Who Are Ethnic Entrepreneurs? A Study of Entrepreneursapos; Ethnic Involvement and Business Characteristics

This article proposes that the term "ethnic entrepreneur" should be defined by the levels of personal involvement of the entrepreneur in the ethnic community instead of reported ethnic grouping. It hypothesizes that significant differences in personal and business characteristics will surface between the most community-involved and least community-involved ethnic entrepreneurs. T-tests were done on 112 Asian and Latino entrepreneurs split into top and bottom quartiles on the personal involvement scale. Results showed several significant differences between the two groups on variables relating to the entrepreneurs' background characteristics, business-related goals, cultural values, business strategies, and business performance.     

Is accounting for sustainability actually accounting for sustainability…and how would we know? An exploration of narratives of organisations and the planet

The emergence of sustainable development as the complex notion through which social and environmental issues must be addressed – whether at policy, personal or organisational levels – has had a growing influence in the accounting literature. In addition to explorations of what sustainability may mean for accounting and finance, we have experienced a growth in both critiques of sustainability reporting (sic) and in experiments and speculations on how accounting for sustainability might advance. This growth – as with social and environmental accounting before it – has very properly attracted critique. One convergent theme in that critique has been a challenge that much of the realist and procedural baggage associated with conventional accounting is no longer apposite when seeking to account for sustainability. What may be required, is a more nuanced understanding of what ‘sustainability’ actually is and how, if at all, it can have any empirical meaning at the level of the organisation. This essay seeks to initiate an auto-critique of accounting for sustainability via an examination of meanings and contradictions in sustainable development which, in turn, leads towards a suggestion for the development of multiple and conditional narratives that whilst no longer realist or totalising, explicitly challenge the hegemonic claims of business movements in the arena of sustainability and sustainable development.     

The impact of alternative operationalizations of industry structural elements on measures of performance for entrepreneurial manufacturing ventures

Using a sample of 115 manufacturing ventures, this study examined elements of industry structure which prior theory and research in the fields of industrial organization economics, strategic management, and entrepreneurship suggest are the most important structural characteristics of industries. Future researchers should carefully select the particular operationalization of industry structure as our research demonstrates that the influence of industry structural elements on measures of firm performance is strongly dependent upon the particular operationalization utilized. In addition, measures of industry structure were found to have a differential impact on alternative measures of firm performance, suggesting that different performance measures are not interchangeable proxies for one another. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Better Access to Water,Better Children's Health: A Mirage?

In Egypt, diarrhoeal diseases remain the main cause of mortality among young children, although the percentage of households with an “improved” access to water, according to the definition used by the World Health Organisation (WHO), is very high. This article seeks to shed light on this paradox, by better identifying the populations affected by problems of access to water, taking into account three dimensions—the time it takes to access a source of water, daily cut-offs and behaviour with respect to storage—and by applying alternative matching estimators to estimate the effects of defective water access on child diarrhoea. It is found that children whose families are identified as having a water access problem through the use of broader-based definitions have a greater likelihood of contracting diarrhoeal diseases. This article, thus, shows that the mortality of children in Egypt could be further reduced by improving households' access to water.     

The cosmopolitan engineering student: an analysis of a recruitment campaign for KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm

This paper presents a study that seeks to examine the messages conveyed in one of the initiatives that have been initialized in order to make young people interested in pursuing engineering studies at technological universities. The study is a case study of the web-based advertising (recruitment) campaign KTH from the Inside designed for KTH Royal Institute of Technology. The analysis draws on a theoretical framework from governmentality studies. The analysis of the campaign conclude that the ideal engineering constructed in the campaign is one of an individual who meets the requirements asked of a lifelong learner with cosmopolitan aspirations. This is an ideal that builds on a notion of progress associated with social progress and sustainability. This is a break with historical and cultural patterns, which symbolically have linked technology to capitalist profitability and masculinity. Though a break with gender patterns is suggested the ideal subject constructed in the campaign is almost exclusively based on the students on Masters’ level. This excludes students at Bachelor programmes. This I argue is problematic as it narrows the recruitment of students to technological universities to a small group of students.     

