Accounting and Accountability in Fiji: A Review and Synthesis

This paper reviews accounting and accountability research in Fiji. The review is based on 47 papers published since 1978 in accounting refereed journals, professional journals, edited book chapters and theses and other refereed journals outside accounting. In addition to categorisation of the reviewed papers according to accounting topics, theories and methods of data collection, some themes to which the papers could be related are discussed. Financial reporting/accountability research is the most popular research in Fiji followed by new public management research, with sustainability accounting research the third most popular. The paper's findings suggest some directions for future accounting research in Fiji and where the data can possibly be sourced for such research. We conclude that more research is needed in the Fijian context that focuses on accounting and the state, performance auditing, indigenous accounting, SMEs and accountability.     

Prepayment and future cross-buying: an exploratory analysis

Recent research has provided important insights on consumers’ preferences for prepayment mechanisms and on its impact on consumption of a given product or service. However, little is known about how prepayment influences future purchases of goods and services. We consider this question in a contractual setting within the services industry, involving different purchasing decisions over time. Based on a large-scale empirical test, we find that prepay customers make fewer changes to their cross-buying levels (i.e., the number of different services they buy from the company) from one contractual period to another, and that this effect is more salient for the firm's new customers. We propose possible explanatory mechanisms for this effect. For instance, based on mental budgeting theory, we suggest that prepayment customers may set mental budgets and track expenditures against this budget leading them to resist further investments. Alternatively, prepayment customers may be more certain about their consumption behavior leading to fewer changes over time.

     

Performance Management Systems in the Public Housing Sector: Dissemination to Diffusion

This article examines a case study of the implementation of a performance management system in public sector housing in Fiji. The aim is to explore and provide interpretations of why performance management and measures were introduced and implemented and reveal if the indicators were appropriate to serve the strategies of the organisation. The article draws on diffusion of innovation theory and explores the effectiveness of performance management. The research approach is qualitative in nature and uses a case study strategy. Interviews and documentary evidence provide the empirical basis for the research. The organisation has established formal objectives at both institutional and departmental levels and has a performance management system at both levels. With growing pressure for commercialisation from donor agencies, the accounting and managerial practices seem to contradict the organisation's original purpose to provide housing needs for the poor. The case study extends the literature on performance management in developing countries and illuminates the deficiencies within the performance management system. This study has implications for practitioners and researchers as it promotes a better understanding of a new public management practice technique which, in this case, was inadequate to satisfy local housing needs.     

Topics in Applied Economics: Tools,Issues and Institutions a Festschrift Volume for Professor U. Sankar

Journal of Quantitative Economics -     

Manifestations of rural entrepreneurship: the journey so far and future pathways

Management Review Quarterly - Rural entrepreneurship has manifested into a diverse and progressive field of research in the last two decades. It has seen research amalgamating from different fields...     

Communication costs in the performance of unrelated tasks: Continuum models and finite models

We consider two two‐person organizations, called A and B. Each organization faces a changing environment; an environment has two components and each of them is privately observed by one of the organization's two members. Each organization's task is to respond to the current environment by taking a correct action; the correct action is a known function of the environment. However, the task of A is totally unrelated to the task of B: if A knew B's current environment and B's current correct action, that would tell A nothing at all about its own current correct action (and vice versa). Now suppose that each organization performs its task by a sequence of message announcements that stop when an “action‐taker”; has just enough information about the two members’ private observations so that he can take the correct action. Suppose we measure the effort this requires by the size of the set of possible message announcements. Then a compelling conjecture says that there can be no saving in total effort if we merge the two organizations into a single four‐person organization in which a single action‐taker takes both actions.

The conjecture turns out to be true when the possible messages form a continuum whose size is measured by its dimension, provided the message‐announcing procedure obeys suitable regularity conditions. When we turn to a model in which the number of possible messages is finite, the situation is different. While a certain general proposition about coverings and projections is the main tool in proving the “continuum”; conjecture, the finite analog of that proposition is (surprisingly) false. The finite version of the conjecture holds, on the other hand, when one adds a certain regularity requirement ("contiguity") to the message‐announcement procedure. The truth of the finite conjecture without such a requirement remains open.     

Career success schemas and their contextual embeddedness: A comparative configurational perspective

We introduce career success schemas as critical for understanding how people in different contexts perceive and understand career success. Using a comparative configurational approach, we show, in a study of 13 countries, that two structural characteristics of career success schemas—complexity and convergence—differ across country contexts and are embedded in specific configurations of institutional factors. Adopting complexity and convergence as primary dimensions, we propose a taxonomy of career success schemas at the country level. Based on this taxonomy, we contribute to the understanding of subjective career success across countries, discuss the importance of schemas for organisational career systems in multinational enterprises, and propose specific guidelines for future comparative careers research.