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Copyright of Journal of Economics, Finance & Accounting Studies is the property of Al-Kindi Center for Research & Development and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Muthanna Journal of Administrative & Economics Sciences is the property of Muthanna Journal of Administrative & Economics Sciences and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Prices applied to internal transactions between the business segments or divisions of a company in transactions between related entities within a group (transfer pricing) can have a significant impact on a company's competitive advantage. Transfer pricing policy influences the profits of operating segments, resource allocation and the need for segment reporting. The two main approaches to transfer pricing are the tax and managerial approaches. The aim of this research was to test whether multidivisional companies operating in Serbia give more importance to the tax or the managerial aspect of transfer pricing policy. Another research aim was to determine whether segment reporting is more developed in companies in Serbia that have the legal obligation to prepare consolidated financial statements. Both research hypotheses were confirmed using the questionnaire method on a final sample of 52 large and medium-sized companies (out of 1912 large and medium-sized companies operating in Serbia). First, our findings show that tax compliance is more dominant in transfer pricing than the managerial perspective in the Serbian companies analyzed. Second, we found that mandatory consolidated financial reporting and related segment reporting can influence the managerial approach to transfer pricing in Serbian multidivisional companies and groups. Other factors (production orientation of companies, developed responsibility accounting and managers' bonuses, for example) also encourage this approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Economic Administrative & Legal Sciences is the property of Arab Journal of Sciences & Research Publishing (AJSRP) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper reviews Nigeria's experience with economic reforms and outlines major policy measures that have been implemented. The paper also addresses three main issues in the public sector of the Nigeria economy, namely, problems in the management of public expenditure, constraints in the implementation of policy reforms to overcome the management problems and prospects of successful implementation of policy reforms, it concludes that given the level of performance of the reform effort, its success may depend on the reform of the public sector financial reporting system by adopting an accounting system that is suitable for measuring performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Economic Administrative & Legal Sciences is the property of Arab Journal of Sciences & Research Publishing (AJSRP) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal of Economic Administrative & Legal Sciences is the property of Arab Journal of Sciences & Research Publishing (AJSRP) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper examines whether an agent becomes liable to defensive harm by engaging in a morally permissible but foreseeably risk-imposing activity that subsequently threatens objectively unjustified harm. It first clarifies the notion of a foreseeably risk-imposing activity by proposing that an activity should count as foreseeably risk-imposing if an agent may morally permissibly perform it only if she abides by certain duties of care. Those who argue that engaging in such an activity can render an agent liable to defensive harm ground this liability in the luck egalitarian thought that we may justly hold individuals responsible for the consequences of their voluntary choices. Against this, I argue that a luck egalitarian commitment to holding people responsible cannot, by itself, ground liability to defensive harm. It can help ground such liability only against the backdrop of a distributively just society, and only if further considerations speak morally in favour of attaching certain well-defined costs to individuals' risk-imposing choices. I conclude by suggesting that if an account of liability applies robustly across distributively just and unjust contexts alike, then what grounds an agent's liability is plausibly not her responsibility for threatening objectively unjustified harm, but her culpability for doing so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Algorithms silently structure our lives. Algorithms can determine whether someone is hired, promoted, offered a loan, or provided housing as well as determine which political ads and news articles consumers see. Yet, the responsibility for algorithms in these important decisions is not clear. This article identifies whether developers have a responsibility for their algorithms later in use, what those firms are responsible for, and the normative grounding for that responsibility. I conceptualize algorithms as value-laden, rather than neutral, in that algorithms create moral consequences, reinforce or undercut ethical principles, and enable or diminish stakeholder rights and dignity. In addition, algorithms are an important actor in ethical decisions and influence the delegation of roles and responsibilities within these decisions. As such, firms should be responsible not only for the value-laden-ness of an algorithm but also for designing who-does-what within the algorithmic decision. As such, firms developing algorithms are accountable for designing how large a role individual will be permitted to take in the subsequent algorithmic decision. Counter to current arguments, I find that if an algorithm is designed to preclude individuals from taking responsibility within a decision, then the designer of the algorithm should be held accountable for the ethical implications of the algorithm in use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use experimental economic markets to examine the impact of changing institutional design features on audit quality. Specifically, we manipulate auditors' economic