How and why small to medium size enterprises (SMEs) engage with their communities: an Australian study

• While many studies address corporate philanthropy and corporate community involvement, limited work has been conducted internationally in small to medium businesses and even less has been elucidated about the Australian small business landscape.
• This article reports findings from qualitative research investigating giving to community causes by 52 small to medium size enterprises (SMEs) across Australia.
• Three key questions addressed in this article are: (1) why SMEs engage with community (2) how they engage with community and (3) obstacles they perceive in giving.
• Our findings suggest that SMEs have a preference to avoid cash gifts, prefer to support local causes and would benefit from the development of best practice giving guidelines and templates.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Academic foundations for hospitality and tourism research: A reexamination of citations

A 1999 study looking at the research relationships within and between the disciplines of hospitality and tourism is revisited. When compared to the 1999 study, the current study reveals that there is more within-discipline citing, suggesting that both the hospitality and tourism academic areas are maturing, and not relying as heavily on other disciplines. Further analysis of the citations outside hospitality is done to elicit a more in-depth picture of where hospitality and tourism citations are coming from. Implications are discussed.     

The effect of exit barriers upon strategic flexibility

The conceptual construct, exit barriers, is expanded using both statistical findings and the results of field studies. The immobility of resources, it is suggested, can be overcome by helping marginal competitors to exit from potentially volatile businesses. The implementation of such tactics can be adapted to the firm's own strategic commitment and to the nature of the business in question, although it is expected that firms which might consider purchasing the physical and intangible assets of competitors in order to help them to scale high exit barriers, must themselves perceive the business to be of sufficiently high strategic importance to do so.     

Transforming identities: Accounting professionals and the transition to motherhood

This paper investigates the relationship between the experience of motherhood and employment within the UK accounting profession, by examining the oral history narratives of a small group of accountants who have recently become mothers and returned to work. Drawing from contemporary theories on identity, it considers how individuals make sense of the different social identities of accountant and mother, and to what extent social, institutional and cultural factors shape and restrict the ways in which the self is experienced. It also explores the implications for both the self and the accounting profession of interconnections and juxtapositions between the ostensibly private sphere of the home and the public sphere of employment. It suggests that as the identities of mother and accountant are entwined, they undertake a process of redefinition and transformation of the self.     

A classification of business-to-business buying decisions: risk importance and probability as a framework for e-business benefits

Business-to-business (B2B) markets have been considered an attractive e-business venue for the realization of cost reduction and exchange creation utilities. However, as marketers have long argued, there are different types of buying situations, and the benefits sought in each may vary substantially. The present work builds on the thinking of previous industrial buying typologies by integrating perceived risk concepts into the business buying decision. Specifically, we develop a classification grid of industrial buying situations and then explicitly link likely e-business benefits to the various situations. The proposed framework holds implications for management and research related to supply chain relationships.     

Social Capital and Organizational Change in High‐Involvement and Traditional Work Organizations

We present new evidence indicating that changing from a traditional human resource management (HRM) environment to an innovative one entails a change not only in formal work practices, but also in the informal networks and patterns of interaction among employees. We focus on differences in the social capital of these workplaces and measure differences in the structure of interactions and information transfer among employees across a sample of manufacturing lines with a common production technology and different HRM systems. We then consider the implications of these differences and show that the change from one form of workplace practices to the other is therefore not just a matter of paying for the direct costs of a new set of HRM practices. Rather, it would involve a disruptive overhaul in the entire network of interactions among all workers at the plant.     

Can consumers enforce environmental regulations? The role of the market in hazardous waste compliance

We examine the U.S. hazardous waste management industry to assess the role that consumers play in encouraging environmental compliance. We first examine whether environmental performance affects consumer demand and find that noncompliance does decrease demand, at least in the short term. Next we consider whether market characteristics affect compliance behavior. While we do not find evidence that market size affects behavior, local competition does appear to increase compliance. However, as competition becomes less localized, it has a smaller effect. Finally, regardless of the pressures exerted by consumers to comply, commercial managers are less likely to be in compliance than on-site managers. For example, President Bush’s 2006 budget request for EPA significantly cut funding to the states who are responsible for over 95% of environmental inspections (ECOS, 2005). At the federal level, the number of positions for compliance monitoring decreased by over 17% from FY 2001 to FY 2003 (U.S. GAO, 2002).     

The Impact of Financial Reporting Regulation on the Market Valuation of Reported Environmental Liabilities: Preliminary Evidence from US and Canadian Public Companies

This study investigates the economic consequences of four financial reporting regulations relating to environmental liability reporting in samples of 170 US and 156 Canadian public companies during the period 1984 to 1997. The study's purpose is to investigate the factors that make financial reporting regulation effective in enhancing the relevance and reliability of accounting information. Prior research provides the theory that financial reporting regulations impose costs on managers and create incentives for them to report accounting information that is relevant and unbiased. This study assesses these regulations' enforceability, which is viewed as arising from the regulator's power to enforce its regulations by sanctions or penalties. It tests whether the relation between market valuation and reported environmental liability accruals changes when the new regulations are enacted, and whether regulation with high enforceability has a more significant impact than regulation with low enforceability. This study uses a residual‐income valuation model to measure the valuation coefficient, or multiplier, on reported environmental liability accruals. Changes in this coefficient are used as indicators of changes in the market's assessment of the value relevance and bias of the reported accounting information. This study provides preliminary evidence indicating that financial reporting regulations issued by the securities market regulator and the accounting profession are associated with changes in the relation between market value and reported environmental liabilities in some cases, and suggests avenues for further international accounting research on the factors involved in financial reporting regulation's impact.     

Firm values and sovereign wealth fund investments

We analyze the impact of sovereign wealth fund (SWF) investments on firm values and provide evidence consistent with the tradeoff between the monitoring and lobbying benefits versus tunneling and expropriation costs of SWFs as blockholders. The data show significant positive (negative) returns to announcements of SWF investments (divestments). The returns are non-monotonic, first rising (falling) and then falling (rising) with the share sought (sold) for investments (divestments). Moreover, we find that SWFs are often active investors. Slightly more than half of the target firms experience one or more events indicative of SWF monitoring activity or influence.