What's in a frame? Social organization,risk perception and the sociology of knowledge

A central problem in the sociology of knowledge has been to show that sane people can intelligibly have quite different alternative understandings of the same problem, such as a kind of risk, without abandoning the idea that there is a real problem about which to disagree, and to show the social basis of both plurality and viability. In recent decades, attempts to make this problem tractable have focused on the idea of a ‘frame’. Theories of frames offer accounts of the range of content, as distinguished from theories of processes of diffusion, of which risk amplification theory is the best known example. In this article, several theories of frames – those of Goffman, D'Andrade, Moscovici, Gamson, Schön and Rein, and of prospect theory – found are to be inadequate, because of their lack of clarity and plausibility in their answers to four key questions: ‘what is the relationship between sense‐making and bias?’, ‘how are frames to be individuated?’, ‘where do frames come from?’, and ‘how far and how can people move between frames?’. The article makes the case for a neo‐Durkheimian institutional theory developed by Douglas and others. This approach derives frames as concrete applications to specific contexts from thought styles, which are in turn the product of solidarities or institutional styles of social organization, because it can offer clear, testable, parsimonious hypotheses with which to answer these four questions. The theory therefore provides an account of the institutional logic of framing, and presents reasons for preferring this to non‐institutional approaches such as the various kinds of cognitivism. The article offers three conceptual innovations with which to develop the neo‐Durkheimian theory, in order better to deal with the crucial fourth question about the scope for mobility between frames. These innovations and some specific hypotheses about the scope for mobility between frames are supported by consideration of some exploratory qualitative empirical research on privacy risk perception. The theory provides a more satisfactory strategy for tackling the core problem than most others, by showing plurality to be limited, by showing clear and specific social bases for plurality of frames, by neither wholly endorsing nor wholly rejecting any basic bias, and by showing that their conflictual and systemic interdependence is what makes for viability.     

The role of investors’ objective financial knowledge on the assessment of risk disclosures in mutual fund advertisements

This study examined the role of investors’ objective financial knowledge in processing risk disclosures in mutual-fund advertisements. Investors were exposed to a mutual fund advertisement containing either a disclaimer mandated by regulatory bodies or a strongly worded warning label. Overall, the results showed that mandated disclaimers were ineffective in reducing investors’ return expectations and attitudes toward the advertised fund, regardless of the investors’ level of financial knowledge. However, strongly worded warning labels effectively impacted the return expectations and attitudes of low-knowledge investors, but not high-knowledge investors. That is, the impact of warning labels was dependent on the level of an investors’ financial knowledge; specifically, high-knowledge investors failed to discount past performance as a heuristic cue in their judgments. Importantly, this behavior of high-knowledge investors was not due to a familiarity effect; the risk disclosures were properly encoded and processed by knowledgeable investors. These results suggest that high-knowledge investors either possessed strongly held beliefs (for example, the ‘hot hand’ effect) that persevered even when exposed to the strongly worded warning, or they were overconfident in their judgments.     

Do ethical investors want purity or effectiveness? An exploratory study on the ethical preferences of mutual fund investors

This article relates the result of an exploratory survey aimed at better understanding the ethical preferences of individuals invested in so-called ethical or socially responsible investment (SRI) profiled mutual funds. In order to get an insight into the moral preferences of investors, a range of questions and dilemmas were formulated to determine respondents’ agreement with one of two more stringent philosophical perspectives: the moral purity and moral effectiveness perspectives. Our results indicate that investors support both perspectives but have difficulties in choosing between them in ethical dilemmas. For financial services providers, this confusion among investors represents a major challenge in setting up and managing an ethical or socially responsible investment service. In essence, providers are faced with the task of deciding which strategies and methods that should be used in the ethical investment service, even though many customers may not know which ones they prefer.     

The measurement of harmonization in the form and content of the auditor’s report in the European Union

This study attempts to determine the degree of harmonization in the form and content of the auditor’s report in the European Union. To accomplish this goal, audit reports from 1995 annual reports of the largest industrial companies in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom are analyzed. The analysis uses the basic elements of the auditor’s report listed in the International Standard on Auditing, “The Auditor’s Report on Financial Statements” as the control. Comparability is tested using the chi-square statistic which tests for equality of the proportions of the various elements in the auditor’s report across the Member States. The results reveal that harmonization exists in three of the five elements in the auditor report relating to form (appropriate title, the dating of the report and the listing of the location of the auditor’s office). Harmonization does not exist for the remaining two elements related to form, nor does it exist for any of elements related to content.     

