Poland's development dilemmas on the verge of the 21st century

This article briefly summarizes a prognostic Report, ‘Towards modern Poland—development dilemmas on the verge of the 21st century’ of the Poland 2000 Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences. It further comments on the changes of perspective that have occurred since the Report was written. The study consisted of the development and analysis of three scenarios of socioeconomic development based on societal aspirations. Key drivers influencing these scenarios and their likelihood are discussed here.     

Exploring (false) dualisms for environmental accounting praxis

This paper focuses on the political nature of the linguistic dualisms or ‘false antinomies’ that inhere in environmental accounting practice and environmental accounting research. These dualisms, ‘subject–object,’ ‘man–woman,’ ‘mind–body,’ and ‘culture–nature,’ the paper argues, need to be ‘ambiguized’ if the politics inherent in these dualisms are to be resisted. Two strategies for the ‘ambiguization’ of these dualisms are suggested: ‘performative parody,’ which is a strategy intended for environmental accounting practitioners, and ‘democratic reflexivity,’ which is a strategy intended for environmental accounting researchers. In taking this linguistic focus, the paper challenges common sense constructions of the environment and the potentially elitist and anti-democratic nature of environmental accounting research. By offering these two strategies, the paper provides a means of environmental accounting praxis, or means of resisting global ‘environmental’ domination.     

Beyond the mundane: reconciling breadth and depth in futures enquiry

For some time there has been a need within Futures Studies (FS) to develop methods which go beyond the dominant empirical tradition. For many years there has been a near-exclusive emphasis on understanding the external world ‘out there’. But as time has gone by, so it has become clear that our ability to understand the world ‘out there’ crucially depends on an underlying world of reference that is ‘in here’. Understanding the near-future environment calls for a combination of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ views which, for example, give as much credence to judgment as to calculation. This paper considers a way of considering these very different ‘ways of knowing’. Overall, the aim is to go beyond what might be termed ‘mundane’ analysis, i.e. that which is preoccupied with surfaces, and to open out a broader arena for futures enquiry.     

Towards sustainable households: a methodology for developing sustainable technological and social innovations

A high factor environmental efficiency improvement, towards a Factor 20 by 2050 AD — needed due to the assumed doubling of the world population combined with a fivefold increase of wealth per capita and a halving of the total global environmental burden — cannot be achieved through good housekeeping and technological innovation alone; any technological solutions will have to be combined with social innovations, in lifestyles and cultures. This paper describes the conclusions of the SusHouse (Strategies towards the Sustainable Household) Project that has been exploring possible socially and technologically innovative strategies for sustainable households. The Project has covered three household ‘functions’: Clothing Care, Shelter (Heating, Cooling and Lighting) and Food (Shopping, Cooking and Eating). These have been studied in five European countries (Germany, Hungary, Italy, The Netherlands and the UK). The methodology of the Project has involved stakeholder workshops, the construction of Design-Orienting Scenarios, environmental, economic and consumer assessment of the Scenarios and strategy formulation. The paper describes: (1) the methodology for devising design-orienting scenarios, with examples from the three functions; (2) the results of environmental, economic and consumer acceptability assessments of these scenarios; and (3) comments on how the methodology can be developed and applied.     

Large-scale participatory co-shaping of technological developments: First experiments with PARDIZIPP