accountability to managers by altering who hires the auditor—a manager or an independent third party—and auditors' psychological accountability to investors by explicitly stating that the auditor is hired on the investors' behalf. Our design shifts auditors' accountability from managers, who have directional goal preferences, to investors, who prefer judgment accuracy. We find that removing auditors' economic accountability to managers and replacing it with psychological accountability to investors significantly increases audit quality. This increase in audit quality occurs despite the independent third party randomly hiring auditors. In an additional treatment, we incorporate auditor accuracy into the third-party hiring algorithm and find even higher audit quality. Our results suggest that altering auditors' accountability relationships can significantly enhance audit quality. Data Availability: The laboratory market data used in this study are available from the authors upon request. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to modern management theory, the performance evaluation based entirely on objective indicators within an organization is not considered to be an effective tool. The research objective of this paper is to suggest a contemporary model for evaluation in the budgetary control process of the organization. The model is based on a modern evaluation approach and a complex toolkit of management science and mathematical theories of fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic. In this model, subjective evaluations of the responsibility centres' achievement and performance in budgetary control are generated by fuzzy techniques based on a combination of quantitative and qualitative indicators. The model also allows for an immediate transformation of quantitative into qualitative evaluations and vice versa both in fuzzy and crisp types. The proposed model is an appropriate tool for the subjective performance evaluation of objective results from the organization's budgetary control process under uncertainty. This model was tested in a Bulgarian enterprise for unique wood furniture manufacturing in July 2018 and was applied to five cost centres, with the results demonstrating its applicability. According to our study, the model provides a modern solution to a management problem that is unresolved in the scientific literature and is important to the budgetary management practice of organizations. We believe that the further improvement and implementation of the model will contribute to more effective management and thus to the enhancing competitiveness of the organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the hierarchical aspects of responsibility accounting and which accounting measures should be utilized in evaluating managers. It states that a variety of theories of behavior and organization are embodied in literature on responsibility accounting, including expectancy theory, contingency theory, and principal-agent modeling. It examines the use of worker performance in evaluating management, and in use of explicit or implicit communication from the worker to evaluate management in lieu of worker performance.

The article focuses on collusion and monosyllable cost allocation. It states that most cost accounting textbooks suggest that a manager's evaluation should only examine aspects of performance he or she can directly influence in the specified time period being considered. It comments that businesses allocate fixed and other joint costs to other departments even when those costs are not necessarily controllable by the heads of those departments. It suggests that the principal's best interest might be to treat uncontrollable costs as if they were controllable by the manager so that allocation of uncontrollable costs to various departments for managerial control purposes will be consistent with responsibility accounting concepts.

An important characteristic of management control systems is the use of responsibility accounting. As Baiman [1982, p. 197] notes: "Responsibility accounting states that a person should be evaluated only on the basis of those factors that he controls. This is usually interpreted to mean that a person should be evaluated only on the basis of those outcomes that he affects [emphasis in the original]." This notion gives rise to the desire to distinguish between controllable and noncontrollable costs because the latter presumably should not be used to evaluate an individual's performance. For example, Solomons [1965, p. 83] states that "It is almost a self-evident proposition that, in appraising the performance of divisional management, no account should be taken of matters outside the division's control." However, this interpretation of responsibility accounting is often violated in practice. For example, we often observe a division manager who has profit responsibility for his division being evaluated and compensated on the basis of his division's capacity costs, over which he exercises no control. In this paper, we reexamine the process of constructing performance evaluation and compensation measures with the purpose of providing a possible rationale for why managers (hereafter, agents) are evaluated and rewarded on the basis of costs over which they exercise no control. We do so within a principal-agent context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how information is collected and used in the evaluation of corporate financial performance and the system of management controls from an accounting perspective. The focus is on the decision-influencing role and decision-facilitating role of information, according to Demski and Feltham (1976). The mathematical models explained are: Decision-Influencing Information in the Basic Principal-Agent Model which includes budget variances and conditional investigation procedures; Decision-Influencing Information in an Expanded Principal-Agent Model which refers to responsibility accounting and cost allocation; Decision-Facilitating Information in the Principal-Agent Model which mentions first-best solutions; and a model referred to as a multiperiod setting.

