TOWARDS A VALUE-NEUTRAL POSITIVE SCIENCE OF ACCOUNTING: A COMMENT

This comment points out that Thomas (1981) has misrepresented the views of Lakatos and has misunderstood the role of empirical research in the development of science.     

Current Ethical Issues in Polish HRM

Contemporary HRM was introduced into Poland by the arrival of international corporations with their professional systems of Human Resource Management, which emphasizes ethical personnel management. This research is based on data collected from a questionnaire and interview of 40 women and men professional graduates of the 2004 Weekend MBA Program at Poznan University of Economics eliciting their perceptions of ethical issues in Polish HRM. The present Polish economic situation, with 19% unemployment, precipitates many ethical challenges. The questionnaire and interviews resulted in 217 observations and specific examples of ethical HRM issues. Examples fall in two broad categories and five specific Human Resource areas. The broad external categories are: (1) History and cultural attitudes and (2) Exploitation of the current unemployment situation. Historical and cultural attitudes influence attitudes toward work; company discipline; property and ownership; law and social expectations at work. The history of personnel departments in Socialistic Poland explains many of these attitudes. The five specific categories are: (1) Ethical issues in recruitment; (2) Ethical issues in hiring (Discrimination issues); (3) Ethical issues in performance appraisals and promotions; (4) Abuse of authority (including sexual harassment), and (5) “Mobbing”. Ethical issues in these categories include correlation with appropriate Polish Labor and Penal Laws. This research reveals some HRM ethical challenges unique to Polish HRM. The research emphasizes professional HRM and ethical expectations, which are now being recognized and accepted as a strategic component of Polish management Brother Leo V. Ryan, CSV is Professor of Management – Emeritus and former Dean, College of Commerce, De Paul University. He is a Fellow, St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge, holds honorary degrees from Seton Hall University and Illinois Benedictine University and was a Fulbright Professor in Poland (1993–1995). He is past president, Society for Business Ethics. He is co-author or co-editor of Human Action in Business (1996); Etyka Biznesu (1997); From Autarcy to Market – Polish Economics and Politics (1998); Students Focus on Ethics (2000); Praxiology and Pragmatism (2002) and Poland: A Transformational Analysis (2003). He has been an annual Visiting Professor, Poznan University of Economics, Poznan, Poland since November 1999.     

ICU nurse-physician collaboration & nursing satisfaction

ICU nurses who are satisfied with their work are more likely to be retained, leading to institutional cost savings. In this study, higher levels of nurse-physician collaboration in making decisions about patient care were found to be very important to nurses' satisfaction.     

Budgeting, the individual and the capital market: A case of fiscal stress

Budgetary control is a major aspect of management control. It has undergone major shifts of emphasis in both the literature and practice in the later part of the 20th century. A significant influence on the changing practices of this aspect of control has been the growth of and increased influence of the capital market. This paper draws on a detailed field study focusing on the problematic nature of budgetary control in a changing operational environment that acknowledges both the importance, internally, of the organisation members and their contribution to continued growth—and externally the growing influence of shareholders on business operations. The focus of the paper is on the effects of the constant pressure of the share price on the case unit of analysis and how that changed the use of the budgetary control system. This change is illustrated both at a macro level of organisational accountability for predicted results and also as it is driven down the organisation to the level of the individual.     

Fair imposition

We introduce a new mechanism-design problem called fair imposition. In this setting a center wishes to fairly allocate tasks among a set of agents whose cost structures are known only to them, and thus will not reveal their true costs without appropriate incentives. The center, with the power to impose arbitrary tasks and payments on the agents, has the additional goal that his net payment to these agents is never positive (or, that it is tightly bounded if a loss is unavoidable). We consider two different notions of fairness that the center may wish to achieve. The central notion, which we call k-fairness, is in the spirit of max-min fairness. We present both positive results (in the form of concrete mechanisms) and negative results (in the form of impossibility theorems) concerning these criteria. We also briefly discuss an alternative, more traditional interpretation of our setting and results, in the context of auctions.     

A nonparametric quantity-of-quality approach to assessing financial asset return performance

This paper adapts two recent developments from the bibliometric literature to the problem of assessing the return performance of a financial asset. The result is a quantity-of-quality metric, which is both nonparametric and moment-free. As such, it offers a nonstandard perspective on the informational patterns in asset returns, and accordingly can complement traditional moment-based asset evaluation methods. The proposed approach is simple to apply, and while moment-free, captures intuitively important aspects of asset performance such as location, upside potential, downside risk, and volatility. It can also be expressed as a reward-to-risk ratio, which serves as a counterpart to the Sharpe ratio. Empirical and simulation results suggest that, relative to the Sharpe ratio, the proposed approach prefers assets with moderately higher means and standard deviations, and more favorable skewness.     

How and Why Has Teacher Quality Changed in Australia?

International research suggests that differences in teacher performance can explain a large portion of student achievement. Yet little is known about how the quality of the Australian teaching profession has changed over time. Using consistent data on the academic aptitude of new teachers, we compare those who have entered the teaching profession in Australia over the past two decades. We find that the aptitude of new teachers has fallen considerably. Between 1983 and 2003, the average percentile rank of those entering teacher education fell from 74 to 61, while the average rank of new teachers fell from 70 to 62. We find that two factors account for much of the decline: a fall in average teacher pay (relative to other occupations) and a rise in pay differentials in non‐teaching occupations.