In Search of ‘Successful’ Accounting Research

This critical commentary on Ohlson's paper (in this issue) problematises the concept of ‘successful’ accounting research; highlighting its ex-post, variable nature as a socially manufactured object. Contrasting Ohlson's notion of a singular body of shared ‘common knowledge’ in accounting with the plurality of knowledges valued by different research communities, the commentary advocates a deliberate courting of heterogeneous research paradigms so as to stimulate insightful scholarship. The commentary also reflects on systemic trends underlying the growth of research measurement programmes, and points out that the quest for ‘successful’ research could perversely undermine the generation of memorable and innovative research. Finally, individual researchers are encouraged at each career stage to determine for themselves the intended results to which they aspire, conscious that there are multiple notions of ‘successful’ research and therefore multiple routes to success.     

‘‘Peace’’ perceptions of Special Education Students in North Cyprus: a metaphorical approach

Recently, the peace education as a field has received world-wide attention from scholars, educators and policymakers. In Europe, awareness-raising activities supported by individuals and organizations has paid off and led to successful implementation of peace curriculum into education. Considerable amount of studies reveals that the peace education activities in schools contributed to the realisation of the importance of peaceful and sustainable future. However, peace education is a long neglected subject among the scholars in North Cyprus. Unfortunately, there is no single study focussing on peace education and its necessity in North Cyprus. In this regard, the aim of this study is to investigate how Special Education Students in North Cyprus perceive the concept of ‘‘peace’’. Also, the possible ways of implementing ‘peace education’ into curriculum are scrutinized. In order to fulfil the research aim, qualitative data collected from 158 Special Education teacher candidates. The findings reveal that majority of the participants believes that ‘peace education’ should be taught in schools. At this point, collected data also indicate that governmental initiatives need to be taken in order to raise awareness among students and teachers about ‘peace education’.

     

Who Speaks,and in What Voice? The Challenge of Engaging ‘The Public’ in Health Policy Decision-Making

Abstract

Despite widespread calls for greater public involvement in governance, especially in relation to health policy, significant challenges remain in identifying any such legitimate ‘public’ voice. This research investigates this problem through a case study. It examines how actors experienced and interpreted a government-commissioned citizen’s jury on health spending prioritization in relation to the work of the local health care consumers’ organization. The analysis highlights an unproductive tension around this encounter, and points to more complementary ways in which such top–down and bottom–up efforts might be coordinated. It, therefore, contributes significantly to efforts to strengthen the public voice in contemporary health governance.     

Women victims of self-immolation: a ‘Grounded Theory’ study in Iran

This study aims to examine the sociological aspects of the phenomenon of women self-immolation in Lorestan, Iran. The methodology of ‘Grounded Theory’ was used to analyze data gathered from 11 women who had attempted self-immolation. Data analysis yielded ten categories including patriarchy, divorce as a stigma, family maladjustment, economic frustration, access to fire, prevalence of self-immolation, self-immolation for emancipation, self-immolation as a threat, reorganization of social relations, and remorsefulness. Generally, in societies where patriarchy is dominant, divorce is considered a stigma, and life style pattern is pastoral or rural, when family maladjustment and economic frustration emerge as well, the occurrence of the phenomenon of women self-immolation becomes more likely.     

‘Recession push’ and ‘prosperity pull’ entrepreneurship in a rural developing context

In this paper, the ‘recession push’ and the ‘prosperity pull’ hypotheses are used to analyse the effect of growing non-farm wage employment on entrepreneurship in a rural developing context. Data are collected in a rural household survey in 110 communes in central Vietnam which includes subjective owner assessments of reasons for starting non-farm businesses. This way it is possible to separately test the two hypotheses by distinguishing opportunity and necessity entrepreneurs. We use clustered probit regression analyses and control for possible endogeneity in order to predict participation in entrepreneurship. The results show that better access to non-farm wage employment increases the likelihood of becoming an opportunity entrepreneur but has no effect on necessity entrepreneurship. This, therefore, supports the ‘prosperity pull’ hypothesis but not the ‘recession push’ hypothesis. The growing non-farm economy is likely to accelerate the emergence of opportunity entrepreneurship in rural areas. However, necessity entrepreneurs are suffering from a lack of individual and household assets which pushes them into entrepreneurship regardless of non-farm job opportunities in the surrounding area.     