In this article, we provide evidence concerning the extent to which managers are to blame when their firms become bankrupt. We study a sample of firms that file for Chapter 11 and determine the actions taken by the firms' managers during the three-year period before the filing. We compare the sample with a control sample of firms that performed better. We suggest that the comparison provides evidence on the way managers act as their firms sink into financial trouble and whether financial distress is the result of incompetence or excessively self-serving managerial decisions or due to factors outside of management's control. We find that managers of the Chapter 11 firms and the control firms make very similar decisions and that, on average, neither set of managers is perceived to be taking value-reducing actions. These results do not change when we control for managerial turnover or managerial ownership. We also find that when managers are replaced in firms that eventually file for Chapter 11 protection, the market does not respond positively, regardless of whether the new managers are from inside or outside the firm. Our findings suggest that when managers are blamed for financial distress, they are serving as scapegoats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Research Papers of the Wroclaw University of Economics / Prace Naukowe Uniwersytetu Ekonomicznego we Wroclawiu is the property of Uniwersytet Ekonomiczny we Wroclawiu and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Research Papers of the Wroclaw University of Economics / Prace Naukowe Uniwersytetu Ekonomicznego we Wroclawiu is the property of Uniwersytet Ekonomiczny we Wroclawiu and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Eastern-European Journal of Enterprise Technologies is the property of PC TECHNOLOGY CENTER and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The importance of better analysis and decentralization of decision-making is increasing in today's fast-paced, complex, and large-scale business operations. Responsibility accounting was introduced to accommodate the need for decentralization, accurate information, and analysis. In this paper, we review the evolution of the concept of responsibility accounting (RA) and responsibility centers since the 1920s. Based on the concept of responsibility accounting, managers responsible for their centers' costs should have authority over those centers' activities and expenditures. This study of RA's historical development reveals interrelationships of cost, profit, revenue, and investment centers. Organizations' daily activities-such as manufacturing, sales, and supply chain coordination-require capital investments, resulting in the investment centers' covering all other centers. Traditionally, operations or manufacturing has been considered a cost center, while marketing and sales have been considered a revenue center. The intersection of cost and revenue centers is the profit center, which needs information from both the cost and the revenue centers and is related to transfer pricing. In this paper, we suggest a new center, namely research and development (R&D), to accommodate the ever-changing needs of development activities. Understanding the relationship among responsibility centers provides an organized information flow, which can enhance decision-making and cost control. This study focuses on the historical background and the position of responsibility accounting in an organizational accounting system. Future research avenues are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - The purpose of this note is to expose accounting students and others to recent findings in management control, specifically to the relationship between the informativeness of a performance measure and its usefulness in performance evaluation. Design/methodology/approach - Numerical examples illuminate key ideas and are easy to follow and replicate by students. Findings - Seemingly in contradiction to the controllability principle, performance measures that are informative about actions taken by employees are not necessarily useful for performance evaluation. This occurs when the performance being measured is related to an intermediate task, such as prepping items prior to final assembly. If prepping is an important factor in the quality of not only the intermediate good but also the finished good, and the quality of the finished good can be reasonably measured, it may not be useful to measure the prepping performance. This result holds even if obtaining the intermediate measure is costless and the intermediate measure provides unique information on the effort given to the intermediate task. Originality/value - Opportunities to measure employees' intermediate outputs are ubiquitous; therefore, judicious decisions should be made regarding the use of limited monitoring resources. This note contains intuitive, easy-to-follow illustrations (based on recent findings) that will help students and others identify situations where such evaluations are more and less useful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Research Papers of the Wroclaw University of Economics / Prace Naukowe Uniwersytetu Ekonomicznego we Wroclawiu is the property of Uniwersytet Ekonomiczny we Wroclawiu and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Purpose This paper aims to focus on accounting for human rights. It explores the validity of conflicting theoretical perspectives on accounting and their ability to reduce the gap between accounting and accountability for human rights.Design/methodology/approach This study relies on the notion of topos to develop a pragmatic constructivist perspective on conventional accounting and social accounting with respect to human rights. Applying pragmatic constructivism permits a better understanding and assessment of the ethics underpinning the conventional and social accounting approaches.Findings The ethics underpinning the topos of conventional accounting offer a reductive explanation of the agency of organizational actors, so inhibiting moral and social responsibility. Furthermore, the calculative logic that dominates this topos promotes a monovocal form of communication (to shareholders) and translates values per se into instrumental values. By contrast, the social accounting topos sheds new light on the role that accounting may play in detecting human rights violations, by focusing more on communication and social values. However, for this topos to be valid, alternative management practices that go beyond voluntary social reporting need to be further developed.Originality/value Human rights accountability is an urgent challenge for companies in today’s society. However, scholars have largely disregarded the role of accounting in the process of holding companies accountable for human rights violations. By questioning the relationship between accounting and human rights, this paper takes a first step towards resolving