A future-oriented participatory procedure on the basis of the Delphi method was developed and empirically tested a first time with the goal to improve the shaping of technological developments. The technology under study here was micro-electronics or rather their relationship with labor and the test took place in NorthRhine-Westphalia.Today problems exist in all walks of life. There is a lot of talk about today's problems as if they were new, though one has heard similar arguments throughout history. How do we assess if we are really in danger of bringing the world to an end? Although this danger appears real, it would not be the first time in history that people have thought and felt like this--However, one thing that is new are the consequences of modern sciences and technology, which are not suited to given social and environmental requirements. They have given rise to questions concerning the quality of the decision-makers. The questioning of many of these decisions has increased for some time and is now getting more and more specific, with a demand for quality and information rather than managerial skills and competitiveness from the decision-makers. The term ‘decision-maker’ describes those who determine the application of technology, science and technical equipment which has either existed for a long time already or has recently been developed.--It is not easy to change the structures and processes of decision-making so that new structures and processes will be more suited to social and environmental requirements. We have tested our ideas as to how this could be done, in an empirical project. Although we called it ‘Project NRW-2000’, it would probably be better described as an experiment.--We persuaded 90 ordinary people to participate in this project as ‘experts on daily life and work’. This group was asked to work in six regional sub-groups and discuss, with reference to three given normative societal scenarios for the year 2020, the relationship between microelectronics and labour markets of the year 2020, on the basis of a participatory Delphi procedure. Before we elaborate on the concept of our project in Section 3, we would like to outline it in terms of the mainstream of the sociology of technology as well as with research on ‘acceptance’ in Section 1. In Section 2 we will briefly illustrate the framework of the research programme ‘Socially Oriented Shaping of Technology’ of the state of Northrhine-Westphalia, which funded our research project. Section 4 particularly deals with the participatory elements of our project, while Section 5 is devoted to the development of the scenarios. Section 6 sums up the results of the ‘scenario-construction’. Regarding specific elements, we restrict ourselves to topics concerning technology, labour, and the relationship between women workers/employees and technology. As a final outlook we deal with the political implications of our approach. All that is left is to remind our readers that we regard this project as a first application or experiment within our overall approach.     

Monetary policy, ‘dollarization,’ and parallel market exchange rates: The case of the Dominican Republic

Excessive money creation may give rise to inflation tax revenues and to a depreciation of the domestic currency. this in turn leads to a shift away from the domestic currency into a foreign currency (e.g., the US dollar, hence the term ‘dollarization’). From the domestic monetary authority's point of view, ‘dollarization’ is an unwelcomed phenomenomn, thus the monetary authorities will attempt to arrest the ‘dollarization’ phenomenon while maintaining the excessive money growth. This paper develops and tests a model which analyzes the effects of monetary policy on dollarization and the ‘parallel’ market exchange rates.     

Bridging the divides of online reporting

This paper looks at the possibilities of improving online reporting by closing the ‘digital divide’ through a ‘digitalised revolution’ and by narrowing the ‘accounting divide’ through the sharing of power and the expansion of membership in the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). Paradoxically, whilst the IASB may have contributed to the ‘accounting divide’ it may very well possess the potential to close it and thus improve online reporting. The potential to bridge the ‘accounting divide’ rests with the greater participation by developing country members to exert influence and ownership of the accounting standards setting process.     

Transferring knowledge across sub-genres of the ABC implementation literature

In the last decade, a continuous stream of empirical articles has investigated how various implementation process factors (including, top management support, adequate resources, and ABC training) influence ABC implementation success. However, at the same time, a growing number of researchers have criticised this ‘mainstream approach’ for, among other things, neglecting issues of power and politics and for viewing ABC implementations as something inherently positive. Based on Lukka and Granlund's [Lukka, K., Granlund, M., 2002. The fragmented communication structure within the accounting academia: the case of activity-based costing research genres. Acc. Organ. Soc. 27, 165–190] call for communication between various streams of ABC research, the purpose of this paper is to discuss how the ‘mainstream’ implementation literature may benefit from insights made in the politically oriented literature. A key conclusion is that such an analysis not only provides us with enriched explanations of the relatively strong and coherent findings in the ‘mainstream’ ABC implementation literature, but has also the potential to explain ‘unexpected’ and ‘contradictory’ results found in this stream of research. Based on these observations, a number of directions for future research are proposed.     

World on fire: two scenarios of the destruction of human civilization and possible extinction of the human race

This paper examines the foundation for two scenarios of the future depicting how human civilization might destroy itself and possibly bring about the extinction of the human race in the process. The scenarios are based upon the two human-generated “fires” deeply ingrained within industrial civilization: (1) the nuclear “fire” of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and their automated “launch on warning” alert systems and (2) the slow burning “fire” of global warming and runaway climate change. This paper also examines obstacles that are currently preventing the necessary first steps towards solving these problems.     

Social accounting research: An Australasian perspective

This paper provides an insight into the nature and the extent of social accounting research being undertaken within Australasia. It demonstrates that Australasian researchers account for a significant amount of internationally published social accounting research, but emphasises that the research effort seems to be confined to a limited number of researchers perhaps reflecting a lack of ‘take-up’ in this area in terms of the scale of participation. Information is also presented about the relative propensity of journals within the sample to publish social accounting research, and identifies that ‘top tier’ accounting journals historically have not published social accounting research. The paper also considers various factors which seem to be impeding the ‘recruitment’ of new social accounting researchers.     