‘The Institutions and Governance of Economic Reform'1

This articls uses the reform of New Zealand's state-owned enterprises from 1984–1995 to highlight two lessons for public sector reform from New Institutional Economics. First, failure to apply agency, property rights and transaction cost theory in tandem can lead to time-consuming pauses and policy shifts in a reform programme. Second, a discriminating alignment between the institutional environment and the regulatory governance structure chosen is crucial for successful privatization in industries characterized by economies of scale, large non-redeployable investments and extremely political output such as telecommunications and electricity.     

‘We have never been Post-modern’: On the Search of Management Accounting Theory

This paper considers the value that aldermen in Dutch municipalities, who are elected politicians, attach to quantitative output information. The paper especially focuses on the way in which aldermen evaluate the performances of their professional top managers. In the paper the Hopwood evaluation styles, which originally refer to the private sector, are further developed for the public sector. Exploratory field research was conducted in the municipalities of Groningen, Leeuwarden and The Hague. The research shows that the aldermen paid much attention to a manager's activities and the organization's operations and relatively little to outputs. Aldermen did not use an ‘output-constrained’ or an ‘outcome-conscious’ evaluation style. Rather, most of the politicians evaluated the performances of their top managers in a style that is here called an ‘operations-conscious style’. This evaluation style focuses on the activities of managers and the processes of their organization. Quantitative output information plays some part in this evaluation style, but the main question is whether a manager acts as a good ‘facilitator’, i.e. ensures that his organization is functioning well. Besides, important criteria are the way in which a manager deals with short-term problems and with the politicians' opinions and personal wishes.     

‘Ideational power’ as a resource in union struggle

Contributing to our understanding of ideas as power resources in union struggle, this article analyses a labour dispute in Israel's shipping industry. The article follows the union's foregrounding of a specific idea of the state contained within the collective understanding of Israel's history, by which the union legitimised its position in the dispute and significantly influenced a government decision. The article therefore suggests that ideas can be an important power resource, particularly when other power resources are lacking but that this power resource is dependent on the specific ideational context: effective foregrounded ideas draw on a shared narrative that enables political actors to claim the moral high ground, while accusing their adversaries of failing to fulfil their moral obligations as understood via the frame of that shared narrative.     

In defense of ‘eco’ in innovation ecosystem

Innovation ecosystem is an increasingly popular but all too often ambiguously utilized concept across academia, policy and business. In their recent well-argued critique of the concept, Oh et al. (2016) called it a “flawed analogy” that is potentially dangerous for its lack of rigor. In this letter, we reflect on this critique and examine pathways to resolve some of the issues pointed out. We suggest that, at its best, the ecosystem analogy combines salient features from natural ecology to inform the design of system-level innovation management activities. This requires a great deal of conceptual and empirical rigor, and we outline a number of ideas for future research in this regard.     

Developing a ‘European’ model of human resource management

The concept of human resource management (HRM) has been much debated in the literature. Space limitations preclude an examination of that debate here, but it is clear that the concept developed initially from work in the United States of America in the 1960s and 1970s and since then has been adopted increasingly in the academic literature, by consultancy services and in organizational terminology. The terminology spread from the USA firstly into the developed English speaking world and recently - and more partially - into Europe. Is the concept, as opposed to the terminology, applicable in Europe? This paper argues that the organizational autonomy on which the subject is propounded in the United States is not espoused in Europe. A range of subject areas in which organizations in Europe are supported/constrained by external factors are analysed, thus challenging the validity of the American model. This raises the need to consider different conceptual approaches to HRM: a new model of the concept which would encompass EuroHRM is proposed.     

Multivariate ‘analysis of dispersion’ in the presence of intra-class correlation

Summary Subsequent to a review of the effects of familial or intra-class correlation (=ϱ) on the univariateF, or analysis of variance tests, and of methods for obtaining confidence limits for ϱ, results are presented on the effects of familial correlations in tests in multivariate ‘analysis of dispersion’. Methods for obtaining confidence limits are given in the case where a common variance-covariance matrix may be assumed for the successive multivariate samples.     

