The risk management of nothing

This essay challenges core elements of enterprise risk management (ERM) and suggests that an impoverished conception of ‘risk appetite’ is part of the ‘intellectual failure’ at the heart of the financial crisis. Regulators, senior management and boards must understand risk appetite more as the consequence of a dynamic organizational process involving values as much as metrics. In addition, ERM has operated as a boundary preserving model of risk management subject to the ‘logic of the audit trail’, rather than a boundary challenging practice which confronts and addresses the complex realities of interconnectedness. The security provided by ERM is at best limited to certain states of the world and at worst it is illusory – the risk management of nothing. In contrast, Business continuity management (BCM) may provide clues about how risk management might be reconstructed.     

Pacific science in the 21st century

‘Science’ is often implied to be something emanating from Western Europe or its derivatives. But the people of the 24 nations and territories of the Pacific Islands also want their unique scientific knowledge recognized and perpetuated. Politically the islands are divided into 24 nations and territories, and culturally their people speak about 1200 different languages—each with some differences of culture. This is much the greatest cultural fragmentation on earth. Each culture has, over thousands of years, experimented and discovered some unique principles and evolved some unique techniques. For example, some principles of Pacific navigation (for many centuries the world's most advanced) and techniques of vessel construction, are unknown elsewhere—even today. Some pharmaceutical remedies are unique, some items of marine and plant science are not known to ‘Western science’ and so on. It is to these that the term ‘Pacific science’ refers. This essay explores the potentials for Pacific science in the future, and for Pacific contributions to global knowledge.     

Total recall : aliens, ‘others’ and amnesia in postmodernist thought

Postmodernism sees itself as a champion of plurality and seeks to represent voices of ‘other cultures’ which have been suppressed, neglected or marginalized by modernity. But is postmodernism necessarily a good thing for non-Western cultures? Is it, in its rejection of all metanarrative, its overriding concern for the present at the expense of history, its insistence on blurring the distinction between image and reality, and its absolute moral relativity, a liberating force or a new form of cultural assimilation? Is postmodernism totally divorced from modernist philosophy or is it simply the cultural logic of secularism? This essay explores these questions on the basis of four new books: Contingency, Irony and Solidarity by Richard Rorty;¹ The Condition of Postmodernity by David Harvey;² Contemporary Political Culture: Politics in a Postmodern Age by John R. Gibbons (editor);³ and Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism by Andrew Ross (editor).⁴     

Life in the tube

Douglas Rushkoff, author of Media Virus, Cyberia, and Playing the Future, explains how sensationalism in the media tends to promote our culture's natural, unexpressed agendas. This is an optimistic appraisal of the seemingly banal and exploitative fora of tabloid television, ‘Court TV’ and ‘Cops’. Such low-brow media, when approached from an evolutionary perspective, reveal themselves as the process by which closeted social issues are brought out into the cultural conversation exactly when they need to be.     

Enterprise resource planning systems, management control and the quest for integration

This paper analyses how two companies pursued integration of management and control through enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. We illustrate how the quest for integration is an unending process and it is produced concurrently and episodically. Integration is not only about ‘mere’ visibility and control at a distance. ERP systems do not define what integration is and how it is to be developed, but they incur a techno-logic that conditions how control can be performed through financial and non-financial representations because they distinguish between an accounting mode and a logistics mode. A primary lesson from our cases is that control cannot be studied apart from technology and context because one will never get to understand the underlying ‘infrastructure’—the meeting point of many technologies and many types of controls. ERP systems are particularly interesting for what they make impossible, and our cases illustrate how the two organizations in the quest for integration mobilized a number of ‘boundary objects’ to overcome systems-based ‘blind spots’ and ‘trading zones’. The paper points out that management control in an ERP-environment is not a property of the accounting function but a collective affair were local control issues in different parts of the organization are used to create notions of global management.     

Teaching about the future

Since 1984 UNESCO has been developing a programme of prospective studies. This programme was re-named ‘future-oriented studies’ and is now centred around three groups of activities: a project on the futures of culture; the development of education and training with special emphasis on disseminating the methodology of future-oriented studies; and the creation of an international bibliographic database called FUTURESCO. An invitational seminar, ‘Teaching about the future’, held in Vancouver, 21–23 June 1992, was a direct consequence of the above. It was organized and hosted by UNESCO (with FUTURESCO and the Canadian Commission for UNESCO). It brought together about 20 professional futurists from Pacific Basin countries to consider a range of theoretical, practical and pedagogic issues associated with teaching futures, mainly at the tertiary level.     

