Pitching research: ‘qualitative cousins’ and the ‘extended family’

This study has two related goals – one very specific and one more general. The specific goal is to constructively engage with Lodhia (2017) on the issue of whether and to what extent ‘qualitative cousins’ are well served by Faff's (2015) original pitching research (PR) template. Using this ‘cousins’ focus as a primer, the more general goal is to update the agenda created by Faff (2015) and in so doing, explore the ‘extended family’ of PR work/resources now available.     

Social compliance audits and multinational corporation supply chain: evidence from a study of the rituals of social audits

This study investigates the use of social compliance audits in the supply chain of multinational corporations (MNCs). Particularly, we explore the use of such audits in assessing and managing the working conditions of factory workers in the garment industry in a developing nation. Through a range of interviews with MNCs’ internal auditors, with commissioned external auditors and with representatives of the suppliers in Bangladesh, this study finds that social compliance audits become ritual strategies and are not a primary means of advancing workers’ rights. Drawing on the concept of surrogate accountability, the study suggests that to create real change in workers’ conditions and in order to hold MNCs and their suppliers accountable, some form of surrogate (government, non-governmental organisations or media) intervention is necessary. This is, we argue, preferable to leaving it in the hands of ‘markets’ and simply waiting for another major incident such as Rana Plaza to stir public concern. This study contributes to the literature by investigating how social compliance audits are undertaken by MNCs sourcing products from a developing nation, what motivations drive the adoption of such audits, and what, if anything, are the likely outcomes from the process.     

Teaching Innovative Accounting Topics: Student Reaction to a Course in Social Accounting

Accounting students experience degree programmes with a fairly ‘traditional’ range of topics that are taught with an emphasis on technique and learning the ‘status quo’. To the extent that a topic may challenge this pattern by emphasizing new concepts, questioning existing concepts, being more concerned with what accounting ‘might be’ rather than current practice, or some combination of these, some topics may be considered ‘innovative’ additions to the curriculum. Social accounting is an innovative accounting topic that has attracted considerable attention in the literature. This paper reports on an implementation dilemma encountered in a course on social accounting resulting from a clash between preferred student learning attributes and those embodied in social accounting. The use of action oriented teaching strategies to counteract this dilemma is identified. Similar problems and solutions may be applicable for other innovative accounting topics.     

Political competitiveness and the private–public structure of public expenditure: a model and empirics for the Indian States

Studies of government size usually try to identify the factors that explain what parts of economic activity are brought within the public sector and what parts are left strictly in private hands. Modern governments are now so large that the question of what determines the private/public composition, or privateness, of public expenditure is of comparable importance for understanding the role of government in society. In this paper, we use a model of the composition of public budgets to uncover the importance of electoral competitiveness and other factors in the evolution of the privateness of public expenditure across the Indian states. These states vary widely in their socioeconomic characteristics while sharing a common political heritage based on parliamentary government. New measures of public expenditure on private targetable goods and of electoral competitiveness at the Indian state level accompany the paper along with a primer on Indian public finance accounting practices in an Online Appendix. The empirical analysis shows that the degree of privateness in India’s more developed states falls substantially with greater political competition and with rising incomes, while in the less developed states it responds more weakly to these key factors and in some cases even inversely.

     

The social amplification of risk on Twitter: the case of ash dieback disease in the United Kingdom

