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The aim of this paper is to illustrate the social aspects of supervising students’ research of accounting practice. It attempts to demonstrate that accounting practice and accounting research share a common characteristic – they are both forms of social practice.

The paper is written as a personal reflection and confession. It follows a tradition in the social science literature of academics engaging in auto-ethnographic self-reflection. It is presented as a series of dialogues between the academic and the students.

The tensions between the experienced teacher and the students raise questions about the extent of involvement of the academic in the students’ work. Each project involves social interactions which affect the nature of the supervision required and provided. Positivistic approaches may give strict guidance in the form of accepted rules and conventions, but for social scientists who recognise that research, like practice, is socially constructed, outcomes are often uncertain.

It is a personal reflection on specific research projects, and so there are no conclusions about supervision in general.

The intent is to capture the uncertain development and outcome of research projects. The uncertainty may be typical of supervisor/student experiences.

Though examples of auto-ethnographic self-reflection may be found in the social science literature, there are few, if any, in the accounting literature.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the distribution characteristics of airflow in mine ventilation suits with different pipeline structures when the human body is bent at various angles. On this basis, the stress points are extracted to investigate the pressure variation of a ventilation suit under different ventilation rates and pipeline structures.

Based on the three-dimensional human body scanner, portable pressure test and other instruments, a human experiment was conducted in an artificial cabin. The study analyzed and compared the distribution characteristics of clearance under three different pipeline structures, as well as the pressure variation of the ventilation suit.

The study found that the clearance in front of two pipeline structures gradually increased in size as the degree of bending increased, and there was minimal clearance in the chest and back. The longitudinal structure exhibits a significant decrease in clearance compared to the spiral structure. The pressure value of the spiral pipeline structure with the same ventilation volume is low, followed by the transverse structure, while the longitudinal structure has the highest pressure value. The increase in clothing pressure value of a spiral pipeline structured ventilation suit with varying ventilation volumes is minimal.

The ventilation suit has a promising future as a type of personal protective equipment for mitigating heat damage in mines. It is of great value to study the pipeline structure of the ventilation suit for human comfort.

The purity of the milk supply is intimately related to the health of the community. There are very definite reasons why milk stands apart from other foods in its peculiar liability to be associated with human disease. These reasons are briefly the following:—

The introduction of roller‐milling rendered it possible to utilise any variety of wheat, since the grain in this process is not subjected to severe attrition, and pulverisation of the bran is avoided as far as possible. In roller‐milling the wheat grain is reduced to flour in gradual stages (gradual reduction process), during which the offal is continually removed by sifting and by the use of air currents. In this way a more complete removal of branny and other undesired particles can be effected, and a greater yield of highly refined flour can be obtained than in stone‐milling.

The necessity of standards of purity for certain kinds of agricultural produce being now recognised by the new Adulteration Act—4, (1)—no apology is needed for attempting to bring the application of the principle into actual practice. Some few standards have already been generally adopted, and the legalization of limits relating to many of those substances with which the Adulteration Acts deal would undoubtedly be welcomed.

The Royal Commission appointed “to inquire into the relation of human and animal tuberculosis” has issued its final report, just ten years after it commenced its work.

The present study aims to report the findings of a qualitative and quantitative content analysis of the Facebook pages of the two presidential candidates.

The sample contained 513 posts collected during the last three months of the 2012 US presidential election. The analysis of the candidates’ pages consisted of three phases: the identification of the different elements of the Aristotelian language of persuasion, the identification of the subjects that appear on the posts, and the identification of additional roles that the Facebook pages play in the campaigns.

Findings show that both candidates used an emotional and motivational appeal to create a social capital and to present a personal image that revealed very little of their personal lives. Statistical analysis shows the numbers of comments and likes given to the posts were influenced by the element of persuasion used on the posts. Results show that campaigns wanted to retain control of the message displayed on the pages by posting information on a small number of non‐controversial subjects. Finally, the content analysis revealed that the Facebook pages were used for fund‐raising purposes, and for the mobilization of supporters. The Facebook pages of both candidates present an alternative way to do politics called fandom politics that is based not on logic or reason but on the affective sensibility of the audiences, discouraging dissent and encouraging affective allegiances between the candidate and his supporters.

This study presents an innovative way of analyzing the use of social media sites as a tool for the dissemination of political information and reveals utilization of these media for the creation of social and economic capital by politicians.

The paper discusses how the management of a sports and fashion company, which we refer to as NULMA, successfully applied the neo/normative control technology “karma organisation” and gained employee engagement. Whereas other studies have documented employee resistance to organisational cultures when used for managerial control, our case demonstrates resistance to management practices that employees find inconsistent with the dominant karma culture.

The study is based on a six-year longitudinal organisational at-home ethnography conducted by one of the authors using methods of both participant and non-participant observation, semi-structured interviews and collaborative production of secondary data in the case organisation.

While our research shows that management can successfully apply neo/normative control which employees accept and support, we further show that employees mobilise the same values to resist management when it fails to deliver on the commitments and promises of the organisational culture.

The study contributes to the literature on organisational culture and, in particular, neo/normative control by theorising employee resistance as being by “accident”, by which we mean an inherent negative potentiality co-invented and released by managers establishing a “karma organisation”. Our theorising culminates in a discussion of the study’s implications for research and practice.

Contemporary working life highlights the challenge between exploitation and exploration both on a general and a more individual level. Here, we focus on the latter, and connect the critical debate regarding self-management to March's exploitation/exploration trade-off, as this forms a useful theoretical frame to understand how employees make sense of their self-management efforts. The employee is subjected to an individual responsibility to understand and manage an exploration of the self while handling the norms of self-exploitation that a self-management culture creates. Through an empirical study of a large group of management consultants, we explore how they perform and make sense of self-exploitation and self-exploration through three specific discourses: the discourse of workload, the discourse of aspiration, and the discourse of fun. Through these, the consultants try to identify optimal amounts of work, play, and ambition, all while handling the trade-off between self-exploitation and self-exploration. We show how this keeps failing, but how it reappears as a necessary condition for avoiding future failures. In all three discourses, the trade-off therefore presents itself as the problem of as well as the solution to self-management.

This paper aims to check the presence of such relationship in the field. Certain values are at stake for the success of economic behavior. Since the genesis of modern capitalism, a set of beliefs proper of Calvinism (mainly Predestination but also Beruf, inner-worldly asceticism, role of Sects […] ) was said by Max Weber to cause an anxiety about salvation and generate a propensity to economic success as a sign of election. The author argues on the contrary that the Calvinist belief in the Perpetual Assurance of Salvation might cause a sense of self-efficacy able to favor economic success. To observe this in action today, it is crucial to consider the evolution that the Protestant ethic went through migrating first in North America and, finally, through the Protestant revival of China. Wenzhou is called “Jerusalem of China” for its large Protestant community that is also strongly involved in business. Some scholar already pointed out the presence among those entrepreneurs of this Protestant ethic (Yi Xiang, Boss-Christian […]).

The data presented in this comparative qualitative study pertain to ethnographic observations, job-shadowing and interviews done among Chinese Christian and non-Christian entrepreneurs from Wenzhou living in Milan, Italy.

The results show, with some adjustments, the presence of a Chinese version of the Protestant ethic overlapping with several values proper to the Chinese context (Confucianism, lineage, social network). The extension of the study to other cases must be done with caution considering the non-causal justificatory role of the belief.

Successful entrepreneurship involves specific social, cultural and even religious aspects that move beyond mere business strategies.