The conscious purpose of science is control of nature; its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos

The enormous advances in science promise infinite potential in a world that, paradoxically, has become distinctly finite. The benefits of science are offset by adverse unintended effects. They are perpetuated by the structure of technological development and the underlying assumptions within the world view that brought forth those benefits. Causal layered analysis is a futures research tool that enables the creation of transformative spaces in which we can envisage alternative and preferred futures. It focuses on the deeper dimensions, questioning our assumptions and exposing the contradictions and our prejudices. It is applied here to the introduction of genetic engineering in agriculture in New Zealand as a means to illustrate a role for science whereby the “disruption and chaos” may be minimised if not eliminated.     

Psychology, meaning and the challenges of longevity

Humankind has begun to reap one of the most valued harvests of its scientific and technological pursuits: a significant increase in human longevity. We now live longer than ever before, due in large part to advances in medicine and health care that provide those who have the opportunity to afford them a lifespan that for many approaches or exceeds the 100-year mark. It is now within the realm of possibility that people will live lives of 125 years or more within the next century. However, our ability to increase physical longevity may have outstripped our ability to deal individually and socially with these new lives, these new existences that go well beyond what has traditionally been considered a “working life”. How well-prepared are we psychologically to cope with the meaning of a life that extends to as much as 150 years or more? In this new “age of longevity”, what are the challenges for psychology as a resource for humanity in its quest to give definition to the experience of being alive, as well as for managing the affairs of everyday life? Traditional developmental theories in psychology tend to articulate early stages of life in detail, but are generally mute on the matter of later life. Cognitive psychology has been inclined to view longevity as leading to a deterioration of mental faculties due to “aging”. This paper examines the psychological implications of increased lifespans from an optimistic perspective by reviewing current developments in research on cognition, emotion and aging. The review identifies trends in psychology that, if emphasized and strengthened, may lead to improved theoretical frameworks that cast longevity in a positive light, and that identify how people can find meaning and fulfillment throughout their whole lifespan.

“Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life for which the first was made.” Robert Browning “Rabbi Ben Ezra”

I first encountered Browning’s works as an undergraduate, and being a pre-engineering student at the time my tendencies toward poetry were stunted to say the best. Few of the great works of literature my teachers compelled me to read at that stage of my life and development made enough of an impact to last beyond the length of the course requiring their reading. Much has changed since then and my interests in literature and what literature has to say that is of value for our lives has deepened. But Browning’s enthusiastic call to join him in aging has always been a fascination. Indeed, what could be more of a contradiction to modern attitudes about becoming elderly than to claim “the best is yet to be”? What can be more of a challenge to how we approach the relationship between being young and being old than to claim that the last of life is “for which the first was meant”? What can the possible rewards of the golden years be that transcend the glorious enthusiasms, unfettered optimisms, and just pure physical conveniences of being young? Or, was Browning simply trying to sucker us all into a fait accompli, the hopeful outcome of which is the envy of the very youth that the aged often envy so much?There is little enough envy of the aged today. I approach these years with great caution, recognizing that how I look upon those who are two decades older than myself will, in turn, condition me to see myself in those years much in the way that I see them now. “Aging” is not something anyone really wants to do. We want to, at best, “grow older”, a perspective that carries with it a more positive spin: growing wiser, growing up, or simply “growing” with all of its new-age connotations of personal enlightenment and becoming. I am not “aging”, I am “becoming at one”.The language we have adopted to talk about the time-course of life, and particularly about the years in the latter third of that course, does much to frame both how we live those years and how we anticipate them in our youth. Our expectations are ones of decline, physical debilitation and mental infirmity. We “retire”, as in withdrawal into seclusion, away from the mainstream of life and into the backwater eddy of inaction. On the shelf.Much of this view has been reinforced by how humanity has approached examining this aspect of its own time course through science. We study aging with an eye to how its effects influence the abilities of those so afflicted to perform or operate compared to those who still have a grasp on their full faculties. And, of course, we find that as people grow older, they do not approach life in the same way as do younger people.Part of our view on life comes from the very way in which science is funded: those interested in the last of life often receive their support from the National Institute on Aging, not the National Institute on The Last of Life for Which the First Was Made. Research agendas often focus on identifying sources of infirmity and potential prostheses, either physical or social, that can ease the lives of the elderly on their way toward achieving the goal of successful aging. All too often, success in aging means imposing relatively few demands on social resources or on the lives of younger people, such as family members. In our “ageist” society, elderliness is not generally equated with status and stature. Less and less, the young “listen” to the old out of deep interest in their lives and their experiences. Wisdom is the providence of the freshly matured and recently educated.The shortcomings of life in the advancing years are many and well-documented in the research literature. Memory spans decrease, information retrieval becomes less reliable, and new information is less readily assimilated. As people become older, they appear to rely more and more on automatic processing of information, quick associations and the like, rather than deliberative and conscious reasoning [1]. For the older mind, intuition is at least moderately preferred over analysis. For example, younger people tend to interpret stories analytically, focusing on details, while older people tend to focus less on a story’s details and more on its “gist” and its underlying significance to things that are important to them [2], and tend to do better at grasping and dealing with information in terms of its holistic meaning [3 and 4].The effects of these differences in information processing between young and old can be seen in practical matters of everyday life, such as decision making and judgment. Johnson [5], for example, found that older adults use simplifying decision strategies more often than younger adults. These strategies, such as noncompensatory rules that consider only the positive or the negative aspects of a decision option but not both, relieve one of the psychological burden of making complex and effortful tradeoffs, at the possible expense of efficiency and accuracy. Chasseigne et al. [6] found that as people age, they become less consistent in their use of information in making judgments and predictions; even reducing the overall information load and demands on memory does little to improve the reliability of their judgments. ¹     

