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This paper explores the economic and social effects of human capital investment in the 20th century. As well as drawing on census data and statistical yearbooks in Australia and Aoteoroa/New Zealand, the paper develops its argument by an intersection of scholarly work in sociology, economics and the history of education to consider the effects of increased human capital investment on economic growth but also on the experiences of childhood, work discipline and the present climate crisis.

This paper considers the implications of what economic historian Claudia Goldin has described as the “human capital century” for the history of school and university education. By reconsidering education in the settler colonies, especially Australia and Aoteoroa/New Zealand, as “stimulus”, this helps explain key aspects of contemporary human capital investment, which the paper argues should be understood as constituted by children's and young people's free labour at school, university and across the economy.

This research argues that children's and young people's free labour, performed in educational institutions, constitutes a large portion of Australia and Aoteoroa/New Zealand's national investment in human capital. At key points, this investment has acted as an economic stimulus, promoting surges of profitability. The effects were not confined to young people. Systematised, educational expansion also became the foundation of environmental degradation, labour market exploitation and a relentless increase in service-sector productivity that is worn on professional bodies. Productivity increases have been associated with reduced professional autonomy as a managerial class coerced professionals into working harder, though often under the guise of working “smarter” – a fiction that encouraged or coerced even greater personal investment in collective human capital. This investment of personal time, effort and selfhood by children and the professionals they grew into can thus be seen, in Marxian terms, as a crucial vector of capitalist exploitation in the 20th century.

The paper concludes by suggesting that a reduction of managerial influence in educational settings would improve learner and professional autonomy with improved labour and environmental conditions.

The paper makes a unique contribution to the history of education by exploring education as stimulus as a key component of education’s role in 20th and 21st century capitalism. It interrogates exploitative aspects of human capital investment, especially in the midst of environmental catastrophe and the recent COVID crisis.

This study aims to comprehensively examine the relationship between financial reporting quality (FRQ) and investment efficiency (IE). The central thrust of this research endeavor is to empirically analyze the impact of FRQ on diverse facets of investment, including overinvestment, underinvestment and overall IE.

Using a sample of 13,902 firm-year observations from publicly listed US companies, this study uses the generalized method of moment (GMM) in conjunction with three distinct measures for FRQ under three different investment settings, considering firm liquidity and industry performance.

This study offers interesting insights into the intricate relationship between FRQ and IE. The results indicate a strong positive relation between the two constructs. In particular, the research reveals a negative link between FRQ and underinvestment, and an inverse relationship between FRQ and overinvestment. These findings suggest that FRQ is one of the key drivers of IE and that by enhancing FRQ, businesses can better optimize their investments.

This study highlights the significant implication of the effect of FRQ on IE, as it enables businesses to optimize their investments by improving their decision-making processes and better risk assessment of associated projects, resulting in more efficient capital allocation. A higher degree of FRQ increases investors’ confidence in a company’s financial statements, resulting in higher liquidity. It can benefit regulators to set higher standards and promote transparency.

The study examines the relationship between FRQ and IE. The study finds a strong positive relation between FRQ and IE, with FRQ being a key driver of IE. The paper’s original contribution lies in its comprehensive examination of the complex relationship between FRQ and IE, using robust analytical techniques by applying GMM and taking into consideration firms liquidity and industry performance.

Excessive entitlement, the enacted belief that one's voice, opinion, or assessment holds more weight than that of others (even those of one's own kind), and how it unavoidably rubs against their sense of their best-loved self, is the focus of this chapter. Some define excessive entitlement as a kind of greed where individuals in academia elevate themselves and lord their perceptions/stances over others. This work is situated in the academy and involves relationships and situations that arose between and among graduate students and professors as well as between and among professors and other professors. Wedged between conflicting agendas, individuals feel pulled from pillar-to-post as they experience differing phenomena and images playing out within themselves, some seriously challenging their images of the best-loved self. This fine-grained scholarship illustrates that although strides have been made around gender, professional backgrounds, ethnicity, and race in society, room for significant improvement still exists, most especially at the micro-levels where aggressions can still take place. This research reveals intertwined hegemonies in academia. Narrative inquiry – a storied method that unpacks stories – deftly skirts research issues by including fictionalization as a fourth analytical tool, joining the conventional tools of broadening, burrowing and storying-restorying. Using these devices situates the inquiry, burrows into stories of experiences, and illuminates shifts taking place. Truth is established through employing multiple research tools over time and gauging the extent to which the intersecting narratives ring true to those outside the research situation.

