An Examination of the U.S. Public Accounting Profession’s Public Interest Discourse and Actions in Federal Policy Making

Participation in the political process by the United States public accounting profession often blurs the role of the profession as advocates for the public interest with its role as advocates for its own private interests. In this study, we draw from prior theoretical and empirical work to investigate recent federal political activities of the public accounting profession to shed light on these sometimes contradictory roles. In particular, we investigate ten contemporary regulatory issues of interest to the AICPA. We analyze 36 AICPA legislative advocacy letters related to these issues that were provided to federal policy makers. In addition, we analyze the public accounting profession’s federal lobbying reports that were submitted during this same time period. The analysis allows us to assess the public interest discourse present in the AICPA legislative letters as well as the extent of political action taken by the profession related to these issues based on the profession’s lobbying efforts. Our analyses (1) demonstrate that the profession’s discourse and actions often reflect both public and private interest motivations, (2) allow us to categorize the profession’s advocacy efforts as arising from specific motivations, and (3) show that the profession’s public interest arguments used to advocate for their policy positions change depending upon the specific legislative issue being considered.     

员工招聘中的知觉归因偏差及规避策略

员工招聘是企业将具有一定素质和能力的应聘者吸引并选拔到企业空缺职位上的持续不断的过程.员工招聘对企业和求职者都起着至关重要的作用,能帮助企业招到所需要的人才,使求职者找到理想的工作.员工招聘是招聘人员与应聘者之间知觉互动的过程,在此过程中,招聘方和应聘者常常会产生知觉归因上的偏差.这些偏差的存在会使招聘效果降低,有可能导致企业选择到不合适的人员,求职者找不到自己理想的岗位.为有效规避员工招聘中存在的知觉归因偏差,对招聘方而言,应通过多种方法对应聘者进行认知和判断,制定客观统一的评价标准,从不同的信息源获得信息,了解知觉对象不同时期的信息,并采用理性和系统的方法对应聘者进行分析判断;而对于求职者而言,则应注重信息收集,加强对自身的了解和定位,对自己进行恰当的包装,并作好事后工作.     

Women's Magazines: Construction of Identities and Cultural Consumption in Hong Kong

Consumption is an integral part of contemporary capitalistic society. By means of a textual analysis of letters to the editor of a women's magazine in Hong Kong, as well as in-depth interviews with readers and editors, this paper examines how women's cultural consumption creates, constructs and circulates women's identities. Results reveal that the processes of identification can be constructed on three equivalent consumption levels. Firstly, women readers identify certain "imaginary communities" through reading the magazine, and by modeling the behaviors and styles of the communities they feel they are sustaining their relationship with them. Secondly, women identify with an idealized community-constructed beauty and seek to consume products which collectively suggests this idealized beauty for them. Thirdly, women regard the "communities" as providing shelter for rapport and comfort from the emotional and relational problems of real life. In sum, structured identification-consumption has shaped working class women into an identity, which conforms to society's dominant capitalist logic. Despite these findings, however, there are always a few women who attempt to seek alternative lifestyles.     

CEO letters: Social license to operate and community involvement in the mining industry

This paper aims to analyse how the discourse of CEO letters and other factors influence community involvement and Social Licence to Operate (SLO) in the mining industry. The analysis is based on qualitative information disclosed in sustainability reports and CEO letters from 32 mining firms. Content analysis was undertaken to obtain data for the study, and then a regression analysis and a multiple correspondence analysis were used to test the hypotheses defined in the study. The results indicate that the CEO discourse influences how a firm expresses the importance of gaining its SLO, the philanthropic activities in which companies become involved and the destinations of the investments in the communities in which they operate. The results also show changes in the discourse between 2011 and 2015, which are, in part, explained by the difficult situation experienced by the sector during this period. The paper contributes to the Corporate Social Responsibility literature by integrating different theories from this field into the SLO framework. The analysis carried out and the results obtained are useful for both CEOs and Sustainability Managers, especially in managing their relationships with the communities where they operate or intend to operate.     

No easy solutions: lessons learned from an intervention to reduce clinic non‐attendance rates in a Scottish hospital

Hospital waiting lists and times have become the public measure of government success or failure. This research examined existing hospital outpatient capacity and considered the age‐old problem of patients who fail to attend their appointment. A reduction in did‐not‐attend (DNA) rates would maximize utilization of capacity, ensure early diagnosis and drive down waiting times. The research was designed to determine whether the introduction of outpatient letters, which included the need for positive confirmation of attendance, decreased the incidence of patient non‐attendance. Utilizing an experimental design, data gathered at two Plastic Surgery clinics were compared over two three‐month periods, pre‐ and post‐implementation. Total attendance and non‐attendance were examined in terms of new and review patients, gender and age profile. The research concludes that the intervention tested in this form can now be discounted thus allowing the exploration of subtler solutions.     