Enterprise resource planning systems, management control and the quest for integration

This paper analyses how two companies pursued integration of management and control through enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. We illustrate how the quest for integration is an unending process and it is produced concurrently and episodically. Integration is not only about ‘mere’ visibility and control at a distance. ERP systems do not define what integration is and how it is to be developed, but they incur a techno-logic that conditions how control can be performed through financial and non-financial representations because they distinguish between an accounting mode and a logistics mode. A primary lesson from our cases is that control cannot be studied apart from technology and context because one will never get to understand the underlying ‘infrastructure’—the meeting point of many technologies and many types of controls. ERP systems are particularly interesting for what they make impossible, and our cases illustrate how the two organizations in the quest for integration mobilized a number of ‘boundary objects’ to overcome systems-based ‘blind spots’ and ‘trading zones’. The paper points out that management control in an ERP-environment is not a property of the accounting function but a collective affair were local control issues in different parts of the organization are used to create notions of global management.     

A co-evolutionary model of change in environmental management

Environmental problems, and human attempts to manage them, can be conceptualised as evolutionary complex systems, involving interlinked processes of physical, knowledge, technological, institutional, perceptual and behavioural change. A distinction may be made between changes in physical systems (‘physical emergence'), changes in human knowledge about those systems (‘knowledge emergence') and changes in human perceptions (‘perceptual emergence'). While processes of physical and knowledge emergence are important, it is through perceptual emergence that a phenomenon comes to be regarded as a ‘problem' or ‘issue', potentially leading to changes in policy, institutional arrangements or behaviour. The paper proposes a soft complex systems model of the relationships between these processes, illustrated with examples from the history of air quality management in the UK. The model also has wider application in the understanding of other complex issues of environmental management.     

The end in sight?: Some speculations on environmental trends in the twenty-first century

For a generation there has been unresolved debate between anxious environmentalists and sanguine ‘contrarians’, both of which have been able to amass strong evidence in favour of their positions. This is an important paradox, and the paper attempts to resolve it by means of an elementary but robust model of environmental trends between 1950 and 2100. A crucial feature of the approach is to disaggregate the developed ‘North’ and developing ‘South’, revealing strikingly different patterns. The North's environmental impact will decline steadily, but in the South a rapid increase in environmental impact can be expected in the first half of the 21st century, followed by an equally rapid decline. This dramatic environmental ‘spike’ will be unique in human history and mark a fundament transition to the sustainable state. Its qualities and duration will determine many features of the human and natural world for millennia to come. Many policy implications flow from this analysis. Controversially, it suggests that the ‘spike’ should be embraced and managed rather than avoided or delayed.     

Smaller business governance: Exploring accountability and enterprise from the margins

Smaller businesses now rank higher upon the corporate governance agenda. This agenda places their accountability and ‘enterprise’ particularly at issue. It is only put at issue because of just one possible problematization however. That problematization firstly assumes judicious accountability to be the crux of good governance with accounting at its hub. It secondly assumes that smaller businesses are the very seedbed of any ‘enterprise economy’, virtually irrespective of what form they take, or ‘enterprise’ they display. By then combining these assumptions together, this finally reproblematizes any relationship between accountability and ‘enterprise’, so that ‘de-regulation’ and decoupled accountability liberates smaller business ‘enterprise’ further. Others might question and challenge the very basis, as well as particular formulation, of this problematization however. A better grasp of the greater fluidity and complexity of smaller businesses would make the boundaries of their accountability and ‘enterprise’ more clear and leave their respective margins more suitably exposed. As a key potential instrument for that purpose managerial accounting research might then better inform the debate by specifically rendering these boundaries more visible while also identifying the precise scope for manoeuvre at/across their margins as well. To that end this paper uses certain enabling frameworks to construct and interpret the particular case of managerially accounting for a grown smaller business working across exactly those margins from the perspective of a ‘reflective practitioner’ acting as a field researcher for these purposes. As well as offering fresh insights into how far the boundaries of accountability and enterprise might legitimately stretch, this case calls for more critical thinking about how they might change.     