Assessment of meaningful change in routine outcome measurement (ROM) with a combination of a longitudinal and a ‘classify and count’ approach

To assess significant changes of health status in people receiving health care, distribution-based and anchor-based methods have been proposed. However, there is no real consensus on what method is the best for evaluating clinically meaningful change. To maximize the internal and external validity of outcome assessment, we propose combining two approaches as recommended by recent practical guidelines on this field. Specifically, we suggest applying longitudinal hierarchical linear models on subgroups of patients showing reliable change and reliable and clinically significant change. This combined approach improved the model’s ability (1) to quantify the magnitude of changes to be reliable and clinically meaningful and (2) to select significant predictors of changes. An empirical application on a prevalence sample of Italian outpatients attending four community mental health services was done. A cross-sectional model and three longitudinal models were applied on the entire study sample and reliable and clinically meaningful change subsamples to investigate the magnitude of change and the predictive effect on outcomes of clinical, socio-demographic and process variables on different patients’ subgroups. Differences were found suggesting that both the statistical method and the sample used to calculate individual changes affect the estimates. The main conclusion is that ignoring the longitudinal data structure or including patients with unreliable change at the follow-up might result in misleading inferences that can alter the real magnitude of changes and the contributions of predictors. The approach proposed provides robust feedback to clinicians on clinically significant change and can be recommended in outcome studies and research.     

Are the ‘Big Six’ ‘big’ in Belgium?

Studies in the United States, Europe and Australia have shown that the market for audit services is highly concentrated and largely dominated by the same ‘Big Six’ international audit firms. This paper measures the degree of concentration in the Belgian audit market through an empirical study of the number of professionally qualified auditors employed by each audit firm and some characteristics of their clients. Our calculations show that the concentration ratios, however measured, are low when compared with other countries, possibly due to the low value attached to the certification of financial statements by a professionally qualified auditor. This lack of importance can be explained by characteristics of the Belgian environment (e.g. a relatively passive capital market, dominated by a few large holding companies) which may induce companies to chose cheaper (domestic) audit firms. We also calculate Spearman rank correlations between the rankings of the audit firms based upon the different audit firm revenue proxies. All the correlations show it is of no importance which measure is used to rank audit firms.     

The ‘wrong skewness’ problem: a re-specification of stochastic frontiers

In this paper, we study the ‘wrong skewness phenomenon’ in stochastic frontiers (SF), which consists in the observed difference between the expected and estimated sign of the asymmetry of the composite error, and causes the ‘wrong skewness problem’, for which the estimated inefficiency in the whole industry is zero. We propose a more general and flexible specification of the SF model, introducing dependences between the two error components and asymmetry (positive or negative) of the random error. This re-specification allows us to decompose the third moment of the composite error into three components, namely: (i) the asymmetry of the inefficiency term; (ii) the asymmetry of the random error; and (iii) the structure of dependence between the error components. This decomposition suggests that the wrong skewness anomaly is an ill-posed problem, because we cannot establish ex ante the expected sign of the asymmetry of the composite error. We report a relevant special case that allows us to estimate the three components of the asymmetry of the composite error and, consequently, to interpret the estimated sign. We present two empirical applications. In the first dataset, where the classic SF has the wrong skewness, an estimation of our model rejects the dependence hypothesis, but accepts the asymmetry of the random error, thus justifying the sign of the skewness of the composite error. More importantly, we estimate a non-zero inefficiency, thus solving the wrong skewness problem. In the second dataset, where the classic SF does not yield any anomaly, an estimation of our model provides evidence for the presence of dependence. In such situations, we show that there is a remarkable difference in the efficiency distribution between the classic SF and our class of models.     

‘Gatekeepers’ of Islamic financial circuits: Analysing urban geographies of the global Shari’a elite

This paper analyses the importance of ‘Shari’a scholars’ in the Islamic Financial Services (IFS) sector, which has been a growing global practice since the 1970s. Based on Shari’a Law, IFS firms provide banking, finance and insurance respecting faith-based prohibitions on interest, speculation and risk taking. Although IFS firms operate across a variety of scales and involve a range of actors, this paper focuses on the transnational capacities of Shari’a experts employed by IFS firms. These scholars use their extensive knowledge of Shari’a Law to assess the ‘Islamic’ character of a firm's operations, and assist the development of Shari’a-compliant products. As they embody necessary entry-points into Islamic circuits of knowledge and authority, members of what we dub the ‘global Shari’a elite’ can be regarded as ‘gatekeepers’ of Islamic financial circuits. Drawing on a comprehensive data source we present a geographical analysis of Shari’a board membership, nationality and educational background of 253 Shari’a scholars. The results show that the global Shari’a elite connects a limited number of IFS hubs (e.g. Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Kuwait City, Manama, and London) to knowledge and authority networks falling outside ‘mainstream’ business and service spheres.     