Global modelling in the 1990s : A critical evaluation of a new wave

It seems that after a ‘golden decade’ in the 1970s and a period of decay in the 1980s, global modelling is making a comeback. In particular, the report Scanning the Future seems to mark the beginning of a new era in this respect. In this article this ‘new wave’ of the 1990s is compared with the ‘old wave’ of the 1970s. Although there is progress in the scientific realm, these new models lack a deep concern for the burning problems of our time like the poverty gap between the North and the South and the ‘ecological problematique’. In many ways these new models reflect the new mood of the times, which lacks any vision of a new paradigm and which is strongly ‘northern-centric’.     

Transferring knowledge across sub-genres of the ABC implementation literature

In the last decade, a continuous stream of empirical articles has investigated how various implementation process factors (including, top management support, adequate resources, and ABC training) influence ABC implementation success. However, at the same time, a growing number of researchers have criticised this ‘mainstream approach’ for, among other things, neglecting issues of power and politics and for viewing ABC implementations as something inherently positive. Based on Lukka and Granlund's [Lukka, K., Granlund, M., 2002. The fragmented communication structure within the accounting academia: the case of activity-based costing research genres. Acc. Organ. Soc. 27, 165–190] call for communication between various streams of ABC research, the purpose of this paper is to discuss how the ‘mainstream’ implementation literature may benefit from insights made in the politically oriented literature. A key conclusion is that such an analysis not only provides us with enriched explanations of the relatively strong and coherent findings in the ‘mainstream’ ABC implementation literature, but has also the potential to explain ‘unexpected’ and ‘contradictory’ results found in this stream of research. Based on these observations, a number of directions for future research are proposed.     

Confronting the culture of progress in the 21st century

Disconnected from the social and historical roots of technological progress, technology transfer is embraced on a global level as a tangible solution to the third-world development ‘problem’. Left under-scrutinized is the dehumanizing potential of using technological progress as a gauge for civilizational advancement. The increasing globalization of the link between progress and technology is demonstrated in the case of China, which has accelerated its modernization efforts since the late 1970s. This article examines the ideological influence of progress on third-world development planning and implementation, questioning the validity of accelerating modernization in the context of long-term sustainability. On one hand, alternative models are required for envisioning social and environmental sustainability; on the other hand, strategies for intervention are needed to overcome deep-seated ideological beliefs about progress. Education represents a key site for producing and shaping ideological beliefs, and a potential ‘weak point’ for intervention is suggested.     

Changing images of futures in the 20th century

The 20th century has seen a rise in dystopian images of futures and an apparent decline in imaging capacity. This article considers responses to this ‘imaging dilemma’. They include critique, futures workshops, accessing cultural resources, renegotiating aspects of a worldview and ‘imagining’ a different historical dynamic. It is concluded that there is a substantive basis for informed optimism and empowerment. The keys to each lie in the nature of the human response to what is desired or feared.     

Dogs don't bark at parked cars

The following essay, by the Past President of the World Futures Studies Federation (WFSF), was presented as the Opening Keynote Address to the WFSF World Conference ‘Coherence and Chaos in our Uncommon Futures’, Turku, Finland, 23 August 1993.     

Smaller business governance: Exploring accountability and enterprise from the margins

Smaller businesses now rank higher upon the corporate governance agenda. This agenda places their accountability and ‘enterprise’ particularly at issue. It is only put at issue because of just one possible problematization however. That problematization firstly assumes judicious accountability to be the crux of good governance with accounting at its hub. It secondly assumes that smaller businesses are the very seedbed of any ‘enterprise economy’, virtually irrespective of what form they take, or ‘enterprise’ they display. By then combining these assumptions together, this finally reproblematizes any relationship between accountability and ‘enterprise’, so that ‘de-regulation’ and decoupled accountability liberates smaller business ‘enterprise’ further. Others might question and challenge the very basis, as well as particular formulation, of this problematization however. A better grasp of the greater fluidity and complexity of smaller businesses would make the boundaries of their accountability and ‘enterprise’ more clear and leave their respective margins more suitably exposed. As a key potential instrument for that purpose managerial accounting research might then better inform the debate by specifically rendering these boundaries more visible while also identifying the precise scope for manoeuvre at/across their margins as well. To that end this paper uses certain enabling frameworks to construct and interpret the particular case of managerially accounting for a grown smaller business working across exactly those margins from the perspective of a ‘reflective practitioner’ acting as a field researcher for these purposes. As well as offering fresh insights into how far the boundaries of accountability and enterprise might legitimately stretch, this case calls for more critical thinking about how they might change.     

Exploring (false) dualisms for environmental accounting praxis

This paper focuses on the political nature of the linguistic dualisms or ‘false antinomies’ that inhere in environmental accounting practice and environmental accounting research. These dualisms, ‘subject–object,’ ‘man–woman,’ ‘mind–body,’ and ‘culture–nature,’ the paper argues, need to be ‘ambiguized’ if the politics inherent in these dualisms are to be resisted. Two strategies for the ‘ambiguization’ of these dualisms are suggested: ‘performative parody,’ which is a strategy intended for environmental accounting practitioners, and ‘democratic reflexivity,’ which is a strategy intended for environmental accounting researchers. In taking this linguistic focus, the paper challenges common sense constructions of the environment and the potentially elitist and anti-democratic nature of environmental accounting research. By offering these two strategies, the paper provides a means of environmental accounting praxis, or means of resisting global ‘environmental’ domination.     

