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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.

This paper sets out some parameters for the special issue, focusing on Nordic countries studied as ‘injured nations’, racialising states and repressed histories. The distinctiveness of using whiteness paradigms to accomplish this are specified, and then the individual contributions to the topic are outlined. The processes of racialisation identified and analysed link the past to the present. There are different pathways, from colonised to colonising, from subaltern to dominant racialised position. The specifics of each country's journey are noted, whilst links to contemporary discourse elsewhere are also established. Although there are populist nationalist parties active in the Nordic countries, the contributors argue that first, it is the mainstream political discourse that enables the more extreme versions: it is not a question of rupture but continuity. Secondly, racialising discourses that place people belonging to the nation in a privileged position vis-a-vis Others can be found outside the formal po...

Racialization is a concept that is theoretically underdeveloped. Although there has been an increased interest in Islamophobia since 9/11, it is very rarely discussed as racial in its nature. In this special issue on Islamophobia and the Racialization of Muslims scholars connect racism to Islamophobia. This issue situates racialization as a way to explain and understand Islamophobia, as racism towards a Muslim population. Through empirical studies, this issue uncovers the processes of racialization of Muslims and the rise of Islamophobia in both Europe and the USA. Case studies include the experiences of middle-class US Muslims; of white British converts to Islam; of young working-class British-Pakistani men; policing practices in Ireland; and the construction of Muslim identities through online comments about a reality television show. As well as identifying some issues specific to the nation, each case study also reveals the intersection of the racialization process with class and gender experiences.

This article examines the discursive racialisation of asylum-seekers by residents of Portishead, a small English town, a process demonstrating a classed and placed set of expressions of whiteness. I study the racialisation of a diverse group of people from the bottom-up, through an analysis of residents’ letters of objection to the Government’s request for planning permission to turn a building into an asylum processing centre in 2004. Three registers of language are presented: ‘technocratic’, ‘resentful’ and ‘conjectural’. Racialisation is expressed through shared ideas about the type of space in Portishead, and the type of people appropriate for it. The space is constructed as white and middle-class: the asylum-seekers are produced discursively as neither and therefore as not belonging. I suggest that the phenomenon of relatively powerful groups constructing themselves as weak and beleaguered can be conceptualised as a form of ‘defensive engagement’.

This paper presents key ideas from fieldwork conducted in Birmingham between 2009 and 2011. This work examined identity in ‘white’ neighbourhoods, and attitudes to politics and understandings of poverty in more mixed ones. This work revealed that many Birmingham residents were concerned about a perceived loss of values, the impact of ‘unrespectable’ households and individuals in their areas and the apparent disconnect between political representatives and local residents. In the aftermath of the disturbances of August 2011 across England, including in Birmingham, we revisit these themes and examine the implications for understanding disorder in the city of Birmingham.

The leatherback sea turtle Dermochelys coriacea is a Critically Endangered species that nests on oceanic beaches. Natural disturbance cycles of erosion and accretion maintain nest- ing habitat on these beaches by controlling dune vegetation and sand quality. The nesting beach at Sandy Point National Wildlife Refuge in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands, is designated 'critical habi- tat' for leatherback turtles by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. It harbors the largest nesting pop- ulation (>800 females) in the USA. It is an important rookery for Atlantic leatherback recovery efforts. For the past 30 yr, the beach has been continuously monitored and managed in order to increase hatchling recruitment and conservation. Our study highlights how a multiyear change in the natural disturbance cycle has affected dune plant growth and leatherback production at this beach. Reduced summer erosion relaxed natural control of Ipomoea pes-caprae, a native dune plant, allowing its seaward spread to cover >75% of the nesting beach. This spread of vegetation led to both direct and indirect interactions between nesting leatherbacks and I. pes-caprae. Because the beach is managed in order to protect leatherback nests, a dune vegetation control plan was needed. We measured the effects of 3 vegetation management options on nest success: herbicide treatment, aboveground mechanical removal, and undisturbed vegetation. These treat- ments were compared to nest success at a non-vegetated control site. We found that the spread of I. pes-caprae reduced nesting habitat and nest productivity. Aboveground vegetation treatment did not control root growth into nests. We discuss possible vegetation management strategies to improve leatherback nesting habitat quality and maximize nest productivity while minimizing anthropogenic disturbance to the natural beach dynamics.