名词化隐喻在商务英语信函中的语篇交际功能分析

商务英语信函作为商务英语的一种重要语篇文体形式,为了实现其交际目的,常有意识地使用名词化语法隐喻结构。本文首先扼要介绍系统功能语言学理论下的名词化隐喻研究及名词化隐喻的语义特征,然后重点分析名词化隐喻在商务英语信函中的语篇交际功能。     

企业人力资源管理中的风险分析

在进行人力资源管理时,我们往往重视招聘、培训、考评、薪资等各个具体内容的操作,而忽视了其中的风险管理问题.其实,每个企业在人事管理中都可能遇到风险,如招聘失败、新政策引起员工不满、技术骨干突然离职等等,这些事件会影响公司的正常运转,甚至会对公司造成致命的打击.如何防范这些风险的发生,是我们应该研究的问题.特别是高新技术企业,由于对人的依赖更大,所以更需要重视人力资源管理中的风险管理.     

Exploring Top Management Language for Signals of Possible Deception: The Words of Satyam’s Chair Ramalinga Raju

This paper explores the potential for systematic scrutiny of the language of top management to reveal signals of possible deceptive conduct. The language used in letters signed by Ramalinga Raju, Chair of the Indian multi-national company Satyam, are analysed using a multi-method quantitative approach. We explore the language in Raju’s annual report letters from 2002–2003 to 2007–2008; and in his letter of January 7, 2009 in which he confessed to deceptive conduct. We analyse the frequency of personal pronouns, the tone of positivity or negativity, the frequency of words of extreme emotion and aspects of the characteristics of language use indicated by the DICTION 5.0 text analysis master variable, CERTAINTY. The text of Raju’s letters appears to have been influenced by his self-confessed deceptive behaviour. Raju’s word choice changed noticeably in his five annual report letters prior to the collapse of Satyam as the scale and impact of his financial misstatements increased. The methods presented should be considered for adoption by auditors and regulators—as a way of assessing whether signals emerging from language use warrant closer (including audit) scrutiny of a firm’s financial reporting and governance. They should also be considered for use by monitors of entity risk, such as credit rating agencies and financial analysts.     

“One of these days,things are going to change!” How do you make sense of market disruption?

The significance of mindsets is apparent in everyday business life. As today’s managers and companies face uncertainty and disruptive change in the business environment and markets, there is a growing need to understand and strategically address such change. This becomes challenging when disruptive market forces confront the institutional logic or rules of the game based on collectively acquired experience of doing business in the given field. In overcoming such challenges, managers’ hidden reasoning remains an untapped potential while their existing mindset influences what they attend to and what they decide to do. This article elaborates a diagnostic framework, accompanied by a tool to help managers make sense of disruptive markets and reflect individually and collectively on possible courses of action. The framework has two principal dimensions—strategic scope and focus—that are further divided into three business elements of strategic market-oriented management: offering, customer, and market. The tool offers a practical means of profiling individuals’ mindsets. In increasingly dynamic business environments, reflection capabilities represent a new source of competitive advantage.     

Woman to women: Social marketing an idea to the new world

In 1971, Kotler and Zaltman developed a formal planning process for social marketing. But this article highlights the marketing of the idea of Britain's moral cause to American women in 1939–41, a clever example of social marketing thinly disguised to avoid the abhorrence attached to propaganda. The authors show how Ruth Drummond's letters in Ladies' Home Journal contain an effective mix of communication elements dedicated to winning women to a way of thinking that they had rejected initially. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Targeting male perpetrators of intimate partner violence: Western Australia's "Freedom from Fear" campaign

Violence against women by their partners is now recognized as a major international public health problem, in both developed and developing countries. For example, it is estimated that each year in the US, 4 million women experience a serious assault by their partner and that the victim-related economic cost of partner violence is about US$67 billion. Traditional domestic violence campaigns focus on legal threats and sanctions in an attempt to stop men from being violent. While incarcerating violent men and issuing protection orders are necessary components of domestic violence prevention interventions, they do not--and cannot--remove women's fear of the man reappearing at some future time or place, often with tragic consequences. Furthermore, many women do not want to leave the relationship, nor do they want the man incarcerated; they simply want the violence to stop. The Western Australian "Freedom From Fear" campaign is an innovative social marketing initiative that acknowledges these factors and aims to reduce the fears of women (and children) by motivating perpetrators and potential perpetrators to voluntarily attend counseling programs.     