Darwinian dystopia: the shape of things to come

Acknowledging that evolution is directionless, shaped only by context and history, and that predicting the future is, therefore, a risky business, scenarios for ‘short-term’ (next few centuries) and ‘long-term’ (10s-100s of thousands of years) futures are offered. The short-term future will be determined by the appearance of transnational corporations that represent levels of social complexity above that of the nation state. Best described as laissez-faire capitalism run amok, the rise of transnationals controlled by powerful managerial elites is warranted or justified by the simultaneous emergence of neo-conservative ideologies that resemble the pernicious social Darwinism of Victorian England. The long-term future will be shaped by the failure of humans to control their fertility. In the face of cultural barriers to rational control of population growth, and as global populations exceed the carrying capacity of the planet, countless millions of ignorant, miserable humans will barely eke out an existence, surviving only long enough to reproduce more of the same. The prospects for speciation are nil, given that high global population densities will preclude reproductive isolation.     

Revisiting the ‘Court of Generations’ Amendment : A conversation

In 1991, futurist Bruce E. Tonn proposed a ‘Court of Generations’ Amendment to the US Constitution. His proposed ‘Court of Generations’ lacked punitive powers but, hopefully, would have sufficient legitimacy to counteract extreme present-minded thinking evident in US political processes and institutions. Although Tonn's ‘Court of Generations’ Amendment has been well received in the futures community, who else has heard of it? Otherwise, has it made any difference? How can the cumbersome and nonfuturistic amendment procedure in the US Constitution generate a futures-oriented ‘Court of Generations’? And for those who sincerely look forward to a ‘Court of Generations,’ precisely what kind of tactically savvy visionary leadership will give the ‘Court of Generations’ any chance of being approved? During 1997, Vincent Kelly Pollard engaged Dr. Tonn in an Internet conversation aimed at clarifying these issues.     

Education and the economy: rethinking the question of learning for the ‘knowledge’ era

This paper argues that advanced industrial societies are (i) addressing ‘intended and unintended consequences’ of economic and technological development, and (ii) responding to dilemmas that cannot be solved by existing schema and routines. Paradoxically, the current education–economy/lifelong learning debate rests on traditional interpretation of the concept of learning (i.e. acquisition of pre-existing knowledge and skill). The paper argues that a sociological and educational theory of learning is needed to assist people and communities to use ideas originating from one context to resolve the dilemmas experienced in another. It introduces the concept of ‘reflexive learning’ to illustrate how to reformulate public education policies to address these issues.     

Information and the transnational SME controller

One of the issues that face the small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) when expanding is the ‘control’ issue and this paper investigates and presents preliminary evidence of ‘controlling’ or ‘management accounting’ practice in a transnational SME. Wibsey, the site of the case, is now a small group of companies that have expanded from a U.K. base into 10 European countries. This expansion has posed complex problems, which have increased the information requirements of the SME. The contextual issues of complexity and resulting challenges for the transnational organization in its management accounting, information and control systems are considered. Wibsey uses traditional management accounting as the basis of supporting decision-making in the group and a lower level of information need is reported, in contrast to Dent (1996) (Dent, J. F., 1996. Global competition: challenges for management accounting and control,Management Accounting Research , 7(2), 247–269), because the group chooses to maintain a traditional ‘accounting-led’ evaluation system in controlling and evaluating its transnational operations.     

The environment in an ‘information society’: A transition stage towards more sustainable development?

Social scientists and futurists have suggested that societal development is advancing to a novel stage, to an ‘information society’. However, the crucial qualifiers of this ‘new’ society are ambiguous. Furthermore, environmental goals have created new challenges for information society studies. This paper examines the interaction and dynamics between the information society and sustainable development, which most often manifest themselves as competing scientific and socio-political discourses. On the one hand, there is the potential for reducing the stress on the environment: the emergence of information technologies and services can lead to a dematerialisation of production and immaterialisation of consumption. On the other hand, there are risks: positive environmental effects might be overcome by the ‘rebound effect’ caused by excessive economic growth. It is concluded that further theoretical and empirical studies are needed in order to examine the complex and contradictory relationship between the information society and environmental issues.     

Efficiency in the gold market — a note

This paper investigates the efficiency of the gold market with respect to the information contained in sequences of successive price changes. Tests for serial correlation and modelling the changes as first-order Markov processes indicate some short-term dependence. While there is no reason to believe outsiders can profit from knowledge of these relationships, insiders might, though this is not certain. In addition, the application of a market model to monthly returns for the period 1974–1977 results in the finding that gold's ‘alpha’ and ‘beta’ were positive, but not significantly different from zero.