change in material terms equates with progress.These voices fall into four main areas.

• Post modernist and post structuralist thinkers;

• Feminists empowering postmodern discourse with value laden analyses of power;

• Post colonial thinkers with a debt to neo-Marxist and critical theorists;

• Neo-humanist thinkers with an investment in all three of the above, who work from a critically spiritual perspective.

In this paper I am going to argue that a Neo-humanist vision of the futures of Futures Studies is one which will fully engage the human potential by activating a critically spiritual methodology. This is important as many of the tools of futures work are actually intended for use in anticipating and managing change (uncritically) but have little relevance when considering the nature of progress. Those methods and techniques which engage with the less analytic more visionary process of futures are much more relevant to progress because they actively involve the individuals in the act of ‘futures building’ as opposed to ‘futures scanning’.‘Progress’ here is used to mean fundamental change in the consciousness of both the individual and collective mind. It is essentially spiritual and has no clear temporal or spacial restrictions being timeless, or as Joanna Macy would have it, anchored in “deep time” [1]. Change, on the other hand, is very much associated with technical and material movement, having no connection with the inner fabric of the human psyche. There is no appreciation of spirit here, though great attention is paid to gross national product and the latest technical innovation to hit the market.Futures Studies has the potential to be responsive to future human dilemmas. But to be so it will need to make the effort to embrace tools and concepts that lie beyond the narrow pall of academic rationality as it is currently constituted. A greater space is already emerging within the field that not only tolerates but promotes imaginative and creative processes that break down the intellectual prudery of those who are attached to their own discipline and have little capacity to envision beyond narrow and self imposed confines. Thus we find music and song, poetry and story, art and theatre effective vehicles for work on deeper forms of consciousness. Visioning and imaging workshops such as those run by Joanna Macy, Elise Boulding, John Seed and Warren Ziegler (to name but a few) are growing in power and sophistication. Meditation and other reflective practices — the spiritual quest — seeking to plumb the depth of the human soul become relevant when seen within a broadened definition of rationality and research.Clearly futurists need to be able to assess and describe likely changes in the short, medium and long term but their central goal should be to facilitate areas of human endeavor which can benefit from a closer linkage between action, the consciousness that informs and directs the action and the spirit that underwrites the consciousness. Equally clear is the fact that not all futures trends are as relevant to this deeper layer of operation within Futures Studies.     

Imagineering city futures: The use of prospective through scenarios in urban planning

This article, based on empirical work by the authors over the past decade, argues that city planners and policy-makers lack an effective future-oriented approach enabling them to comprehend current complexity, anticipate impending change and shape a preferred future condition.Reflecting on more than a dozen recent city futures exercises, three overriding themes emerge: changing values systems will be the single biggest driver over the next thirty years; the forging of shared visions is a prerequisite to strategic city planning; and the nature, force and direction of the various vectors of collaborative leadership by constituent stakeholders will determine the future success or otherwise of city stewardship.The article concludes by calling for the formulation of a Unified Theory for Sustainable Cities by reference to Gaia and the application of a futures oriented approach such as Prospective Through Scenarios.