It has long been recognised that the traditional media play a key role in representing risk and are a significant source of information which can shape how people perceive and respond to hazard events. Early work utilising the social amplification of risk framework (SARF) sought to understand the discrepancy between expert and lay perceptions of risk and patterns of risk intensification and attenuation with reference to the media. However, the advent of Web 2.0 challenges traditional models of communication. To date there has been limited consideration of social media within the SARF and its role in mediating processes of risk perception and communication. Against this backdrop, we focus on the social media platform Twitter to consider the social amplification of risk in relation to ash dieback disease (Hymenoscyphus fraxineus); a tree health issue that attracted intense media attention when it was first identified in the UK in 2012. We present an empirical analysis of 25,600 tweets in order to explore what people were saying about ash dieback on Twitter, who was talking about it and how they talked about it. Our discussion outlines the themes around which talk about ash dieback was orientated, the significance of users’ environmental ‘affiliations’ and the role of including links (URLs) to traditional media coverage. We utilise the notion of ‘piggybacking’ to demonstrate how information is customised in line with group/individual identities and interests and introduce the concept of the ‘frame fragment’ to illustrate how information is selected and moved around Twitter emphasising certain features of the messages. The paper affords a detailed consideration of the way in which people and organisations simultaneously appropriate, construct and pass on risk-relevant information. A conclusion is that social media has the potential to transform the media landscape within which the SARF was originally conceived, presenting renewed challenges for risk communication.     

Fair value accounting and the present value fallacy: The need for an alternative conceptual framework

The major functions of company accounting identified by the IASB and the FASB are (1) reporting on ‘the custody and safekeeping’ of the company's resources and (2) reporting on ‘their efficient and profitable use’. The joint IASB/FASB project for improving the conceptual framework for financial reporting is directed towards better performance of both functions within the conventional ‘accrual’ system of accounting through the use of ‘fair value’. Although the disclosure of fair values is a development to be welcomed, the requirement that changes in fair value should be reported as ‘gains’ or ‘losses’ appears to rely on the ‘Hicksian’ concept of income as a theoretical ideal.The object of the present paper is to establish that this concept is fundamentally flawed by what may be called the ‘present value fallacy’. Even in an economic utopia of perfectly competitive markets (with no discrepancies between objective market values and subjective present values), the concept of income or profit as value growth can be seriously misleading.If the prevailing Hicksian conceptual framework is discarded in favour of an alternative based on Fisher's theory of income, the two major, but incompatible, functions of financial reporting can be carried out independently and without compromise. The conventional ‘hybrid’ system of accrual accounting, in which backward-looking measures of volume and forward-looking measures of value are mixed together, would be replaced by a ‘segregated’ system in which they are kept strictly apart. A logical extension of Fisher's theory suggests the disclosure by agent/managers of the return on investment that they are planning to deliver to their principal/owners. This type of ‘decision-useful information’ is vital for the efficient operation of capital markets and for removing the accounting incentive to short-termism.     

Survey Under‐Coverage of Top Incomes and Estimation of Inequality: What is the Role of the UK's SPI Adjustment?

Survey under‐coverage of top incomes leads to bias in survey‐based estimates of overall income inequality. Using income tax record data in combination with survey data is a potential approach to address the problem; we consider here the UK's pioneering ‘SPI adjustment’ method that implements this idea. Since 1992, the principal income distribution series (reported annually in Households Below Average Income) has been based on household survey data in which the incomes of a small number of ‘very rich’ individuals are adjusted using information from ‘very rich’ individuals in personal income tax return data. We explain what the procedure involves, reveal the extent to which it addresses survey under‐coverage of top incomes and show how it affects estimates of overall income inequality. More generally, we assess whether the SPI adjustment is fit for purpose and consider whether variants of it could be employed by other countries.     

‘Above the fray’: Interests,discourse and legitimacy in the audit field

Legitimacy is a crucial concern for the institutional field of auditing, given its reliance on perceived legitimacy for its political mandate and license to practice, in addition to its wider credibility and trust amongst stakeholders such as clients, investors and the public. In this paper, we explore the role of interest-discourse in the discursive strategies of legitimization in the audit field. We develop an Ethnomethodologically informed Discourse Analysis (EDA) perspective that enables us to theorise how institutional actors account for interests as a means for de-legitimization and re-legitimization. We ask: how do institutional actors in the audit field establish who or what is ‘above the fray’ and who or what is ‘interested’? We illustrate our argument by examining how the ‘Big Four’ audit firms handled a ‘crisis of legitimacy’ in the accountancy profession following the recent financial crisis, focussing in particular on a Parliamentary inquiry into market concentration in the audit industry in the UK. First, we show how de-legitimization is achieved through the discursive strategies of stake attribution, stake interrogation and stake mis-alignment. Second, we show how re-legitimization is achieved through the discursive strategies of stake inoculation, stake confession, stake alignment and stake transcendence. We conclude by examining the implications of the discursive processes we have studied for the future of the audit field in the UK.     