Information about bank intangibles,analyst information intermediation,and the role of knowledge and social forces in the ‘market for information’

Although developments in the sell-side analyst literature have revealed the role of intellectual capital (IC) in analysts’ work, the whole information intermediation progress of IC remains a “black box”. This paper develops an analyst information intermediation model, illustrating how ‘soft’ information changes through analyst acquisition, processing and disclosure of information. Bourdieu’s ideas of habitus, field and capital are used to develop our explanation of the analyst information intermediation model. We argue that the combination of empirical evidence and theoretical explanation provides a new and more comprehensive way to improve understanding of the role of analysts within knowledge and social contexts.     

Genetic counselling: ethical mediation of eugenic futures?

This paper examines some proposals concerning the involvement of genetic counsellors in reproductive decisionmaking. This involvement represents the future situation as being shaped decisively by the “relevant” knowledge of powerful medical and other political interests. The paper deconstructs and reorders this proposed knowledge in order to make it problematic. The projected involvement of genetic counselling backed by claims of ethical expertise is rendered denaturalised and particular, opening a conceptual space for the emergence of other futures. An alternative future in which public communication, not private medical decisions, is given as the primary ethical focus.     

The Impact of Austerity in the Framework of Corporate Rescue and the Rights of Workers in the EU: A Road to Recovery?

The financial crisis and the sovereign debt crisis have been attributed to a number of causes. Whether these are economic, social, cultural or legal, they are all by and large also political. The aim of this article is not to delve into the myriad of heated political arguments that continue to dominate the scene but to assess the impact of the financial crisis on the employment protection rights and the corporate rescue regimes in Greece, Portugal, France and the UK. In light of the crisis, the rights of the workforce have been severely compromised to afford financially troubled companies a greater opportunity to recover. In order to minimise the catastrophic impact of financial turmoil on their economy and society, all four jurisdictions introduced reforms to their labour codes and corporate rescue mechanisms, often in the name of austerity. This article will offer a snapshot of the changes and their effects and an assessment whether or not the reforms of pre‐insolvency regimes have operated as an effective embankment for the protection of social and economic welfare. The purpose of this piece is to shed a light on the changes that have occurred and that have affected employment rights in the domestic legal systems of individual member states, as influenced to some extent by the EU in its expectations of improvements to increase labour market flexibility, and whether corporate rescue mechanisms in individual member states are able to provide some counterbalance to the erosion of employment rights generally. Copyright © 2017 INSOL International and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Discussion of ‘The antecedents of the use of continuous auditing in the internal auditing context’

Gonzalez et al. (2012) apply the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT, Venkatesh et al., 2003) to the issue of adoption of continuous auditing (CA) by internal auditors. The authors make a very convincing case for the slow evolution of CA and propose that this can be explained by the four factors contained in the UTAUT as well as annual sales and voluntariness of use. They find, in their revised model, that effort expectancy and social influence directly impact intentions to use the technology, while performance expectancy is moderated by annual sales and social influence is moderated by voluntariness of use. Interestingly, the authors also identify geographical differences in these influences. I offer commentary on these findings and suggest avenues for future research in the domain of technology adoption and use in accounting.     

How biased is the behavior of the individual investor in warrants?

Based on the actual trading behavior of individual investors in the Portuguese financial market during almost ten years this paper examines the socio-demographic characteristics of retail investors in warrants, and discusses the hypothesis that some behavioral biases do have an impact on the investors’ predisposition to invest and trade in warrants, a complex financial instrument. One finds that there is a profile of investors in warrants: younger and less educated men are more likely to invest in warrants and that overconfident, disposition-prone and investors exhibiting a gambling attitude are more likely to invest and trade in warrants. Secondly, the gambling motive seems to be a distinguishing characteristic of investors in warrants. In other words, when investors are driven to trade in financial markets for pleasure/fun they tend to trade complex products more and to trade simple and easier to understand financial instruments less. Finally, the higher the intensity of trading the more relevant are the disposition and the gambler’s biases.     