‘RESILIENCE’ IN ORGANIZATIONAL ACTORS AND REARTICULATING ‘VOICE’: Towards a humanistic critique of New Public Management

Assumptions of resilience are frequently made about organizational actors, both by scholars and practitioners. It is argued that resilience is unlikely to be the usual outcome from the trauma routinely confronted in organizational life. It is suggested that ‘assumptions’ of resilience stem from either a reification of what is perceived to be a highly desirable trait in organizational actors or a lack of acknowledgement of what, if recognized, would be regarded as an ‘unthinkable’ aspect of organizational life. Managers are unlikely to recognize and admit that the pain they inflict on others in the name of efficiency, organizational down-sizing and out-sourcing will contribute to long-term changes in organizational actors. It is also likely that, while coping skills and resources may be sufficient to equip individuals for the myriad problems they routinely face, even the ‘successful’ actor may not remain unscathed. Some of the negative organizational outcomes of this unthinking ‘assumption’ of resilience are canvassed and suggestions are made as to what strategies may ameliorate the situation. A rearticulation of actors' ‘voice’ in formal organization, at a time of a hegemonic dominance of economic rationalism, is especially overdue.     

Cross-cultural competence in the context of NGOs: bridging the gap between ‘knowing’ and ‘doing’

Abstract

International human resource management research in non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is scarce and it predominantly focuses on the recruitment and retention of volunteers. The context of NGOs is different from conventional for-profit international business settings with different kinds of challenges, especially in terms of providing appropriate training on managing multi-cultural teams and working with local project partners and communities. The literature also tends to focus on expatriate perspective and not on a host country perspective. We address this gap by examining how project managers and hosts experience cross-cultural issues on overseas assignments. We study volunteer project managers leading international and local youth volunteers during the Raleigh International programme in Malaysia. We use a qualitative methodology and data collected at 3 case locations via participant observation during 120 days contact with the respondents as well as interviews and surveys. We propose the CPACE (Curiosity, Passion, Adaptability, Communication and Empathy) framework describing competences needed in cross-cultural encounters and based on respondents’ actions as well as their words and it is relevant to a NGO context. The framework is intended to lay the foundation for future research and in particular to demonstrate the need for cross-cultural competence to be more grounded in particular contexts.     

What is the meaning of ‘talent’ in the world of work?

The ongoing confusion about the meaning of ‘talent’ within the world of work is hindering the establishment of widely accepted talent management theories and practices. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the literature on talent management by offering an in-depth review of the talent concept within the specific context of the world of work, and proposing a framework for its conceptualization. We group different theoretical approaches to talent into ‘object’ (i.e., talent as natural ability; talent as mastery; talent as commitment; talent as fit) versus ‘subject’ approaches (i.e., talent as all people; talent as some people) and identify dynamics existing within and between them, as well as implications for talent management theory and practice. Finally, we discuss different avenues for further research aimed at developing the talent—and consequently, the talent management—construct further.     

‘Breaking the ICE’: workplace democracy in a modernized social Europe

The EU seeks to improve its labour market performance through implementing the Lisbon and European Employment Strategies which encourage the modernization of work organization through the development of partnership with the assistance of an ‘appropriate’ regulatory framework. Key aspects of this latter framework concern workers' rights regarding information, consultation and participation in corporate governance. European labour laws, introduced in the 1970s, sought to strengthen employers' consultation with their workforce and, more recently, the changing economic, technological and organizational environment has returned issues related to workplace democracy to the top of the social policy agenda. Here we evaluate the significance of the new Directive on Information and Consultation with Employees (ICE) within the context of this planned modernization of European social policy. In doing so, we re-examine the historical development of workers' consultation laws in Europe and assess the economic rationale for regulating workplace social dialogue in an enlarged Social Europe.