What is a fair amount of executive compensation? Outrage potential of two key stakeholder groups

The public discussion of executive compensation often centres on ‘fair’ and ‘unfair’ amounts and the public outrage over compensation that is deemed too high. The academic literature states that such outrage can lead to outrage costs, pressuring firms to adjust compensation levels. However, it is unclear what a ‘fair’ compensation is for various stakeholders and how their fairness concerns relate to outrage constraints. Based on surveys among two key stakeholder groups (representative eligible voters and investment professionals), we provide evidence that fairness is an important criterion for both groups but that opinions on how large a fair compensation amount should be are widely dispersed. Moreover, personality traits systematically influence fairness opinions through self‐serving interpretations of distributive justice and personal risk attitudes, indicating that a ‘fair’ amount of executive compensation may strongly depend on the involved stakeholders. Investigating thresholds for outrage, i.e., amounts above which compensation is judged ‘unfairly’ high, we show that even though investment professionals care for fairness as well, ‘capital market outrage’ might not equate to ‘public outrage’. Our paper contributes to the literature on outrage constraints by linking individual fairness concerns to outrage potential and has implications for transparency of executive compensation and research on shareholder activism.     

Foresight education in Australia—Time for a hybrid model?

This paper revisits the original design parameters of what was a ‘new’ Masters in Strategic Foresight that commenced at Swinburne University in 2001. It explores which of the original purposes and assumptions have stood the test of time over the course of a decade and analyses how the course has evolved, partly through design and partly through necessity. The paper reflects on the primary contribution of the Masters teaching experience and proposes that encouraging the students to develop philosophical ‘literacy’ operated to develop both the practicality of their use of methods and the capacity of their leadership and critical thinking. A secondary contribution reiterates the importance of ‘place’ and the necessity of ‘sufficient time’ for adult development to occur.     

What role for social scientists in risk expertise?

When it comes to risks – health and environmental risks, like those linked to the use of nanotechnologies, pesticides, etc. – three main groups of actors are easily identified, brought together through boundary organisations such as environmental and sanitary risk agencies: the natural and technical scientists, who provide their expertise to assess risks (especially toxicologists, epidemiologists and microbiologists); the policy makers, who take decisions regarding risk management and risk regulation; the lay public, who are more and more involved in participatory frameworks. Sometimes three other groups of actors are added: the ‘economists’ who can for instance conduct cost–benefit assessments or multi-criteria analyses (especially ecological economists, public economists, political economists and social economists); the ‘philosophers’/‘ethicists’ who can use ethics to highlight moral choices and responsibilities in face of risks; and the ‘jurists’/‘legal experts’ who can justify authorisation or interdiction according to law. Inversely, there is a group of actors which is not clearly identified, that of social scientists, even though a considerable quantity of social science knowledge on risk has been produced. Why is there such a discrepancy? This article, based on a critical review of the literature, aims to make sense of the fuzziness surrounding the involvement of social scientists when it comes to risk expertise. The article shows that one reason for this puzzling situation is to be found in the gap between what social scientists often want to do when they are called in as risk experts and what natural scientists and public policy makers actually expect from them.     