What drives the market value of firms in the defense industry?

This article assesses the relative importance of different types of news in driving significant stock price changes in the defense industry. We implement a systematic event study with the 58 largest publicly listed companies in the defense industry, over the time period 1995-2005. We first identify, for each firm, the statistically significant abnormal returns over the time period. Then, we look for information releases likely to cause such stock price movements. Most of the key drivers in the defense industry are the same as in other industries (key role of formal earnings announcements and analysts’ recommendations) but we also identify some specific features, in particular the influence of geopolitical events and the relevance and frequency of bids and contracts on stock prices. Finally, we examine the impact of the September 11 terrorist attacks on defense firms.     

Bias in the tone of forward‐looking narratives

We extend the prior literature on biased disclosure decisions by examining whether, when and how managers bias the tone of forward‐looking narratives. In order to measure tone we employ techniques of manual content analysis and we aggregate positive, neutral and negative statements into an overall measure of tone.We then analyse the frequency of positive and negative statements for firms with large impending year‐on‐year changes in sales and operating profit margin, and we regress tone cross‐sectionally on four managerial incentive variables that are unrelated to the private signal about future trading, namely loss status, sign of earnings change, business risk, and the existence of an analyst earnings forecast. We find that firms with large impending performance declines bias the tone in the outlook section upwards. Also, we find that loss firms, risky firms and firms with an analyst earnings forecast provide a more positive tone, while firms with an earnings decline provide a more negative tone. Finally, we observe that for a majority of our managerial incentive variables the main vehicle of biasing the tone is to change the number of negative statements, not the number of positive statements. Overall, our findings are difficult to reconcile with predictions from signalling models, but they are consistent with the alternative view of impression management. Our results have policy implications. In particular, they suggest that there is a need to reconsider the current largely unregulated nature of forward‐looking narratives.     

Processes of auditability in sustainability assurance – the case of materiality construction

This study examines how financial audit-styled concepts such as materiality are transferred to non-financial audit arenas. Drawing on a case study of assurors working within a Big 4 professional services firm, we uncover a number of interrelated features of the materiality determination and assessment process within sustainability assurance (assurance on sustainability reports). We illustrate how assuror flexibility, underpinned by assuror intuition, is central to uncovering assurance technologies deemed capable of addressing the materiality of ambiguous sustainability data. Assurors with no financial audit background retrospectively rationalise their intuition using the assumed authority of structured financial audit methodologies. This facilitates the tentative translation of financial audit knowledge to the sustainability assurance domain. Collaborative, holistic decision-making processes inform the assurors’ continual construction of materiality and are characterised by alliances of (accountant and non-accountant) ‘expert’ assurors merging formal and tacit knowledge. These alliances seek social cohesion within sustainability assurance teams in order to establish a social consensus among assurors around the materiality determination and assessment process. Our analysis develops and extends Power’s theorisation of how new areas are made auditable and advances our understanding of the more practical aspects of non-financial assurance services offered by Big 4 professional services firms.     

Discussion of “The effect of task complexity and expert system type on the acquisition of procedural knowledge: Some new evidence”

Mascha [Int. J. Account. Inf. Syst. (2001).] hypothesizes that differences in task complexity between studies in accounting and psychology explain differences in their conclusions regarding the benefits of feedback in acquiring procedural knowledge. Overall, the work was done carefully and it contributes to our understanding of learning while using expert systems. I comment specifically in three areas. First, I comment on whether procedural knowledge, which cannot be expressed verbally, or simply knowledge is the construct of interest. Second, I pose some questions regarding how task complexity was operationalized and the implications of that operationalization for the conclusions. Finally, I propose an alternative experimental design that I find more complete, which would eliminate some alternative explanations for the results.     

Is the social representation of nanotechnology anchored in that of GMOs?

