Knobe,Side Effects,and the Morally Good Business

The International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) has recently issued a revised “Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants” (IFAC Code). As a requirement for membership in IFAC, a national accounting organization must either adopt the IFAC Code or adopt a code of conduct that is not “less stringent” than the IFAC Code. In this paper, we examine the extent to which 158 national accounting organizations have adopted the revised IFAC Code as their own. Our results indicate that 80 of our sample organizations have adopted the IFAC Code (sometimes with minor modifications), while the remaining 78 opted not to utilize the model IFAC Code. We then test the hypothesis that national accounting organizations in lower income economies would be less likely to adopt the IFAC Code than those in high income economies. Our results do not support the hypothesis. We argue that one potential reason for such a finding is that adopting the IFAC Code may be a cost effective means of adopting a code of ethics for organizations in lower income economies.     

The SEC's retail investor 2.0: Interactive data and the rise of calculative accountability

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the United States mandated a new digital reporting system for US companies in late 2008. The new generation of information provision has been dubbed by Chairman Cox, ‘interactive data’ (SEC, 2006a). Despite the promise of its name, we find that in the development of the project retail investors are invoked as calculative actors rather than engaged in dialogue. Similarly, the potential for the underlying technology to be applied in ways to encourage new forms of accountability appears to be forfeited in the interests of enrolling company filers.We theorise the activities of the SEC and in particular its chairman at the time, Christopher Cox, over a three year period, both prior to and following the ‘credit crisis’. We argue that individuals and institutions play a central role in advancing the socio-technical project that is constituted by interactive data. We adopt insights from ANT (Callon, 1986, Latour, 1987, Latour, 2005b) and governmentality (Miller, 2008, Miller and Rose, 2008) to show how regulators and the proponents of the technology have acted as spokespersons for the interactive data technology and the retail investor. We examine the way in which calculative accountability has been privileged in the SEC's construction of the retail investor as concerned with atomised, quantitative data (Kamuf, 2007, Roberts, 2009, Tsoukas, 1997). We find that the possibilities for the democratising effects of digital information on the Internet has not been realised in the interactive data project and that it contains risks for the very investors the SEC claims to seek to protect.     

Which Journal Articles are Uncited? The Case of the Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research and the Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing

Two main streams of research performance evaluation rely on quantitative measurement of research output and citation count. Although research output counting has achieved a certain degree of success, such an approach cannot assess the impact of a publication on knowledge development. A citation count, in contrast, measures the influence of a publication on subsequent research efforts. Citation count has thus become an important way to represent research performance. This study analyzes the uncited articles published in the Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research and the Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing in the period 1996–2005. Findings would be of use to academic researchers in planning for the type of article to write.     

Internationalization of Western Venture Capitalists into Emerging Markets: Risk Assessment and Information in India

This paper provides the first analysis of the internationalization of venture capital firms through an examination of risk assessment and information usage by firms in India. Personal interviews were conducted with executives in 31 (84%) of the active venture capital firms. The paper extends previous research by comparing perceptions of the behavior of domestic venture capital firms in India, foreign (primarily U.S.) venture capital firms in India and U.S. venture capital firms in their domestic markets. Foreign firms in India place significantly greater emphasis on product market factors and accountants' reports than domestic firms in India. They place significantly less emphasis on financial contributions of management in assessing risk and own due diligence and information from entrepreneurs than do U.S. firms in their domestic market. They make more use of information from trade publications and relating to production capacity and technology and information from accountants' reports than do domestic venture capital firms in India. The evidence is consistent with venture capital firms adapting to local market conditions rather than implementing "recipes" from their domestic markets.     

Outside Board Members in High Tech Start-ups

Board composition in large organizations has been subject to much empirical research, however, little attention has been focused on board composition in start-ups, and more specifically high tech start-ups. This lack of research is surprising given that many high tech start-ups have multiple equity stakeholders such as venture capitalists or public research organizations, such as universities. Given that high tech start-ups are commonly resource-poor these external stakeholders may play an important role in accessing critical external resources. Drawing on agency theory, resource dependence theory and social network theory we examine the tensions that exist between the founding team and external equity stakeholders in determining the presence of outside board members. In particular we focus on whether or not the outside board members have either complementary or substitute human capital to the founding team. We test our model on a sample of 140 high tech start-ups in Flanders. Our results indicate that high tech start-ups with a public research organization as an external equity stakeholder are more likely to develop boards with outside board members with complementary skills to the founding team.      

Chinese Auditors' Ethical Behavior in an Audit Conflict Situation

This paper draws on the economics of ethical compliance model to examine the association between ethical reasoning, perceived risk of detection, perceived levels of penalties and Chinese auditors' ethical behavior in an audit conflict situation. Using 53 Chinese auditors from Shenzen as subjects, and a survey questionnaire, this study found that there is a significant negative association between ethical reasoning and the likelihood of unethical behavior and that this negative association is weaker for auditors who perceive higher risks of detection.     

Visions for a walking and cycling focussed urban transport system

Walking and cycling can make a considerable contribution to sustainable transport goals, building healthier and more sustainable communities and contributing to traffic and pollution reduction. There have been many national and local initiatives to promote walking and cycling, but without a long term vision and consistent strategy it is difficult to see how a significant change may be achieved. This paper presents three alternative visions for the role of walking and cycling in urban areas for the year 2030: each vision illustrates a ‘desirable’ walking- and cycling-oriented transport system against a different ‘exogenous social background’. These visions have been developed through a process of expert discussion and review and are intended to provide a stimulus for debate on the potential for and desirability of such alternative futures. Each is based on the UK and represents a substantial change to the current situation: in particular, each of the visions presents a view of a society where walking and cycling are considerably more important than is currently the case and where these modes cater for a much higher proportion of urban transport needs than at present. The visions show pictures of urban environments where dependence on motor vehicles has been reduced, in two of the visions to very low levels. The methodological approach for devising visions is informed by work on ‘utopian thinking’: a key concept underlying this approach is one of viewing the future in social constructivist terms (i.e. the future is what ‘we’, as a society, make it) rather than considering the future as something that can be ‘scientifically’ predicted by the extrapolation of current trends.