Sodium and ready meals: a survey of Irish consumer awareness

The aim of the study was to gain an understanding of Irish consumer attitudes towards ready meals and current sodium issues in Ireland. A questionnaire was distributed to 357 consumers via convenience quota sampling to a range of nationalities in both rural and urban/city areas of Ireland. The survey revealed that a high proportion of respondents (45%; n = 161) were worried about the amount of salt they consumed. Despite this, 58% (n = 207) stated they never look at the sodium/salt contents on nutritional labels with 68% (n = 244) claiming that sodium/salt contents would never affect their buying choice. The survey also uncovered that 76% (n = 270) of the Irish consumers surveyed consider ready meals to be high in sodium and 80% (n = 285) consider them to be an unhealthy option. Despite this, 50% (n = 179) of the respondents consumed a ready meal at least once a week with a further 17% (n = 59) consuming them two to three times a week. Of those who did consume ready meals, 78% (n = 191) chose them due to their convenience. A total of 75% (n = 269) of all the respondents said they would choose a chilled ready meal over its frozen counterpart. The reason for this being attributed to the fact that chilled ready meals were perceived to be healthier (44%; n = 158) and of better quality (54%; n = 194) than their frozen counterparts. Results from this study highlight the need for concerted actions involving consumers, manufacturers and retailers to reduce sodium levels in Irish ready meals, as despite being reasonably aware of the sodium issue consumers were not making informed choices to reduce sodium/salt consumption.     

Health care in Australia 1980–2000

Subjective information, collected in this case by a modified Delphi method, can reduce uncertainty and clarify priorities for decision makers. Although Australian health care is likely to face increasing costs and a restriction of some services, a more flexible system will emerge—with community-based care, continuing professional education, and greater use of paramedical staff.     

The Impotence of Accountability: The Relationship Between Greater Transparency and Corporate Reform

This paper explores the role of accounting in the attempted reform of the corporation during the “progressive era” in the United States. Focusing on the activities of three institutional bodies in the early twentieth century, the paper documents how their repeated recourse to “publicity,” which relied crucially on accounting technologies, failed to turn the corporation into an entity more sensitive to the public interest. Specifically, two interrelated contributions are made to existing literature on accounting and corporate governance. Firstly, the paper documents the early historical development of the now taken‐for‐granted phenomenon of accounting and adjudicating at the entity level (Miller and Power 2013). Secondly, the paper offers a rejoinder to present‐day projects of corporate governance which identify better and enhanced accountability as key to the successful reform of the corporation. During the progressive era, accounting expanded and territorialized new spaces, bringing trusts out of a hitherto secretive, private realm and into the view of the public. Yet this was not enough to engender substantive corporate reform.     

The Pace and Stability of Small Enterprise Innovation in Highly Dynamic Economies: A China‐Based Template*

In this paper, we analyze the dynamics of knowledge spillover entrepreneurship in the Chinese “transitional” context, as a template for the evaluation of the pace and stability of small business innovation institutionalization in many transition economies, and we also provide theory and evidence to further develop knowledge spillover entrepreneurship theory. Based on the first available cross‐sectional data set (2005 for 2004) covering 158 manufacturing sectors over the five Chinese provinces representing one‐third of China's industrial output, the empirical analysis provides evidence that local competition/specialization affect the pace/stability of innovation institutionalization in small enterprises and large‐medium enterprises differentially, suggesting new insights for research and policy in the transition‐economy/small business management context.