When Hosts Become Guests: Return Visits and Diasporic Identities in a Commonwealth Eastern Caribbean Community

The broad intent of this paper is to further contribute to the existing literature that addresses VFR tourism. It suggests that the return visit may ultimately be positioned as a form or type of travel within the larger category of VFR tourism, but a form or type that has built within it a more clear understanding of historic and social contexts and processes. The other broad intent of the paper is to highlight the importance of the relationship between the returning visitor, originating from diasporic communities abroad, and the host community as a stage for the negotiation of identities. The return visit is shown to reflect such underlying processes yet continue to incorporate aspects of individual motivation, which when taken together demonstrate the fluidity of diasporic spaces and transnational identity structures. Using data obtained from ethnographic fieldwork among social networks within the Commonwealth Eastern Caribbean community in Toronto, Canada, it is suggested that return visits are used to retain social histories and contextualise social and cultural backgrounds after migration. The implications for VFR tourism and the relationship between diasporas, transnationalism and tourism are discussed, as is a conceptual model of the return visit.     

Why Ansett Airlines Failed and How to Prevent It Happening Again

Ansett Airlines, Australia's second largest, ceased operations in September 2001. With debts of $A3 billion it was placed in administration on behalf of creditors. The immediate consequences included 16,000 employees out of work and, on the day flights ceased, an estimated 47,000 passengers with tickets in hand but no planes to board. Anger and annoyance triggered a search for somebody to blame and many reports in the media, along with ministers in the Australian Government, blamed the airline's management. An analysis of the case leads to a different conclusion. While Ansett's management might have been deficient, a factor that seems to have triggered the failure, a deeper issue is its principal cause. It is the policy of competitive markets imposed on Australia's domestic airlines by successive governments. In a country where the resident population and the tourist destinations are dispersed over great distances, there is high dependence on airline services. Simultaneously the small population combined with the geography of major air routes and the economics of airlines means that air travel markets cannot sustain a highly competitive airline industry of the sort seen in the USA in recent decades and introduced in Australia in the 1990s. Australia needs intelligent airline regulation, a co-operative and sustainable industrial framework within which competition is tolerated, but only in a limited scope.     

A fundamentalist perspective on accounting and implications for accounting research

This paper presents a framework for addressing normative accounting issues for reporting to shareholders. The framework is an alternative to the emerging Conceptual Framework of the International Accounting Standards Board and the Financial Accounting Standards Board. The framework can be broadly characterized as a utilitarian approach to accounting standard setting. It has two main features. First, accounting is linked to valuation models under which shareholders use accounting information to values their stakes. Second, the desirable characteristics of accounting information are inferred from the demand of investors and analysts who use the information in practice. This stands in contrast to the “qualitative characteristics” in the Boards’ Framework which are embraced largely on the basis of their aesthetic appeal. These features lead to a set of broad accounting principles that resolve “recognition” and “measurement” issues at the core of the Boards’ Conceptual Framework and also the central issue of a balance sheet approach versus an income statement approach. The framework in the paper also frames the research questions for researchers interested in accounting policy.