Health care reform and reform for health: creating a health system for communities in the 21st century

If we are to improve the health of the population and reduce the inequalities in health that plague our communities and our planet, we will have to give greater attention to the determinants of health. The reform of the health care system, necessary though it is, will never be sufficient; we need to reform our whole society and in particular to focus on human rather than economic development. At the community level we need to create healthy communities that are “health-creating systems” of environmental, social and human development, as well as health care systems that focus first on improving and maintaining health. Such a “bottom-down” health care system would see the hospital become once again the place of last resort (but still a potentially important partner in creating healthier communities) and would focus instead on how to provide health promotion and health care from the household level up.     

Land, conflict, identity in India’s north-east: negotiating the future

Even a peripheral examination of major conflicts across the world reveals that these revolve around one critical natural resource: land. Whether in the Middle East, Ireland or closer home in Jammu and Kashmir, the battle is between those who believe in a boundary authorized by a particular political dispensation and those who believe that their ethnic and sub-nationalistic or nationalistic claims surpass such barriers. The North East of India, that little wedge of land protruding above Bangladesh, jutting into and flanked by Tibet/China, Myanmar and Bhutan, is a fascinating example of how mindsets and attitudes combined with intensely competitive and unbending views of history and geography make ethnic and demographic problems extremely difficult to resolve. Patronage by the Central Government, which is resented, and the physical and emotional distance from the mainland have combined to produce a strange psyche of dependence, bitterness and alienation in the region. Despite the seeming lack of answers for the future, it is evident that the region has to build on its natural advantage in terms of abundant natural resources. Greater degrees of autonomy with extensive powers to village “republics”, based on tradition, but with a definite change towards gender sensitivity and representation, can show the way forward.     

Valuing customers and loyalty: The rhetoric of customer focus versus the reality of alienation and exclusion of (de valued) customers

The accounting practice of customer valuation ostensibly emerged from the so-called “customer revolution" of the 1980s. Early conceptions centred around notions such as customer focus and providing value to customers, but these ideas have latterly given way to calculation of the financial value of customers to an organisation. Integral to customer valuation are the reconstruction of the customer as an asset (or liability) of the organisation, the segmentation of customers into identifiable groups, and the treatment of customers as dollars rather than people. Whilst rhetoric of “the customer is king" persists, accounting for customer valuation brings its own transformative terminology and has become a means for organisations to selectively focus on particular customers, rather than the customer in general. The paper examines the health insurance and banking industries as exemplars of the affects of customer valuation, and discusses pivotal issues of access, equity, alienation, and social exclusion. Customer valuation is shown to have become a means to increase shareholder income and wealth, almost inevitably at the cost of (further) marginalising the poor and disadvantaged.     