this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 50s and 60s of the twentieth century was a period of significant diversification of the economic activities. As a result of that, big companies called conglomerates appeared. The biggest problem with them was efficient management. The system of central management did not work properly. In response to this the concept of decentralization was created. It assumed the transfer of decision-making powers to lower level of the organizational structure and increase the independence of separated areas of the company. The implementation of the decentralization concept also required modification of an existing information system in the company. In response to this responsibility accounting was established. The heart of it were separate areas of the company called responsibility centres. This modificated information system provided top management regular internal reports about economic situation in each of separated centres using multi-block income statement. The emergence of large companies resulted in problems not only with efficient management but also the assessment of the economic situation by external users, in particular, the company investors. They also noticed the value of the responsibility accounting. However, the fact that the investors began to demand the disclosure of such information as a part of financial statements, was the first step towards the creation of segments reporting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of REMAH Journal is the property of Research & Development of Human Recourses Center (REMAH) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Research Papers of the Wroclaw University of Economics / Prace Naukowe Uniwersytetu Ekonomicznego we Wroclawiu is the property of Uniwersytet Ekonomiczny we Wroclawiu and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This research was aimed at evaluating the methodological framework to be applied in strategic as well as in responsibility accounting, as a prerequisite for ensuring the relevant information, necessary for preparing and evaluating sustainable development strategies, using Directive 2014/95/EU framework. In order to assess the current situation in the Republic of Croatia, a survey on the sample of 64 big Croatian companies in different industries in the year 2013 was conducted. The sample of selected companies was chosen on the basis of membership in the Croatian Business Council for Sustainable Development (HR BCSD) and of the companies that follow the principles of sustainable development in their business and declare themselves as environmentally and socially responsible. Research results will be confirmed through comparison with previous findings conducted in the year 2007, but also compared with the relevant information collected from 71 companies of eight EU countries. The goal is to assess whether the achieved level of strategic and sustainable accounting tools in the Croatian companies are sufficient to provide relevant information for non-financial reporting for external and internal users in the process of long and short term decision making. Recognized gaps will be the starting points for defining the opportunities and areas in the process of harmonization between internal and external sustainability reporting system. The goal is in recognizing starting points, opportunities and areas, which are important for internal and external sustainability reporting, taking into, account the provisions of the globally accepted standards and the new EU Directive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Polish Journal of Management Studies is the property of Czestochowa University of Technology, Faculty of Management and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article focuses on the responsibility judgments in organized collective cases for individualism's accounting problem and for accounting strict individualist moral information perspective that favors collective moral autonomy. It contends the inability of retrospective evaluation to depart from prospective member duty contents. It also offers insight on collective case responsibility judgments binding prospective and retrospective responsibility.

Copyright of Research Papers of the Wroclaw University of Economics / Prace Naukowe Uniwersytetu Ekonomicznego we Wroclawiu is the property of Uniwersytet Ekonomiczny we Wroclawiu and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The role of management accounting in the creation of information resources is shown. Much of the information is created in the accounting and analytical system. Improvement of managing restaurant business is based on management accounting data. Its strength is responsibility accounting. Approaches to organization of accounting for responsibility centers in enterprises of restaurant business, three types of such accounting and its benefits for management aiming to improve, upgrade and create a new process useful for the client are defined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Economics & Administrative Sciences / Afyon Kocatepe Üniversitesi Iktisadi ve Idari Bilimler Fakültesi Dergisi is the property of Afyon Kocatepe University, Faculty of Business Administration and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Research Papers of the Wroclaw University of Economics / Prace Naukowe Uniwersytetu Ekonomicznego we Wroclawiu is the property of Uniwersytet Ekonomiczny we Wroclawiu and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Research Papers of the Wroclaw University of Economics / Prace Naukowe Uniwersytetu Ekonomicznego we Wroclawiu is the property of Uniwersytet Ekonomiczny we Wroclawiu and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Research Papers of the Wroclaw University of Economics / Prace Naukowe Uniwersytetu Ekonomicznego we Wroclawiu is the property of Uniwersytet Ekonomiczny we Wroclawiu and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Research Papers of the Wroclaw University of Economics / Prace Naukowe Uniwersytetu Ekonomicznego we Wroclawiu is the property of Uniwersytet Ekonomiczny we Wroclawiu and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal of Faculty of Political Science is the property of Journal of Faculty of Political Sciences and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Purpose – The global biofuels sector has expanded rapidly in the past decade, with feedstock expansion penetrating many tropical areas. While the emerging demand for biofuels represents an opportunity for developing countries, it also poses a host of social and environmental risks. Large investments are needed to finance expansion of biofuel and feedstock production, suggesting that the financial sector may have a crucial role to play in mitigating these risks. This paper seeks to explore the role of financiers in expanding biofuel feedstock production and refining in tropical forest-rich countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America