Development of the Voluntary Simplicity Engagement Scale: Measuring Low-Consumption Lifestyles

Journal of Consumer Policy - Those who choose to reduce their material consumption to seek satisfaction in non-material ways are said to be living a life of voluntary simplicity. This lifestyle has...     

Skilling marginalised or skills eco-system,precarious workers and higher education—A case study of Roma in Liverpool,UK

This qualitative case study explores the Human Resource Development (HRD) interventions utilised in respect of local eco-skills with one marginalised group, the Roma, in the City of Liverpool, UK, and responds to HRD research calls into the cause of cycles of inequality. The case study illustrates the challenges experienced by precarious workers in accessing education and training. Further, it shares the interventions taken to address inequalities that a Higher EducationUK University and a local Non-Government Organisation took between 2016 and 2019. Roma is among the UK and Europe's most disadvantaged and marginalised groups. Working in partnership, utilising Community-Based Participatory Research, we developed three HRD interventions: stakeholder groups (adult and young Roma), motivational interviewing and employability/education events. The findings unpack an understudied experience and context: the need for more attention to developing skills at a local level for marginalised precarious workers. We found that aspiration grew through focused community support and a partnership approach, and educational opportunities emerged, albeit at a relatively slow pace. This paper ends with a call for action for more HRD educators to work with those at the margins of society.     

Are special items informative about future profit margins?

Most proponents of using profit margins in forecasting models suggest that unusual items be removed from income to create a core profit margin. We investigate the appropriateness of this assumption over short and long horizons. Specifically, we explore the association between profit margins and special items over windows of increasing length, from one to five years. We find that the association between past special items and future profit margins differs markedly between firms with low and high core profitability. For low profitability firms, past special items have no association with future profit margins, even over windows of five years. In sharp contrast, for high profitability firms, negative special items are associated with lower future profit margins. This suggests that some firms maintain high core profitability by becoming serial chargers and special items differ from core earnings only to the extent that the allocation process induces timing errors in reported earnings.     

Internal audit: A comfort provider to the audit committee

This study, based upon four Belgian case studies, provides insights on (1) what drives the audit committee to look for the support of the internal audit function; and (2) what makes the internal audit function an expert at providing comfort to the audit committee [Pentland, B.T., 1993. Getting comfortable with the numbers: auditing and the micro-production of macro-order. Accounting, Organizations and Society 18 (7–8), 605–620; Carrington, T., Catasús, B., 2007. Auditing stories about discomfort: becoming comfortable with comfort theory. European Accounting Review 16 (1), 35–58]. We found that audit committees seek comfort, with respect to the control environment and internal controls, two areas in which they confront considerable discomfort. Besides the internal audit function's traditional assurance role, its involvement in improving internal controls provides a significant level of comfort to the audit committee. Internal auditors' unique knowledge about risk management and internal control, combined with appropriate inter-personal and behavioural skills, enables them to provide this comfort. Besides, their internal position, their familiarity with the company, and their position close to people across the company facilitate internal auditors being a major source of comfort for the audit committee. Formal audit reports and presentations, together with informal contacts, seem to be important symbols of comfort [Power, M., 1997. The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification. Oxford University Press, Oxford]. In addition, we found that the overall level of comfort to the audit committee can be enhanced via collaboration between internal and external auditing (the so-called ‘joint audit approach’).     

Perspectives on the measurement of job attitudes: the long view

Insights from 50 years of industrial research and consulting projects were synthesized into a set of themes pertaining to the measurement of job attitudes. The themes include the importance of developing instruments using vocabulary and style familiar to respondents; of programmatic research in developing and validating measures; of paying attention to anomalies and discontinuities in data; and of integrating research results into science and practice. The authors develop recommendations concerning obtaining useful field experience and fostering a scientific environment that respects and encourages efforts to improve psychological measurement.