This study sheds new light on the personality trait and provides evidence regarding the relation between narcissism and desirable accounting practices, specifically the impact of CEO narcissism on accounting conservatism.

The authors test the relation between CEO narcissism and accounting conservatism for a sample of 907 US companies and their corresponding CEOs for the period between 2010 and 2018. The authors apply three established models of accounting conservatism and measure executives' narcissism using a non-intrusive approach ubiquitous in the literature.

The authors find that CEO narcissism is associated with speculative accounting practices in the form of timely recognition of positive news and more prudent financial reporting of anticipated negative news. The authors provide the first empirical evidence that, despite its well-known negative effects on corporate financial reporting, executive narcissism can also produce positive outcomes.

While managerial overconfidence has received much attention, the effects of executives' narcissism are still widely unexplored (Chatterjee and Hambrick, 2007). The authors thus contribute to the literature by investigating the relationship between CEOs' narcissism and accounting conservatism. The authors conjecture CEO narcissism should have a twofold effect on prudent financial reporting. On the one hand, CEOs' narcissism should be associated with low levels of unconditional conservatism due to excessively fast good news recognition. On the other hand, narcissistic executives should be associated with early recognition of negative news and hence with higher levels of conditional conservatism.

This chapter links the emerging work on excessive teacher entitlement (Ratnam et al., 2019) with the ethical principle of inclusive professionalism: the right of all children to attend mainstream schools and therefore to receive accessible and appropriate teaching regardless of their educational needs (Armstrong, 1998). In the professional development process, teachers and educational leaders are confronted with numerous contradictions between prescriptions and facts, between means and ends, between intentions and actions, etc. They face numerous ethical dilemmas, which become more acute when they enter the professional field. The resulting uncertainties can lead to a defensive and inappropriate commitment to their prerogatives and difficulty in adjusting to the great diversity of situations encountered. This work reports on a multi-case study that involved a cross-case analysis of situations (Walton et al., 2022) observed by the researcher in an academic professional context.

The purpose of this study is to provide a detailed demonstration of how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to potentially generate valuable insights and recommendations regarding the role of accounting in addressing key sustainability-related issues.

The study offers a novel method for leveraging AI tools to augment traditional scoping study techniques. The method was used to show how the authors can produce recommendations for potentially enhancing organisational accountability pertaining to seasonal workers.

Through the use of AI and informed by the knowledge base that the authors created, the authors have developed prescriptions that have the potential to advance the interests of seasonal workers. In doing so, the authors have focussed on developing a useful and detailed guide to assist their colleagues to apply AI to various research questions.

This study demonstrates the ability of AI to assist researchers in efficiently finding solutions to social problems. By augmenting traditional scoping study techniques with AI tools, the authors present a framework to assist future research in such areas as accounting and accountability.

In the years following the publication of A Theory of Consumption (1923), Hazel Kyrk’s book became the flagship of the field that would later be known as the economics of consumption. It stimulated theoretical and empirical work on consumption. Some of the existing literature on Kyrk (e.g., Kiss & Beller, 2000; Le Tollec, 2020; Tadajewski, 2013) depicted her theory as the starting point of the economics of consumption. Nevertheless, how and why it emerged the way it did remain largely unexplored. This chapter examines Kyrk’s intellectual background, which, we argue, can be traced back to two main movements in the United States: the home economics and the institutionalist. Both movements conveyed specific endeavors as responses to the US material and social transformations that occurred at the turn of the 20th century, notably the perceived changing role of consumption and that of women in US society. On the one hand, Kyrk pursued first-generation home economists’ efforts to make sense of and put into action the shifting of women’s role from domestic producer to consumer. On the other hand, she reinterpreted Veblen’s (1899) account of consumption in order to reveal its operational value for a normative agenda focused on “wise” and “rational” consumption. This chapter studies how Kyrk carried on first-generation home economists’ progressive agenda and how she adapted Veblen’s fin-de-siècle critical account of consumption to the context of the household goods developed in 1900–1920. Our account of Kyrk’s intellectual roots offers a novel narrative to better understand the role of gender and epistemological questions in her theory.