to better understand the role and future potential of responsible finance in the biofuel sector. Design/methodology/approach – The analysis draws on published data and reports from academia, industry, governments, civil society and the press, to quantify the magnitude and source of investments made from 2000-2010 in 16 countries sampled from "ecoregions" subject to high rates of forest conversion, weak land tenure institutions, and vulnerable communities. Findings – It is found that the case study countries received USD 5.3-7.3 billion for feedstock production and USD 5.7-6.7 billion for biofuel refining between 2000 and 2009. This was financed by a mix of entrepreneurs, private banks, investors, governments and multilateral banks. While no clear patterns emerge, foreign banks and institutional investors rank as "important" for most feedstocks and regions. Multilateral banks and domestic institutional investors seem to be the least important. Few financiers have criteria in place in order to ensure sustainable investing practices, and those who do tend to have policies of limited quality. Originality/value – While much has been written on biofuel sustainability and governance, there is little research that delineates the nature of investment and finance in the sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - This paper aims to identify how the news media cover organizational crisis responsibility and crisis response strategies and, if at all, how they differ by crisis types. Design/methodology/approach - The approach takes the form of a content analysis of level of responsibility (individual versus organizational level) and organizational response strategies in news coverage of major crisis events during 2006 in three newspapers. Findings - Significant differences were found between preventable crises and accidental crises: most preventable crises news coverage focused more on the individual level of responsibility, while accidental crises news used the organizational level of responsibility. The significant differences of organizational response strategies indicated that preventable crises news coverage frequently reported denial strategies, while accidental crisis news covered deal with strategies more. Research limitations/implications - The study is limited to the samples of the three newspapers and the period 2006. Practical implications - This study suggests that crisis managers should always check the crisis news coverage, and media bias and orientation, and try to have good relations with the media to deliver the right message to the public during a crisis. Originality/value - Despite the importance of the media's role in the public's perception of crisis responsibility, there is a lack of systematic analysis of level of crisis responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As business becomes increasingly global, it is important for managers to appreciate that practices that work well in one country may not work as well in other countries. This article compares cost center practices under Grenzplankostenrechnung (GPK), a common approach to cost accounting in Germany, and typical cost center practices in the United States. Differences between Germany and the United States on Hofstede's uncertainty avoidance dimension and in workforce and management education provide possible explanations for differences in the responsibility assigned to cost center managers between Germany and the United States. Differences in cost center practices concerning classification of costs, measures to use when considering changes in costs, and the size and scope of the cost center between Germany and the United States all support these differences in cost center manager responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alignment of an organization's performance measurement system with its strategy is widely advocated as a guiding principle in management control system design. Despite its importance, it is far from clear what strategic alignment of performance measures entails, whether and how organizations achieve it. In this article we explore the alignment of performance measures focusing on firms' use of environmental performance indicators as the consequence of pursuing an environmental strategy. Based on the economic and contingency literatures on management control system design and performance measurement, we propose that the use of such performance measures is a consequence of changing the design of the performance measurement system to accommodate the strategy, and by increasing the informativeness of performance metrics. We test these propositions in a sample of financial managers in manufacturing firms in The Netherlands. We find that alignment to environmental strategy is mostly achieved through the increased quantification of environmental performance measures and via their increased sensitivity to managerial actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the accounting literature has extensively studied the role of transfer pricing (TP) within the management control system (MCS) of companies, MCS issues related to cross-border transfers have received far less attention. In this case study, we investigate how TP tax compliance influences responsibility accounting when one multinational enterprise (MNE) uses a single set of transfer prices for both tax compliance and management control. First, the MNE eliminated TP negotiation, leading to psychologically disagreeable and sometimes also economically harmful situations. Second, the firm administratively simplified the determination of profit margins to such an extent that it could lead to suboptimal business decisions. Third, tax compliance induced a profit-center designation for business units that were primarily responsible for costs or revenues. The firm first coped with a mixed treatment of these responsibility centers, allowing them to be profit centers for tax purposes and cost or revenue centers for MCS purposes. Later, top management became convinced of the benefits of a profit-center treatment for all purposes and started to convert the pro forma profit centers into real profit centers. Overall, this study contributes to the stream of research documenting and explaining how MCSs are designed and used under environmental pressures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the effect of transparency of committees on committee member voting. Proponents of transparency emphasize the benefits of enhanced accountability and predictability, as well as the provision of expert information to the economy. Political scientists and economists both note that transparency can yield inefficient decisions as decision makers start hiding their private views in public. This would distort the process of information aggregation. The article also states that committee members would vote depending on the popular sentiment concerning the decision, rather than what they feel is right or wrong.