E-business opportunities in financial services

Over many years, technological developments have enabled financial services products to be sold and administered via remote distribution channels. E-business is the latest channel whose potential is being explored by both traditional financial services players and new entrants alike. But, in their haste to ‘go online’, are organisations, new and old, falling into the ‘technology trap’ and ignoring the fundamentals underpinning financial services retailing and, perhaps, undermining some of their ‘segment-of-one’ strategies? This paper concludes that the key to successful e-financial services retailing is to take the nuances, attributes, techniques and skills that have accompanied financial services products in the physical world and reinvent them in an e-environment. Only by following this approach will e-business avoid being labelled as a solution looking for a problem. UK high street banks are continuing to extend the choice of channel through which customers can manage their money, eg e-banking. But it is suggested that channels such as e-banking potentially reduce the level of personal contact between bank and customer to the extent that a ‘virtual’ relationship develops. This paper concludes that, given the tendency towards ‘virtualisation’, it is inconceivable that bank–customer relationships will become any more intimate in the future. Indeed, a greater degree of personalisation in customer communication may be the very best that banks are able to offer.     

New development: Financial reforms played in two octaves— yet again?

Major public service reforms are underway at the national level in Australia. The reforms are being implemented progressively over a three-year period. This is the third in a series of articles looking at the implementation of these reforms and focuses on the second stage, which was supposed to be completed in 2015. The author examines the recent report of the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit which reviewed the development of the ‘Performance Framework’ through a series of public hearings. He explains why, for good governance, particularly in a difficult economic and budgetary climate (domestically and internationally), public interest considerations must prevail, not just in issues about ‘how’ but also about ‘what’ is being actually achieved. There is considerable scope for shared learning and experience across governments and sectors of the economy in any reforms of the public sector.     

Poverty or preference: what do ‘consensual deprivation indicators’ really mean?

Consensual deprivation indicators assume that there is a broad consensus on what goods/services families should be able to afford, and that an inability to afford those items can measure deprivation. Using data from two British surveys in 1999, this paper makes two arguments. First, there is only limited agreement about which items families should be able to afford. Secondly, different social groups are more (or less) likely to say the absence of a ‘necessity’ is due to choice. Families who cannot afford two or more ‘necessities’ invariably have a number of ‘nonnecessities’, often many. Their patterns of preferences (and spending) are not typical and they are choosing to buy other goods – through preference rather than poverty. Simply checking whether people lack items for any reason provides results empirically as reliable, but subject to similar criticisms.     

Individualization revisited: global family developments,uncertainty and risk

Abstract

As part of our special issue appreciating the work of Ulrich Beck, this article introduces and rearticulates his concept of individualization for an audience beyond those engaged with sociological theory. It is argued to be the ‘forgotten half’ of Beck’s approach that is in particular need of both restatement and reaffirmation of its contemporary relevance. It does so by firstly contextualizing and explaining its comparatively limited impact before elaborating the stages of the individualizing process and how his key notion of ‘disembedding without re-embedding’ is distinct from traditional sociological understanding of the individualizing dynamic within modernity. Its relevance and utility is then indicated through surveying developments in family and affective relations in China and America, two of Beck’s ideal types of individualization pattern. Both demonstrate a pattern of radical ‘disembedding’, and a conscious and partial ‘re-embedding’ in the case of the ‘neo-traditional’ American middle-class family. Following this, the article suggests a stronger potential connection between the risk and individualization dimensions of his approach than was drawn out by Beck himself, through focusing upon the uncertainty created by disembedding. The uncertainty that follows from individualization suggests precautionary retreat into security and the construction of risk as a means of embodying and managing uncertainty. Recognition of this social dynamic is potentially more useful in understanding risk than the better-known but very general theory of reflexive modernization that is the other half of Beck’s contribution to risk research.     

Communicating risk for issues that involve ‘uncertainty bias’: what can the Israeli case of water fluoridation teach us?