Discourses of transparency in the intellectual capital reporting debate: Moving from generic reporting models to management defined information

In the last decade, transparency has become a necessary mantra for both publicly listed companies and government institutions. Intellectual capital reporting is often related to this goal of enhancing the transparency of business and public institutions. In this paper we emphasize that a movement is seen in the intellectual capital reporting debate, which we argue can be approached as two different discourses of transparency, namely one discourse based on generic reporting versus a second discourse based on management driven information. In other words, one discourse highlights as much information to stakeholders as possible, but seems to be in the process of being substituted by another, which emphasizes reporting what is seen from the perspective of management, namely the “right” information, and only that. The argument for the latter discourse is that it will make intellectual capital reporting more transparent, because of users’ bounded rationality and other constraints such as time. This, however, has the implication that users of intellectual capital reporting may become victims of management's selected “right” information, by [Strathern, M. The tyranny of transparency. British Educational Research Journal 2000;26:310–32] designated as the “tyranny of transparency”. Also, we emphasize the problems of perceiving transparency as a goal and not a means.     

The average hospital

In 1998, the UK government introduced the National Reference Costing Exercise (NRCE) to benchmark hospital costs. Benchmarking is usually associated with “excellence”; the government emphasised the raising of standards in the 1997 White Paper “The New NHS: Modern, Dependable” that heralded the NRCE. This paper argues that the UK “New Labour” government's introduction of, and increasing reliance on, hospital cost benchmarking is promoting “averageness”. Average hospitals will be cheaper to run and easier to control than highly differentiated ones; they may also score more highly on certain measures of service improvement. The paper aims, through empirical investigation, both to demonstrate how the activities and processes of hospital life “become average” as they are transformed to comply with the cost accounting average and to indicate how the “average” is being promoted as the norm for hospitals to aspire to. To benchmark to average costs, comparisons are necessary. To compare hospital costs involves the creation of categories and classification systems for clinical activities. Empirical evidence shows that as doctors, patients and clinical practices are moulded into costed categories, they become more standardized, more commensurate and the average hospital is created.     

Bankruptcy practice in India

The bankruptcy framework prevailing in India, traces its roots back to colonial rule. That framework has undergone a number of amendments over the past 200 years, creating a plethora of overlapping and sometimes conflicting articles. The latest attempt at reconciliation of these various Acts was made under the Companies Act, 2013. This paper drives through the land mark amendments in the history of India, leading to the current bankruptcy framework. Each Act is discussed based on the requirements, procedures and outcomes post enactment. Also, the major pros and cons of the different Acts are identified, and a critical analysis is presented of the latest Act, Companies Act, 2013. Moreover, the provisions of Chapter 7 and Chapter 11 of the U.S Bankruptcy Framework are compared against the provisions of these Acts. The paper then presents a diluted, easy to understand, step by step procedure of the current bankruptcy framework. Followed by a case analysis of a recent prominent Bankruptcy, to elicit the issues in the current framework. In conclusion, a list of recommendations is presented, to improve the Bankruptcy Framework in India.     

Learning and the monetary policy strategy of the European Central Bank

This paper examines the welfare implications of alternative inflation targeting proposals for the monetary policy of the European Central Bank. We assume that policy makers have to “learn” the laws of motion of inflation in an economy characterized by “stickiness” in domestic price setting behavior and subjected to recurring shocks to productivity, exports and foreign price. We find that a switch from an “asymmetric” inflation targeting strategy to an “symmetric” makes little difference in welfare payoffs, but it comes at a cost of much higher interest-rate variability. We also find that there are practically no welfare gains from switching from an inflation-targeting strategy based on the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) to a strategy based on the domestic price component of the HICP.     

Can India meet the increasing food demand by 2020?