论“公平与效率之争”无意义

在真实社会中,到处充满了不同个人或不同利益集团站在自我本体立场上,为充分实现自我主观判断的利益最大化而展开寻求纳什均衡的博弈。在这样的博弈格局中,不可能存在"具有社会中性的公平"与"具有社会中性的效率"。由此即决定了必须以"存在社会中性公平与存在社会中性效率"为前提的"公平与效率之争"毫无意义。     

论国际贸易结算方式的综合使用

在国际贸易实务中,为便利操作和争取扩大贸易合作,各种国际贸易结算方式经常被综合使用。除三种基本结算方式,即汇付、托收和信用证之间的综合使用之外,基本结算方式与附属结算方式之间的综合使用也逐渐流行。了解目前各种结算方式的综合使用情况和方法,对于提高国际贸易操作技能具有重要意义。     

Technical and non‐technical education and the employability of engineering graduates: an Indian case study

India's substantial growth in recent years has resulted in a significant increase in demand for engineers. Information technology companies, now a major part of the Indian private sector, have been prominent in such recruitment, but the competences they seek in engineering students appear to be different in terms of priorities from those sought by engineering firms. Against this background, and Indian employers' general dissatisfaction with graduates' skills, the present study aims to investigate the importance of technical and non‐technical education, respectively, in the employability of undergraduate engineering students. Employability was determined according to students' success in campus recruitment drives by information technology companies, that is, whether they received an offer of employment. The study used a sample of two cohorts consisting of more than 500 undergraduate engineers in total, drawn from one of the leading engineering colleges in South India. Independent variables consisted of marks scored at the higher education admission stage, grades in engineering at graduation and performance in non‐technical education. The last named comprised verbal reasoning, logical reasoning and soft skills. The dependent variable was whether or not they were offered employment. The results, obtained through correlation and ordinal regression, revealed that the performance of students in non‐technical education was a stronger predictor of employability than was grade obtained in technical education. The findings will be of relevance to engineering colleges because they can be used in the formulation of a strategy to improve the employability of their students. The context is a concern in many countries that those leaving higher education are not properly equipped for the world of work.     

Heart in China, Vision on the World——An Australian Chinese's Business Legend in China

In the early days of China's reform In later 1970s when China first launched"reform and open"policy,there were numerous business opportunities all around China,so were there all kind of uncertainties and obstacles.At the beginning of his business,Dr.Lau recalled one unforgettable event-he and his secretary had once hand typed and sent out more than 1,000 letters to suppliers in one week just to accomplish a commission of emergent product importation on behalf of a local government agency in China.Pitifully,these commissions often brought no profit to the company.     

‘Mum,can I play on the internet?’

Research about the role of parents in children’s consumption of online advertisements is scarce. Parents are viewed as having a responsibility to deter children from invasive marketing, yet with the rise of non-traditional marketing it is unclear whether they have the knowledge and skills necessary to undertake this role. The authors address this research gap and demonstrate that parents have limited understanding of the effectiveness of online advertising and this restricts their ability to protect their children from online marketing endeavours. Parents recognize online persuasive techniques only when they themselves have been exposed to them (e.g. banners, pop-up advertisements) and are often unable to appreciate more subtle marketing techniques in their persuasive capacity (e.g. advergames). In addition, they erroneously believe that children respond to online marketing the same way adults do. Finally, parents display naivety in their conviction that their children would never be taken in by marketers but, paradoxically, this complacency is only limited to online advertising.     

The Ethical Wealth of Nations

Michael Porter argues that some nations manifest a competitive advantage deriving from key elements of their economic structure. Some nations are thus disposed by structure to possess what Porter calls a "competitive advantage of nations" (Porter, 1990). In this paper I examine the prospect of an ethical advantage of nations, and in particular, of a set of advantages that extend far beyond the simple dimension of trust so often discussed. I consider, further, how such a range of ethical features would be structured, and what the implications of those features would be. Three conclusions are reached: 1. Morality may create economic advantages for nations in ways that extend beyond the notion of an idealized market; 2. In order for ethics to drive economic advantage, ethical concepts must rise to the status of intrinsic value; and 3. If claims for national ethical success factors are true, then nations should attend to the issue of moral education.     

Problems of international labour cost comparisons

In the first half of the 1990s, the debate on Germany’s high labour costs flared up again as part of the discussion on Germany as an industrial location. With the strong depreciation of the D-Mark in the past two years and the change of course in wage policy, this debate has now subsided again to a certain extent. However, great attention is still paid to international labour cost comparisons, particularly as they often produce quite varied results. How are these differences to be explained? What are the problems involved in making international labour cost comparisons?