A Review of: THE EVALUATION OF RISKY INTERRELATED INVESTMENTS by Frederick S. Hillier

The flood of publications and seminars on activity costing in the last few years suggests that companies suddenly encountered a need for better management accounting information in the 1980s. In fact, management accounting's relevance to most business decision-making deteriorated steadily since the 1950s. However, most companies did not perceive these inadequacies in management accounting until the early 1980s. Current interest in activity management and activity costing reflects the convergence around 1980 of two forces: a long-undetected set of problems in management accounting that seems to originate in the 1950s; and the growth of new competitive pressures in the 1970s that made companies acutely aware of these problems. Although these two forces arose independently, their interaction in the 1970s led to the rise of activity-based management thinking. This paper describes the past, present, and future of activity-based management: past uses of financial accounting information that confounded companies' efforts to plan marketing strategies and to control operations after the 1950s; present ideas for solving these problems with activity-based management concepts such as activity costing; and the likely future direction of activity-based management thought.     

Do‐It‐Yourself Projects as Path toward Female Empowerment in a Gendered Market Place

The role of women as homeowners and heads of households are changing the dynamics in which women engage in do‐it‐yourself (DIY) behavior. Because there is limited extant theory associated with female involvement in DIY behavior, a qualitative study using in‐depth interviews was conducted. Through grounded theory analysis several themes emerged during the coding process, and the themes of empowerment were especially relevant to the informants in this study. Five dimensions of empowerment were identified: empowerment through project initiation, production mastery, adding economic value to goods and services, unleashing creative potential, and empowerment through ownership. The findings show women's involvement in DIY behavior and the consumption of DIY‐related goods is closely tied to the concept of female empowerment.     

Diversification, Vertical Integration, and the Regional Pattern of Dairy Farm Size

Dairy farm size differs considerably across the United States. We analyze patterns of dairy farm size to determine how differences in vertical integration and diversification relate to farm size. We find that diversification accounts for little size variation. For vertical integration, the partial correlation with dairy herd size is strongly negative. Dairy value-added size measures vary less across regions than herd size, indicating that an important part of herd size variation relates to vertical integration. Nonetheless, dairy farms in the Pacific and South regions remain much larger than farms in the traditional dairy regions, even when accounting for vertical integration.     

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Trends in the international licence trade

The term “international licence trade” signifies the worldwide buying and selling, across national frontiers, of technical and industrial licences. In contrast to the trade in goods, which involves the exchange of material goods, the transfer of licences concerns immaterial goods, i.e. legally protected industrial property rights (patents, registered or ornamental designs, copy rights) and unprotected technical knowledge and inventions (the so-called “know-how”).