India's Green Revolution has evolved at an environmental cost, which is perhaps irreversible. The economic growth has become increasingly dependant upon the use of non-renewable resources such as chemical fertilizers, pesticides, oil and coal. India now follows a rapid development path, which is similar to the past growth patterns of most western nations. Whether or not such a growth blueprint would be environmentally sustainable under Indian conditions is questionable since rapid economic growth tends to positively influence environmental degradation. India is a land of villages with 700 million people living in over 600,000 villages, many in the enormous drylands. As the Tata Visiting Chair, I had the opportunity to study the rural development projects implemented by a non-profit agency (Sadguru Foundation) that harvests rainwater to improve irrigation and livelihood of rural people using check dams and lift irrigation systems in western India. This paper has examined how India's remote drylands can be transformed to achieve a ‘Sustainable Green Revolution’ to meet India's future food demands without creating serious negative consequences to natural environment. If the model highlighted in this paper is adopted all across the vast drylands of India and other parts of Asia, Africa and South America, it would certainly increase agricultural output, guarantee future food security, protect natural resources, and above all exterminate the greatest insult to human dignity—poverty!     

Dalit vision of India: from bahishkrut to inclusive Bharat

Dalits continue to remain “bahishkrut’ (outcaste, ostracised, ghettoised, and socially boycotted) in modern India. They are still in search of an inclusive civilisation that would not isolate them in time and space. Even the process of globalisation does not promise them any decent avenues of mobility. The future project of dalits and their friends and sympathisers is going to be to change the protocols of social interaction along egalitarian lines and ultimately in favour of dalit and non-dalits. The dalit vision of India, thus, is to transform India from bahishkrut to an enlightened and inclusive India. The elements of this future vision vis-à-vis technology, the state, democracy, nationalism, civil society and its deeply rooted prejudices are identified and discussed.     

Visions of development: the inevitable need for alternatives

This paper begins by looking at radical visions of development, such as those of Gandhi and Mao, which developing countries threw up in the twentieth century. But soon these visions were eclipsed by the technological vision of development, now being championed in India by its president, Abdul Kalam. The elites of the world believe that only the technology of the developed west can lead developing nations to the path of development. But they fail to recognise the linkages of this capitalist, technology-driven path with colonial exploitation and war. They overlook the insight, first stated by Rosa Luxembourg, that capitalist expansion presupposes non-capitalist or pre-capitalist territories that provide the markets required for capitalist growth. Thus the major failure of the capitalist technological vision is that it can only be a vision for selected nations, or for a selected few within nations. It can never be a vision for the whole world. For countries like India, therefore, an alternative vision of development is essential. This will require a political act of courage to delink from the developed nations and the development and refinement of alternative technology, much of which already exists. Educating the intelligentsia that a good society does not require the technological pursuit of unlimited prosperity, however, is a big challenge.     

Bridging the divide: The rise of the Indian Accountant from 1900 to 1932

The Accountancy and Empire literature is replete with studies in which the salient recurring theme has been that of “otherness”. An alternative interpretation of the colonial encounter is offered in this study of the rise of professional accountancy in India whilst under British rule. The study draws on Cannadine’s theorisation of Ornamentalism (2001), which suggests that class was equally as important as race when it came to contemplating the extra-metropolitan world. We draw on this concept as an aid to understanding why the professionalization trajectory in India was different from other racially-diverse colonies and how high-caste Indians were able to bridge the racial divide and enter professional accountancy during the colonial period. The study draws on archival data to examine the processes put in place to enable the rise of the Indian Accountant and professional organisation under a pervasive British presence. We forward the notion that British perceptions of Indians and Indian accountants were framed by the recognition of caste-class affinities that were not prevalent in other colonies and, in India, accountancy was considered to be a profession suitable for Indians from the higher castes.     

Mentoring and the tolerance of complexity

This paper explores mentoring in the light of complexity theory and the premium placed upon knowledge in organisational viability. A key question is “what is the role of mentoring, as a developmental and knowledge creating process, in a complex environment?” There are two parts to the discussion. First, we explore complexity at work, and what it means for the individual. We link the central ideas of complexity theory with the notion of a ‘corporate curriculum’, an inclusive concept intended to capture the complex nature of learning at work, in all its variants. Secondly, we speculate on the contribution mentoring can make in complex organisations where employees are part of a knowledge economy by virtue of being knowledge producers and being engaged in learning at work. The environments in which we work are becoming more complex and mentoring is also complex. There is a synergy here. For people living in complexity where there are few rules, no right answers and no predictable outcomes, we suggest that mentoring can play a distinctive role in helping people to ‘tolerate’ complexity and remain effective.     

