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ChatGPT, a language-learning model chatbot, has garnered considerable attention for its ability to respond to users’ questions. Using data from 14 countries and 186 institutions, we compare ChatGPT and student performance for 28,085 questions from accounting assessments and textbook test banks. As of January 2023, ChatGPT provides correct answers for 56.5 percent of questions and partially correct answers for an additional 9.4 percent of questions. When considering point values for questions, students significantly outperform ChatGPT with a 76.7 percent average on assessments compared to 47.5 percent for ChatGPT if no partial credit is awarded and 56.5 percent if partial credit is awarded. Still, ChatGPT performs better than the student average for 15.8 percent of assessments when we include partial credit. We provide evidence of how ChatGPT performs on different question types, accounting topics, class levels, open/closed assessments, and test bank questions. We also discuss implications for accounting education and research.

Funders, policy-makers and public service managers should be aware that inputs can be designed into the innovation process in order to build capacity among staff engaged in innovation in public ser...

Colorism is a form of discrimination based on skin tone wherein people with light(er) complexions are advantaged over those with dark(er) ones. In this review, we define key terms, explore colorism as an individual and structural phenomenon, and identify some predominant themes in the existing scholarship on colorism. We review three case studies of contemporary uses and ramifications of colorism in order to encourage scholars to engage with this important field. These case studies are skin tone’s impact on U.S. politics, “transraciality,” the appropriation of skin tone, and finally, the global skin lightening industry. While the first two are mostly focused on the United States, the third enables an appreciation of the global dynamics of colorism, and links back to the national and regional contextual politics of skin tone.

This chapter examines the relationship between the concepts of superdiversity, ethnicity, and race. It identifies scholars using the superdiversity paradigm engage much more frequently with ethnicity than they do with race, which is a particularly underdeveloped engagement. “Ethnicity” and “race” are defined as separate but overlapping concepts, and their uses within the scholarship on superdiversity are a basis for formulating a hypothesis about why ethnicity is more popular. The chapter argues that the conceptual history of ethnicity means that race is always present in its formulation. Race seems to have been imagined by most superdiversity practitioners as an older and now less pertinent frame for understanding the complexities of social relationships within the primarily microlevel studies that so far dominate the superdiversity corpus. The second half of the chapter suggests how a closer engagement with critical race scholarship might expand and improve the work on superdiversity. Stratification and integration are used as themes to illustrate this theory.

College governing boards are widely held to be the keystone of institutional strategy and the prime locus of support, challenge and accountability in respect of the actions of the senior Executive. Whilst there are many normative prescriptions about the conditions and arrangements required for effective college governance, relatively little is known about how and to what extent the practices of boards reflect or realise these prescriptions. This paper draws upon a unique research study of eight further education colleges across the four nations of the UK. Following Chia and MacKay and Hendry et al., our ‘strategy as practice’ approach gives primacy to emergence and immanence through board practices. Video and observational data, supplemented by some interview and documentary data are used to develop an understanding of governing practices. Our analysis suggests that current normative prescriptions lack the conceptual sophistication required to support governing as it really happens. We offer a reconceptualisation of both strategy and accountability suggesting that the latter includes lateral, inward- and outward-facing functions that make conflicting demands on governors. We argue that these distinctions are vital in enabling further positive development of governing in the college sector.

Skin lightening cuts across multiple and intersecting areas of interest to sociologists. These include consumerism, capital, the body, femininities, masculinities, the power of the media in shaping people’s imaginations, constructions of beauty, and racialised and gendered social relations and representations, with the legacies of colonial pasts playing out in the present. Here, we set out some key themes, patterns, and frames observed in the multidisciplinary work published on skin lightening, and advocate for the addition of other frames for strategic reasons, which we argue in the second half of the article. Foucault’s technologies of self is recommended as a platform for critiquing individualism and the framing of choice; a political economy approach would help establish that skin lightening is a global business and grasp industry-wide patterns. Finally, a shift to looking at discourse and counter-discourse would reframe women as active agents in cultural resistance and change, and not just the relatively passive dupes of the colonial legacy. We thus map out a broad research agenda that would transform skin lightening into an object of broad, sustained sociological research.

This article analyses the racialization of discourses about national identities, and explores the implications for populations racialized as white. Two extensive datasets have been brought together, spanning a decade and 560 interviews, to explore discursive interplay, the oppositional nature and relationality of majority and minority claims about national belonging. We demonstrate that national identity claims are constructed discursively from positions of relative advantage and disadvantage: here the English majority and Polish minority. Discourses of national identity involve positioning and using resources differentially available. Dominant majority groups, perceiving themselves as entitled through their conceptualization of the nation-state and indigeneity, interpret and police minority claims in ways that equate to a gate-keeping function. The analysis examines the contingent hierarchy of whiteness and the discursive implications for entitlement, deservingness and resentment. The framework of whiteness helps illuminate the construction and contested racialization of hierarchies around national identity and belonging.

This paper describes a prototype of a novel vertical cooling tower constructed from an inflatable fabric duct that incorporated a water spray nozzle mounted at the top. The device was constructed u...