Purpose - To address multiple problems facing a company's top management with respect to the customer satisfaction survey. Is the customer satisfaction survey still suitable after many years of use? What method should be applied to help ensure better utilization of information from the customer satisfaction survey? Should the three aspects (i.e. quality, delivery, and responsiveness) representing the customer satisfaction continue to be used as part of the survey's main contents. As an ISO 9001: 2000 certified company, the customer satisfaction survey is required. Design/methodology/approach- A method was proposed to help integrate the survey results with other key performance indicators (or ratios). This integration represented the verification effort on the suitability of the customer satisfaction survey. The examinations into the interrelationships between these three aspects the company's performance indicators included three perspectives. They were: no time-factor consideration; one-period time-lag factor, and two-period time-lag factor. The set of key performance indicators was selected jointly with the company's top management. Findings - The findings indicated that the quality and responsiveness aspects were still suitable. This was because these results were closely related to the production volumes, number of customer complaints, number of customers, and, etc. Therefore, the revision of the customer satisfaction survey needed to focus on adding other aspects such as flexibility and courtesy while doing away with the delivery aspect. Practical implications - The proposed method, and its findings and recommendations received positive responses from the company's top management. This method utilized and related existing performance information in an integrated manner. Originality/value - This study generated a potential approach to understand and to help interpret the customer satisfaction survey's results, to boost the utilization of relevant performance information, and likely to assist in a target-setting process during a planning session. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – To present a perspective on partnership grounded in empirical management research. This paper is based on a keynote presentation by the author at a conference on partnership in Durham in 2004. Design/methodology/approach – It reflects on the particular challenges of realising partnership ideals in the field of public policy with its rich textures of accountability, reflecting a career perspective of management research and the facilitation of planning workshops in inter-organisational policy domains. Findings – The challenge of managing decisions within an often obscure maze of inter-agency relations is interpreted as one of developmental decision making, within which personal capacities for responsible scheming play a crucial role. Research limitations/implications – It is argued that this view offers more appropriate guidance to partnership practice than a more conventional system-centred perspective; and that this has important implications for future research and education in public management. Practical implications – To learn from one another's experiences, it is suggested that public managers should cultivate capacities to map graphically the shifting patterns of structural relations among issues and among organisational roles. It is argued that the firmer grasp of new communication technologies exhibited by emergent generations offers new promise in this direction, bridging the traditional educational divide between the arts and the sciences. Originality/value – The paper offers fresh perspectives on partnership that are intended to challenge the thinking of practitioners and consultants as well as researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose -- The purpose of this paper is to examine how transfer students interact with a higher education setting that is reacting to new state-mandated accountability goals, and to understand higher education institutions and their environments when faced with new accountability measures. The larger purpose of the study is to develop a grounded theory that helps all players understand the tensions that exist between the state, the universities, and transfer students. Design/methodology/approach -- The paper presents a qualitative study using Bronfenbrenner's ecological theory. Findings -- The paper finds that interactions between the systems played a large role in the transfer students' perceptions of their experiences at a four-year institution. The universities in this study, and their transfer student policies, reflect an environment that was influenced by and influenced transfer students' perceptions. Research limitations/implications -- To date no research has been found that incorporates the ecological model and higher education institutions. Because of this, it is difficult to determine how effective this model may be for institutions that are wrestling with dilemmas. Originality/value -- The ecological theory used in this qualitative study is a useful tool in understanding the contexts and systems in which transfer students, administrators and state-mandated accountability goals co-exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]