On the role of the organization in auditors’ client-acceptance decisions

The objective of this research is to better understand the role that the accounting firm organization plays when auditors make difficult client-acceptance decisions in the midst of conflicting influences—specifically between the professional and commercial “logics of action”. The investigation was conducted via a field study at three Big Six firms located in Canada. The main argument that is developed in the paper is that the firm sets the stage for auditors’ decision-making by making its formal organizational components (e.g., the firm's partner-compensation scheme and decision-making policies) more reflective of one of the two logics, thereby establishing and helping reproduce certain patterns of order and consistency within the firm. However, the firm's organizational components are also to some extent reflective of the other logic, thereby providing decision-makers with a legitimizing space to influence the decision process differently. I present fieldwork data that is consistent with the paper's argument.     

The accounting of “The Meeting”: Examining calculability within a “Fluid” local space

This study traces events in an empirical setting where a key local space, “The Meeting”, was made calculable. Building on field data from interviews and documentary sources at ABB Industry/Finland, the study theorizes in the interpretive genre, elaborating on the notion of the calculable space. It argues the following: Accounting can be extended into un-formalized and more elusive local spaces – into “fluid” spaces which are not clearly mapped within the organizational hierarchy, and which lie beyond recognized responsibility units or physically distinct cells at the factory floor. By opening visibility into the discretion of these “fluid” local spaces, a tighter alignment between programmatic ideals and real action at the organizational grass-root can be achieved. Self-devised non-financial measurement, mediating local tensions and the interests of “autonomous” actors, becomes the technology of government in this process of normalization – which is, however, not to be acknowledged as being unproblematic.     

CRITICAL THEORY AND ACCOUNTING HISTORY: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

This paper briefly examines the contributions that postmodern (critical) research has made to the historical accounting literature and the opportunities that this new body of literature has created for traditional historical researchers. I suggest that the “new history” that has rendered the “familiar strange” has provided new understanding of our discipline that should be welcomed by all historians. The paper briefly examines two areas, the emergence of double entry bookkeeping and cost accounting, to demonstrate the new insights that critical historians have provided to what has been considered a settled agenda. I conclude by noting that the diversity critical research has added to the accounting history research should be celebrated, but caution that we not engage in the modernist strategy of trying to find a “certified path to knowledge.” Accounting history will be enhanced if our community adopts the values–tolerance, willingness to listen, and respect for alternative views–ithat have enabled researchers in other disciplines to flourish.     

The accounting of interpretations and the interpretation of accounts: The communicative function of “the language of business”

The objectivistic philosophical assumptions which underlie contemporary research in accountancy, as well as economics and elsewhere, are challenged and an interpretive alternative is proposed. A “hermeneutical” view of decision-making is examined, first with regard to science in general, and then concerning the human sciences in particular, and finally with regard to economics. Human decisions are not seen as objective, mechanical or behavioristic but as meaningful utterances of minds, as part of a bidirectional communicative process. That is, scientific decisions, like everyday decisions, are mutually interpretive processes of communication in language. Although it is true that much of mainstream neoclassical economics is incompatible with this interpretive approach, the “Austrian” school can be seen as an interpretive version of neoclassicism. This school of economics indicates a way to understand the communicative function the accounting “language” itself serves in the economic process. The professional judgments made by both accounting researchers and practicing accountants, then, are treated as “matters of interpretation,” but as not, thereby, arbitrary.     

The CBO's policy analysis: An unquestionable misuse of a questionable theory

The analyses of fiscal and monetary policies that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) provides Congress tend to be biased, encouraging the use of activist stabilization policies. The CBO's virtual neglect of economic uncertainties and its emphasis on very short time horizons make active policies appear much more attractive than its own model implies. Moreover, the CBO 's adoption of the macroeconometric approach fundamentally biases its analyses. Macroeconometric models do not remain invariant to changes in policy rules and are mute on the implications of alternative policies for efficiency and income distribution. The rational expectations equilibrium approach overcomes these difficulties and implies that less activist and less inflationary policies are desirable.