This article is a critical review of racial and ethnic categories on the U.S. Census with a focus on how the census categories affect opportunities to track racial and ethnic inequality. The authors summarize how motivations behind the census categories changed from a historical basis in controlling people of color and protecting Whiteness toward a contemporary orientation around equity. Yet, many issues remain that confound the racial and ethnic census data, which are then used in research. A look at these issues and possible changes for the upcoming 2020 census serves as a critical reminder of the limitations of the census data. Taking this information into account, the authors conclude with comments and suggestions on the principles underlying racial and ethnic data collection on the census and the implications for tracking inequality.

Racialization is frequently deployed but seldom defined precisely. The agent(s) and mechanisms of the process are often not analysed. Such processes have multiple agents, mechanisms and rationales, all of which may change over time. The key agents of the racialization of Gypsy/Travellers in England have historically been the State and the media. This article claims that a key mechanism in the racialization of Gypsy-Travellers in the twenty-first century is the English planning system. There has been a long-term racialization of Gypsy-Travellers based around criminality, dirt and various threats to order. Gypsy-Travellers respond to the State’s criminalization of their cultures by both adjusting their degree of mobility, and engaging with the discriminatory planning system to procure more advantageous outcomes. Gypsy-Travellers’ “cultural adaptations” end up further embedding the existing racist frame, in which they unfairly gain advantage over sedentary people by simultaneously infringing rules and claiming they are discriminated against.

The influential special issue and overview essay co-edited and co-authored respectively, by Winddance Twine and Charles Gallagher, set out their interpretation of whiteness studies’ genealogy, development and future. In this essay I identify their arguments and critique them in the light of a further eight years’ work on the racialization of white identities produced by the global academy. Particular attention is paid to the proliferation of micro studies about an ever-increasing array of sites, both in thematic and international terms, and to the corpus’ addressing of power relations. Moreover, I underscore Twine and Gallagher’s prescience on the strand of the work they review that bears on the racial project of recuperating white supremacy in a variety of ways, a project that is enjoying heightened visibility in 2016.

This article considers the contribution of the governance professional to the governing of further education colleges in the United Kingdom and arises from a wider study of the ways in which college boards develop and implement college strategy. This is the first observational study to focus on what the governance professional does within the college governance space. From observation and other forms of evidence, the governance professional performs a significant, challenging and expert role in the processes and practices of governing colleges. The governance professional is instrumental as a governance sense-maker and, at a higher level, as translator of governing deliberations and decision making. The governance professional role in practice can vary depending upon a range of personal, local institutional and national factors. However, in essence the governance professional exists to legitimise college governance through the structures, processes and reporting of governing interactions. The article considers the extent to which the governance professional is pivotal to the governing of colleges and analyses the implications for college governing. Our research identifies some barriers to gaining greater impact from the college governance professional.

This extended review of two 2013 publications, Guia, van der Woude, and van der Leun (eds.) Social Control and Justice: Crimmigration in the Age of Fear and Aas and Bosworth (eds.) The Borders of Punishment: Migration, Citizenship and Social Exclusion, critically engages with the potential for race scholarship in the paradigms utilized by the contributors. While acknowledging that these volumes represent an imaginative and significant recasting of criminology, raising as they do a number of useful theoretical issues, the author identifies a reluctance to frame any aspect of these studies in terms of racialization. While much of the substantive content might easily be examined using that concept, it is implicit rather than explicit in this scholarship. Sociologists interested in the racialization of immigration are urged to engage seriously with the work and ideas contained in these two volumes and to bring their insights to bear in complementing this emerging field.

The recent demography of Ireland has been dominated by contrasts, both with the rest of the world and within itself. Ireland became highly exceptional among the populations of Europe by the mid-nineteenth century and has remained so almost up to the end of the twentieth. Ireland’s remarkable example – North and South – has challenged any attempt to establish general rules for the demographic behaviour of modern industrial societies. The structure of this chapter will be in four sections. In section one, we will suggest a brief historical background up to the partition of Ireland into two political entities in 1921. Section two aims to provide an overview of emigration in terms of approximate figures and timings, and points to the massive impact of the Famine since the middle of the nineteenth century. We then look at each of the two political components of the island of Ireland; Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Section three addresses Northern Ireland, from its inception in 1921 to the present through three key periods; the 1920s (state formation); the 1960s and 1970s (the birth of the ‘Troubles’); and the 1990s (peace process), and the inward migration of the twenty-first century. The themes addressed are segregation, gerrymandering, discrimination, fertility rates/mortality rates, and emigration/immigration. The final section on the Republic of Ireland will be split into three parts: the first will focus on the ethnic distinctions between the dominant Catholic majority and its minorities; Protestants, Travellers, Jews, and the ongoing role of emigration in the nation’s demography. The second identifies the period 1996–2008 as crucial to the modern dynamics of ethnic demography, as it is then that the Republic becomes a nation of net immigration. The third part, traces the phenomenon up to the present, using a case study of the State’s attempts to use ethnic demography to redefine formal Irishness in the 2004 referendum on citizenship. We conclude by putting forward a framework for an alternative interpretation of Irish ethnic demography that acknowledges its complexity, beyond a bipolar and essentialising Catholic-Protestant dichotomy, and stressing the importance of nationalisms on the island.