The use of nanotechnology (devices/materials composed of parts less than 10 nanometres) in the development of new products is rapidly expanding. Industrialists and decision-makers consider nanotechnology to be the next industrial revolution, but fear they risk the same resistance to nanotechnology that their counterparts experienced with genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Although risk perception studies have shown that perceived risk of GMOs is quite high compared to that related to nanotechnology, no study to date has explored a potential direct social representation link between the two. The present study aims to fill that gap by comparing the social representations of nanotechnology and GMOs among a population of non-experts. This study was conducted with 282 students in human and social sciences and natural sciences. Using a free association task with the inductive words ‘nanotechnology’ and ‘GMO (genetically modified organism)’, we identified the existing social representations of the two based on a structural approach. While the representation of GMOs is objectified in the field of agriculture, objectification for nanotechnology seems to still be lacking, although its possible objectification likely lies in computing and robotics. Our calculation of the rate of similarity of associative words with nanotechnology and GMOs indicated no present, direct link between their social representations. We discuss the possible evolution of the social representation of nanotechnology over time.     

Lemmings in the bond market? An empirical analysis of the term structure of credit spreads

The paper examines the credit spread between government and corporate bonds at different maturities. Theoretical models assume that credit risk premiums for high quality firms monotonously increase with maturity. We find evidence suggesting that bonds issued at maturities attracting the highest issuance volumes tend to have credit risk premiums that are on average 10 to 15 basis points higher than issues at nonconventional maturities. These results point out a shortcoming of existing theoretical models and show that the credit yield curve is not smooth, but affected by the local supply of issues at various parts of the yield curve. In addition, the empirical evidence presented in this paper indicates that firms utilizing the bond markets for funding could lower their funding costs by shifting the term of their debt away from the most commonly targeted maturities.

Accounting and governance in the final years of the Papal States: Dual roles in the papacy of Pius IX (1846–1870)

The Papal States represent a unique and long period in Italian government and in the government of the Roman Catholic Church prior to Italy's unification in 1870. The 25-year period prior to unification was a particularly tumultuous period when the Papal States struggled for survival, faced military and popular challenges and became increasingly indebted. Accounting could become an important tool to assist decision-making and enhance the Papal States' sustainability, as shown by the governance reforms promulgated by Pope Pius IX in this period. Nevertheless, accountants chose what to make visible and emphasised secular, rather than the sacred aspects of the Papal States. Despite reforms, there was a disconnection between the leaders and the accountants. This research therefore examines the role of accounting in such an institution, and extends the concept of a sacred-secular divide to a state government beset by resource constraints and challenged to fulfil its spiritual aims.     

rain in the stage of plastic deformation and c

nting rate is,and cumulative number of signal energy is the linear rela-tionship with strain.acoustic emission;carbon steel;stretching experiment;fracture0声学技术Technical Acoustics34-38TB302B020;13;A;B;B020_13;龚斌;30-34声子晶体的研究进展及应用前景张荣英;姜根山;王璋奇;吕亚东;华北电力大学,华北电力大学,华北电力大学,中国     

Students’ conceptions of learning in the context of an accounting degree

Students' conceptions of learning (CoL) play an important role in the learning process leading to the development of generic skills. This paper investigates whether CoL of accounting students can be developed by incorporating high-level cognitive skills progressively within the accounting curriculum. First, the study explored, using phenomenography, the variation in accounting students' CoL. The findings highlighted some nuances in accountings students' CoL and that lower-order CoL were prevalent among accounting students. However, more (less) third-year students than second-year students adopted higher- (lower-) order CoL. Upon examining the learning objectives, teaching methods and assessment of all units comprising the accounting major of the host university, evidence was found that CoL are progressively developed and shaped, albeit in a limited way, based on the levels of cognitive domain emphasised within the curriculum. The findings highlight the need for accounting educators to take a whole of the programme approach to developing higher-order CoL.     

Survival of the Fittest or the Fattest? Exit and Financing in the Trucking Industry

This paper studies the impact that capital market imperfections have on the natural selection of the most efficient firms by estimating the effect of the prederegulation level of leverage on the survival of trucking firms after the Carter deregulation. Highly leveraged carriers are less likely to survive the deregulation shock, even after controlling for various measures of efficiency. This effect is stronger in the imperfectly competitive segment of the motor carrier industry. High debt seems to affect survival by curtailing investments and reducing the price per ton-mile that a carrier can afford to charge after deregulation.