Then and Now: Examining Older People's Engagement in Outdoor Recreation Across the Life Course

Outdoor recreation provides a range of health and wellbeing benefits and facilitates engagement with natural environments. We explore older people's participation in outdoor recreation throughout their lives to examine how past experiences shape engagement later in life. A qualitative life history approach, consisting of semi-structured interviews and a focus group in three place-specific (urban, rural, and small town coastal) case studies in Scotland, was adopted. Thematic analysis revealed ways in which childhood experiences shaped adult engagement and highlighted life course transitions where behaviour change was most pronounced. Place and gender were considered as factors which may affect responses. Participants identified the points of getting married, becoming a parent, children entering adolescence, retirement, the onset of disabilities or ill health, and the death of others as “moments of change” in the extent and/or form of their outdoor recreation. The findings highlight potential for targeted interventions to promote outdoor recreation throughout life.     

Mobile devices in the lecture hall: Into it,indifferent, or intrusion?

The authors explored undergraduate business students’ feelings and thoughts about themselves, other students, and their professors when mobile devices are used in the lecture hall for nonacademic purposes. Specifically, they investigated mobile device use during class time, and whether students support it, are indifferent toward it, or consider it to be an intrusion. Using the critical incident technique, the authors thematically categorized students’ thoughts and feelings regarding mobile device usage in the classroom for nonacademic purposes. The results uncovered unique perspectives presented by the students that carry implications for students, professors and administrators.     

‘Passionate and professional’: reconciling logics in public service accounting

In order to deliver public value, the UK government sought to build relationships and connect ‘the public’ with public servants (including back-office workers), but with what effect? Drawing on interviews with public service accountants, the authors found that how these accountants conceptualized ‘the public’—as society or people—shaped whether public value was considered as a monetary or moral concept. Accountants who regarded the public as people spoke of an improper level of involvement and struggled to maintain their professionalism.     

Men at work. Wages and industriousness in southern Sweden 1500–1850

ABSTRACT

In his classic works on the industrious revolution, Jan de Vries argues that demand for new consumer goods trigged eighteenth century Europeans to work more. This implies that industrious behaviour and new consumption patterns were two parallel and interdependent processes that preceded the industrial revolution. However, there is an alternative explanation for any increase in labour output on household level, namely that the labourers were forced to work more to meet ends. An indication of this could be that day labourers’ relative wages decreased over time. In this article, we investigate this by studying wages from annual and casual labour in southern Sweden and compare their levels with consumption baskets.     

Worlding Water Supply: Thinking Beyond the Network in Jakarta

This article draws on scholarship in Southern theory to ‘world’ the study of water’s urbanization. This means complicating scholarship by widening the focus beyond the application of Northern norms to engage with complex and diverse practices in Southern cities. For water’s urbanization, this means focusing on what water supply is for the majority: neither the centralized piped‐water network nor its absence, but the range of practices and technologies that unite people, nature and artefacts in a complex socio‐ecological politics of water. Drawing on scholarship from Southern urbanisms, urban political ecology, and science and technology studies, we illustrate how expanding water’s urbanization to include more than networked infrastructure in Jakarta draws attention to the importance of ecological connections between piped water, groundwater, wastewater and floodwater. Thinking beyond the network requires deeper engagement with the ecological connections between the diverse flows of water in and around urban environments. These produce distinct forms of fragmentation that are missed when analysis is limited to piped‐water supply. The emphasis on ecological connections between flows of water and power seeks to draw attention back to the importance of the uneven exposure to environmental hazards in cities in which neither water nor nature are wholly contained by infrastructure.     

Misleading Forecasts in Accounting Estimates: A Form of Ethical Blindness in Accounting Standards?

Drawing from research on strategic choice, this study investigates the relationship between market turbulence and firms’ sustainable behavior, in the context of sustainability-related institutional adversity. It argues that the relationship between market turbulence and sustainability is mediated by network embeddedness, and this mediating role in turn is moderated by a firm’s innovative orientation. Data collected from a sample of Ontario restaurants inform predictions about firms’ propensity to adopt local wines in their portfolios, despite the limited market and normative support that these wines receive compared with imported wines. The study shows that market turbulence enhances sustainable firm behavior, through the development of strong network relationships. Furthermore, the mediating effect of network embeddedness is particularly salient among firms that exhibit a stronger innovative orientation. These findings reveal how and when turbulent market conditions can contribute to a firm’s sustainable behaviors in the presence of limited institutional support for such behaviors.     

Technical change,technical efficiency,and input usage in Taiwanese agricultural growth

We analyse the increase in sales of Pick 3 and Pick 4 daily numbers lottery games and other Ohio Lottery games after Ohio introduced midday drawings for the Pick 3 and Pick 4 games in August 1999. The midday drawings increased Pick 3 sales by 5%, Pick 4 sales by 12%, and total lottery sales by 2% based on our analysis of a 36-month panel dataset of Ohio lottery sales by zip code. Midday drawings raise more revenue from the strongly regressive daily numbers games. However, the introduction of midday drawings does not change the negative income elasticities of demand for numbers games in an economically meaningful manner.     

Economic structure and factor payments

There is a growing body of evidence that the labour payment share in national income varies across countries and over time, suggesting that the popular aggregate Cobb–Douglas production function may not capture income share dynamics. There remains conflicting evidence on the importance of natural resource rents among low income economies and on estimates of the rate of return to produced capital. This paper focuses on the structural differences among countries, confirming the importance of the agriculture sector in estimates of labour and land’s share of factor income based on 81 countries at diverse levels of economic development in the year 2005. I find that cross-country data are best modelled by a CES production function with an elasticity of substitution of 0.8 and that many low income countries have a higher return to capital than the United States.     

Shotgun mechanisms for common-value partnerships: The unassigned-offeror problem

Shotgun clauses are commonly included in the business agreements of partnerships and limited liability companies (LLCs), but the role of offeror typically remains unassigned. In a common-value, one-sided asymmetric information setting, unequal and inefficient outcomes occur with an unassigned offeror. Experimental results are aligned with our theory.