Women and the prospects for partnership in professional accountancy firms

This paper examines three possible reasons (stereotypical discrimination, structural obstacles and employee's preferences) for the lack of women partners in professional accountancy firms in Australia, UK and New Zealand. Data are collected from an experimental survey and interviews of current partners. Whilst women's perceived preferences and organisational structural barriers contributed strongly to the lack of women partners in all sizes of firms, traditional stereotypical discrimination against women at the partnership decision point was only displayed in metropolitan large non‐Big 4 firms, and it is suggested that this is related to intense competitive pressure and a constrained partnership resource.     

Abbreviated Scenario Thinking

Scenario development is a time- and resource-intensive process, one that not all companies are positioned to undertake at any given point in time. As such, this article will propose an Abbreviated Scenario Thinking process that uses published scenarios from government and industry sources to allow companies to make strategic decisions based on the results. Scenarios are narratives that describe the possible futures in which one must compete 5, 10, or 20 years from now. They allow people to test possible actions by playing them out in three or four different ways. Scenarios are based on plausible consequences of events, environmental forces, and players as they occur in time, and create patterns of the future that can have substantively different effects on strategic decisions. Thus, scenarios are important to executives and managers in the 21^st century as they develop competitive strategies. By employing Abbreviated Scenario Thinking, executives utilize published global scenarios to analyze the driving forces that affect their organizations, asking “What If?” as an entry point to scenario planning. This can produce benefits even before any formal scenarios are written.     

Separation of Ownership and Management: Implications for Risk‐Taking Behavior

Issues associated with the relation between the separation of ownership and management and risk‐taking behavior have been considered in an array of studies, with varying results. Due to the wide variety of ownership structures present, the property–casualty insurance industry provides an excellent setting to test the conflicting hypotheses related to separation of ownership from management and risk taking behavior. Employing a large sample of property–liability insurance companies over the period of 1996–2004, we empirically test the alternative hypotheses regarding the implications of separation of ownership from management for firms’ risk taking behavior. The empirical tests include the ownership structures specified in prior research as well as a more detailed classification scheme. We find that each ownership structure is significantly different from every other ownership structure in terms of risk.     

Rational heuristics: the ‘simple rules’ that strategists learn from process experience

While much research indicates that organizational processes are learned from experiences, surprisingly little is known about what is actually learned. Using a novel method to measure explicit learning, we track the learned content of six technology‐based ventures from three diverse countries as they internationalize. The emergent theoretical framework indicates that firms learn heuristics. These heuristics have a common structure centered on opportunity capture and are learned in a specific developmental order. This results in a deliberately small, yet increasingly strategic, portfolio of heuristics. Broadly, we contribute to the psychological foundations of strategy by highlighting the rationality of heuristics as strategy, capability creation as the cognitive transition from novice to expert heuristics, and simplification cycling as a critical dynamic capability for sustaining competitive advantage. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An Empirical Examination of Stakeholder Groups as Monitoring Sources in Corporate Governance

Insurers are formally and informally monitored by a variety of stakeholders, including reinsurers, agents, outside board members, and regulators. While other studies have generally examined these stakeholders separately, they have not accounted for the fact that there is some relation among the stakeholder groups, and the presence of these groups is likely to be jointly determined. By empirically controlling for these potential interrelations, we create a more complete assessment of the impact of these stakeholders/monitors on insurers’ risk taking. Specifically, we find that the presence of some stakeholders offsets the degree or presence of others, and that most stakeholders/monitors are associated with a reduction of overall firm risk.     

Potential of feed additives to improve the environmental impact of European livestock farming: a multi-issue analysis

Today, less than 3% of the 250,000 plant varieties available to agriculture are in use. Sources of (agricultural) biodiversity are under threat and disappearing in many regions. Increasing industrialisation of agriculture and top-down agricultural research have contributed to this dependence on a relatively few plant varieties. This article argues that new approaches to agricultural development research are needed to conserve agricultural diversity, improve crops, and produce food of quality for all. Such an approach should enable small farmers on marginal lands to participate as equal partners alongside agricultural scientists, fairly sharing their know-how, expertise and seeds. Three case studies illustrate how farmers and plant breeders are working together in a diversity of agro-ecological, socio-economic and political contexts to put these new approaches into practice. New forms of collaboration are producing an increase in diversity and a number of promising improved varieties in terms of yields, agronomic traits and taste. These varieties are showing better adaptation to the local environmental conditions without requiring extra external inputs. Long-term success requires that these efforts be backed up by supportive policies, by actions to ensure that policies are implemented, and where necessary by related legislation.     

Carbon accounting tools: are they fit for purpose in the context of arable cropping?

The agricultural sector contributes 9% towards total UK greenhouse gas emissions and so may offer significant potential as a sector to help meet national and international emission reduction targets. In order to help farmers manage their emissions and to encourage more sustainable farming, several carbon accounting tools are now available. This article describes a short study that selected five suitable tools and compared their performance on nine European arable farms, concentrating on the crop production components, to determine how useful they are for assisting in the development of site-specific mitigation strategies and how well they would perform within farm assurance or benchmarking schemes. The results were mixed, with some tools better designed for identifying mitigation opportunities than others. The results also showed that, quantitatively, the results are highly variable between tools and depended on the selected functional unit, this being highly important if the wider aspects of sustainability such as food security are to be considered. However, there is statistical consistency across the tools regarding the ranking order of the farms in terms of their emissions.     

Serving unfair customers

Companies commonly adopt “the customer is always right” maxim as a basic premise for delivering quality service. A close examination of customer behavior, however, reveals that customers can be not only wrong but also blatantly unjust. Unfair customers take advantage of being “always right” by demanding unwarranted privileges and compensation, adversely affecting companies and, in some cases, employees and other customers. Companies can actually strengthen their ability to deliver quality service by dealing effectively with unfair customers.     

International codes of conduct: An analysis of ethical reasoning

Four international codes of conduct (those of the International Chamber of Commerce, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the International Labor Organization, and the United Nations Commission on Transnational Corporations) are analyzed to determine the ethical bases of the behaviors they prescribe for multinational enterprises (MNEs). Although the four codes emphasize different aspects of business behavior, there is substantial agreement regarding many of the moral duties of MNEs. It is suggested that MNEs are morally bound to recognize the codes and to take them into account when engaging in international business.Kathleen A. Getz is a doctoral candidate at the Katz Graduate School of Business of the University of Pittsburgh.For another interpretation, see William C. Frederick's current paper, Multilateral Compacts as a Source of Normative Corporate Guidelines: The Emergence of a Transcultural Corporate Ethic.     

Income Provision in Old Age

Few areas of public policy impinge more directly on individual lifetime welfare than those directed at retirement income. While policy initiatives implemented since the start of the 1970s fall short of major reform, there have nevertheless been substantial changes in the real value of pensions, the coverage of pensions, and the tax treatment of various forms of retirement income. The objective of this article is to catalogue these changes in policy, and to identify the combination of political philosophy and socio-economic pressures underlying them. It also analyses some of the economic consequences of these policies and examines the question of national superannuation. The article concludes that, for the present at least, any reforms in the area of retirement income provision seem likely to be limited to the refinement of the status quo.