Water fluoridation is a controversial issue in public health. Despite the uncertainty regarding its efficacy and safety, health officials continue to communicate it as ‘unequivocally’ safe and effective. Our focus is on how health officials and policy-makers in Israel frame the issue of water fluoridation in terms of certainty while promoting a mandatory fluoridation policy. According to van Asselt and Vos, the uncertainty paradox describes situations in which uncertainty is acknowledged, but the role of science is framed as providing certainty. Our study is an analysis of documents and media articles emphasizing the paradoxical language used by official representatives on the controversial topic of fluoridation. A central contribution of this study is that we coin the term ‘uncertainty bias,’ in which policy-makers do exactly what they accuse laypeople of doing, framing uncertainty in biased terms. We found that in order to establish mandatory regulation, health ministry officials expressed information in an unbalanced format, promoting the topic of fluoridation by framing it in exclusively positive terms. This study does not focus on the practice of water fluoridation per se, and is not intended to decide for or against it, but rather, to explore how the debate regarding it is communicated. Understanding this particular case can shed light on how other controversial topics are transformed into health policy that is characterized in equivocal terms.     

A critical review of the application of environmental scenario exercises

Scenario exercises have become instrumental across multiple fields, from their original usage in business and military planning, to being ubiquitous in environmental planning and policy formation. This article critically reviews whether there are explicit and imminent divisions between how scenario exercises are used and discussed, with particular focus on the literature of qualitative scenarios concerning environmental challenges. The authors interrogate what scenario exercises are in actual practice, in the context of what they are used for and how they are designed, before then considering the criteria for determining ‘success’ for a scenario exercise. The particular focus of the literature analysed is in the emergence of the discipline of ‘environmental scenarios’, being scenarios concerned with 21st Century environmental challenges such as the influence of climate change on the notion of natural hazards.     

Participatory safety barrier analysis: a case from the offshore maritime industry

This paper argues that a participatory approach directly involving employees in safety barrier analysis can provide ‘added value’ to traditional barrier analyses. Employee participation (EP) could motivate employees to use their knowledge, suggest improvement measures and express their concerns. EP has not received much attention from safety researchers, although one may find several indirect arguments for EP informing the influential safety theoretical perspectives. An example of how participatory safety barrier analysis can be completed and what can be accomplished through such an approach is illustrated via a case study from an offshore logistics chain, and by an analysis of barriers that should prevent collisions between supply vessels and offshore installations. Such collisions could be the initiating event for a major accident. The empirical foundation for the paper is a hazard identification technique session, group and individual interviews, document studies and two search conferences involving approximately 150 participants. It is argued that a participatory approach to safety barrier analysis can reveal ‘holes’ in the defences that otherwise could have gone overlooked, and contribute to the generation of contextualized, definite measures that could strengthen a safety barrier system.     

COMPETING IDEOLOGIES IN THE ACCOUNTING AND INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS ENVIRONMENT

Despite differences in approaches towards ‘accounting and industrial relations’, there have been few attempts to record those differences systematically or to locate them within a conceptual framework. This paper documents the diversity among actors in the accounting and industrial relations environment, situates it theoretically and considers its implications for policy and practice. ‘Differences’ are shown to have persisted across time and to transcend national boundaries. Building on previous studies, a framework is presented to explain observed differences in terms of differences in underlying ideologies, based on varying sets of assumptions about society and organizations. Unitarist, pluralist and radical assumptions are seen to lead to different conceptualizations of the management–labour relationship and different sets of ‘problems’ and conclusions concerning the ends served by the disclosure of accounting information to employees and labour representatives. It is also argued that the ideologies identified incorporate competing knowledge interests and involve distinct modes of rationality.     

The Third Policeman: ‘The true and fair view’, language and the habitus of accounting

This paper explores the role and context of the ‘true and fair view’ (‘TFV’) in accounting and auditing. Utilising the work of Bourdieu as a lens, the paper argues that the world of the TFV is a subjective world with which we think we are objectively familiar. Bourdieu's ‘practical theory’ of habitus suggests that the TFV is shaped by the practice of ‘native virtuosos’ who have a ‘feel for the game’. The paper argues that the conceptualisation of the TFV privileges practice and authenticates the accounting habitus. Hence, whilst language maintains and reinforces social structures, it is in turn created by the routines of practice. By dominating the declaration of the TFV, the auditor effectively reinforces the status quo and the constitution of hierarchy and inequity that exists in the accounting field: the TFV, in Bourdieu's terms, ‘becomes what they are’.