Beyond the mundane: reconciling breadth and depth in futures enquiry

For some time there has been a need within Futures Studies (FS) to develop methods which go beyond the dominant empirical tradition. For many years there has been a near-exclusive emphasis on understanding the external world ‘out there’. But as time has gone by, so it has become clear that our ability to understand the world ‘out there’ crucially depends on an underlying world of reference that is ‘in here’. Understanding the near-future environment calls for a combination of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ views which, for example, give as much credence to judgment as to calculation. This paper considers a way of considering these very different ‘ways of knowing’. Overall, the aim is to go beyond what might be termed ‘mundane’ analysis, i.e. that which is preoccupied with surfaces, and to open out a broader arena for futures enquiry.     

Futures India: society, nation-state, civilisation

The future of a phenomenon can only be understood in terms of (a) the conceptual construction one makes of it and (b) the changes in empirical content of that phenomenon. In turn, the empirical reality ought to be discerned in terms of the past-present-future dialectic. Keeping this in view, this paper begins with conceptual clarifications of the terms society, nation-state and civilization and situates India in terms of these notions. It is suggested that India’s future as a society and as a civilisation is durable although some changes in their content are inevitable. But as a ‘nation-state’ India may radically change given the contestations about it. Four competing value-orientations—cultural monism, cultural pluralism, cultural federalism and cultural subalternism—about the contemporary Indian nation-state have been identified. India’s future as a nation-state will depend upon the legitimacy these value orientations achieve in future.     

Bridging the divides of online reporting

This paper looks at the possibilities of improving online reporting by closing the ‘digital divide’ through a ‘digitalised revolution’ and by narrowing the ‘accounting divide’ through the sharing of power and the expansion of membership in the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). Paradoxically, whilst the IASB may have contributed to the ‘accounting divide’ it may very well possess the potential to close it and thus improve online reporting. The potential to bridge the ‘accounting divide’ rests with the greater participation by developing country members to exert influence and ownership of the accounting standards setting process.     

How frequently should listed companies report results?

On August 17, 2018, President Trump announced that he had asked the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to study whether U.S. listed companies should file interim financial statements at half-year intervals instead of on a quarterly basis. This essay examines the question underlying the President's concern: how frequently should public companies file interim statements? A review of accounting standards, regulations, and research reveals that there is (i) no agreed-upon best practice for reporting frequency, (ii) compelling evidence that analyst earnings estimates arising from interim reporting give rise to executive angst, and (iii) some evidence that lengthening reporting intervals will harm investors. The short-term implication of this essay is that readers of this journal should participate in SEC deliberation on this issue. The long-term implication is that we need to encourage accounting scholars from various disciplines to try to answer the President's question.     

Modelling the post-industrial city

A new kind of city is emerging: globalized (connected to other cities in global networks); tertiarized and even quaternarized (dependent almost entirely for its economic existence on advanced services); ‘informationalized’ (using information as a raw material); and polycentric (dispersing residences and decentralizing employment into multiple centres or ‘edge cities’). The question is how we can adapt the urban and transportation models, which originated in the very different world of the 1960s, to these conditions, and what kind of model would then result.     

Monetary policy, ‘dollarization,’ and parallel market exchange rates: The case of the Dominican Republic

Excessive money creation may give rise to inflation tax revenues and to a depreciation of the domestic currency. this in turn leads to a shift away from the domestic currency into a foreign currency (e.g., the US dollar, hence the term ‘dollarization’). From the domestic monetary authority's point of view, ‘dollarization’ is an unwelcomed phenomenomn, thus the monetary authorities will attempt to arrest the ‘dollarization’ phenomenon while maintaining the excessive money growth. This paper develops and tests a model which analyzes the effects of monetary policy on dollarization and the ‘parallel’ market exchange rates.     

Education and the economy: rethinking the question of learning for the ‘knowledge’ era

This paper argues that advanced industrial societies are (i) addressing ‘intended and unintended consequences’ of economic and technological development, and (ii) responding to dilemmas that cannot be solved by existing schema and routines. Paradoxically, the current education–economy/lifelong learning debate rests on traditional interpretation of the concept of learning (i.e. acquisition of pre-existing knowledge and skill). The paper argues that a sociological and educational theory of learning is needed to assist people and communities to use ideas originating from one context to resolve the dilemmas experienced in another. It introduces the concept of ‘reflexive learning’ to illustrate how to reformulate public education policies to address these issues.