SUMMARY It is generally assumed that leatherback turtles (Dermochelys coriacea), like other species of sea turtle, do not feed while offshore from nesting beaches, and rely instead on fat reserves to fuel reproductive activities. Recent studies, however, provide evidence that leatherbacks may forage during the internesting interval while offshore in the Western Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea. Bio-logging technology was used to investigate the foraging behavior of female leatherback turtles at St Croix, US Virgin Islands. Leatherback gastrointestinal tract temperatures (TGT) were analyzed for sudden fluctuations indicative of ingestions, and laboratory ingestion simulations were used to characterize temperature fluctuations associated with ingestion of prey versus seawater. Dive patterns associated with prey ingestion were characterized and the proportion of prey ingestion during the day (05:00–18:59 h) and night (19:00–04:59 h) were compared. A combined total of 111 prey ingestions for seven leatherback turtles were documented during the internesting interval. The number of prey ingestions ranged from six to 48 for individual turtles, and the majority (87.4%) of these events occurred during the daytime. Prey ingestions were most frequently associated with V-shaped dives, and the mean (±1 s.d.) maximum dive depth with prey ingestion ranged from 154±51 to 232±101 m for individual turtles. Although leatherbacks were found to opportunistically feed during the internesting interval, the low prey ingestion rates indicate that energy reserves acquired prior to the breeding season are critical for successful reproduction by leatherbacks from the St Croix, USVI nesting population.

[Dissolving the Diaspora] provides a Canadian perspective on the problem of intergration viewed through the prism of a particular understanding of multiculturalism. In this article the three key themes; the conceptualisation of diversities, diaspora and dialogue, are identified, and these conceptes are engaged with critically. I argue that despite the many advantages of the multicultural paradigm, there are still a number of fault lines that require critical attention, among which are the relationship of culture to class, and the failure to fully incorporate racism in its vocabulary. I suggest, using the phrase ‘the grammar of social location’, that the language of multiculturalism still ties us to a relatively static model of culture and away from an analysis of the complexity of inequalities. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This article seeks to explain the absence of far-right political formations in the history of the Republic of Ireland, especially in relation to immigration. I argue that the ‘mainstream’ nationalist parties have implemented a racialized governance of Ireland via the issue of citizenship (in the referendum of 2004). While hegemonic ideas on the racial purity of indigenous populations and the highly ambivalent attitudes and policies on immigration pursued over the last decade are characteristic of a broader European trend, this has not, in the Republic, been accompanied by meaningful far-right political mobilization. Ireland has frequently been seen as sui generis in political terms, and indeed emerges in some ways as a counter-case: increasing hostility towards Others has been identified in the midst of rapid economic growth and political stability. A variety of issues related to the country's political development have given rise to an especially small left-wing vote, a nationalist centre ground and longlasting domination by a single populist party, Fianna Fáil. This party has been partnered in government since 1997 by a free-market party, the Progressive Democrats, who have contributed to Ireland's movement towards neo-liberal policies and a highly functional approach to immigration. The transition from country of emigration to country of immigration has thus taken place against an ideological backdrop in which the imperatives of labour demand and consolidating domestic support for reform have made an uneasy match, resulting in the racialization of Irishness. The state has, however, amended the Constitution in order to qualify jus soli citizenship entitlement in the case of particular categories of people: those whose parents are not Irish nationals. The significant stakes of these changes are analysed in the context of state responses to Eire's transition to a country of immigration, and the role of nationalist-populism in the country's political culture.

Whiteness studies are trans-disciplinary, but here the focus is principally on sociology and social history. Firstly, I identify, elucidate and synthesize the major ways in which whiteness in this literature has hitherto been problematized, to provide a sociological view of the multidisciplinary work so far. Five interpretations are identified; whiteness as absence, as content, as a set of norms, as resources and as a contingent hierarchy. Secondly, I make some proposals regarding the whiteness problematic’s degree of pertinence to European settings, with a brief discussion of the Irish case. Finally, I argue that whiteness is useful if conceptualized in a way that sets it within the parameters of studies of racism.

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.

Whiteness studies are trans-disciplinary, but here the focus is principally on sociology and social history. Firstly, I identify, elucidate and synthesize the major ways in which whiteness in this literature has hitherto been problematized, to provide a sociological view of the multidisciplinary work so far. Five interpretations are identified; whiteness as absence, as content, as a set of norms, as resources and as a contingent hierarchy. Secondly, I make some proposals regarding the whiteness problematic’s degree of pertinence to European settings, with a brief discussion of the Irish case. Finally, I argue that whiteness is useful if conceptualized in a way that sets it within the parameters of studies of racism.