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The purpose of this paper is to examine the origins and development of the “Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal (AAAJ) Community”, a flourishing international interdisciplinary accounting research community. This scholarly community has emerged over some 30 years from the publication in 1988 of the inaugural issue of AAAJ under the joint editorship of James Guthrie and Lee Parker. This historical account discusses the motivation for establishing the journal and the important publishing initiatives, developments and trends across this period. The study positions the journal as a key thought leader, the catalyst for other Community activities such as the Asia-Pacific Interdisciplinary Research in Accounting conference.

The investigation involved a selective review of the contents of AAAJ, particularly the annual editorials published since inception, and other relevant literature, analysis of the main research themes and the most cited papers, and oral history interviews with the joint editors. The future prospects for the AAAJ Community are addressed.

The AAAJ Community has shaped and led developments in interdisciplinary accounting research. Recognised for innovation and with a reputation for nurturing scholars, AAAJ continues to grow in stature as one of the world’s leading accounting journals, challenging the status quo and fostering inclusive scholarship.

The study does not examine the journal’s publication patterns nor assess in detail the research studies that have been published in the journal.

The study recognises AAAJ as central to the development of an interdisciplinary accounting research community, firmly located in the sociological, critical and interpretative tradition also associated with some other leading accounting journals.

Calculating brand equity, the price differential that a branded product is able to charge compared to an unbranded equivalent, often suffers from a lack of a means to truly determine equivalence. Luxury wines have the benefit of an established measure of equivalency – the Parker score. Robert Parker’s influence as a tastemaker provides a point of comparison across brands. This study looks at brand equity of Bordeaux classified growth wines considering château brands, growths and vintages to illustrate the intangible value for the consumer.

Using price and wine-specific data from Wine-Searcher.com, an online database and search engine, an initial sample of 393 wines with Parker scores ranging from 72 to 100 is presented. A subset of perfect wines, with 100-point Parker scores, is also reviewed focusing on the great vintage of 2009.

The results indicate that brand equity in the luxury wine market exists. Not only is this true for the brand of a specific château, but there is also equity associated with the vintage and the growth.

This offers practical implications for brand managers in positioning their wines.

An analysis of luxury wines supports the financial perspective on brand equity, especially when there is a viable means of determining equivalence, such as the Parker score.

The primary aim of this study is to examine the descriptive power of the private interest model of professional accounting ethics developed by Parker in 1994. This examination is undertaken over an extended time period in the Irish context. It develops prior research which concluded that the operation of the professional ethics machinery of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland (CAI) facilitated private interest motives on the part of the ICAI. The paper draws on evidence regarding three critical events occurring outside the disciplinary process of the ICAI but impacting directly on its operation as well as on perceptions from within the process. The discourse surrounding the disciplinary process from 1994 to 2001 is examined using media coverage and ICAI pronouncements. This is augmented with in‐depth interviews held with members of the ICAI disciplinary committees. The analysis provides evidence of pockets of support for the descriptive power of Parker’s model but also illustrates how the rigid and static nature of the separate roles depicted within the model can often fail to capture the complexity of the various changes occurring over the period examined. The study presents evidence which challenges the proposed interrelationships between the various private interest roles depicted in the model and makes some suggestions for the modification of the model, particularly the interrelationships depicted therein.

Approaching a biography of a life as long, complex, and intertwined with the history of the 20th century as was John Kenneth Galbraith's is an intimidating prospect for any reader, particularly so when one knows that Galbraith's vision of economics and the world is so fundamentally different from one's own. Richard Parker's recent biography, however, is well worth reading despite any such intimidation as he turns Galbraith's life into a remarkably well-written and deeply researched tale of one of the most influential economists of the century. As should any excellent biography, it not only traces the life of the subject but also situates that life in the broader context of events which unfolded during his lifetime. In the case of Galbraith, he was very much a part of those major historical events. The result is a rich and detailed economic and political history of the United States in the 20th century, with Galbraith at the center of it. In addition, Parker offers a history of economics as a discipline, as seen through the eyes of a subject who was at once both the most famous economist of his time and someone whose ideas were frequently deemed not worthy of serious consideration by many in the discipline. Parker brings all of these threads together more or less seamlessly in telling Galbraith's story from the very beginning to pretty much the very end.

Coming from a long tradition of Quaker beliefs, Mary Parker Follett advocated for an integrative unity in the organization or state where members work together, consensus is built, and power is shared. She applied her process of integration to management practices in both business and government. Parker Follettʼns communitarian ideas and philosophy of smaller more participative government have often run counter to administration and managementsʼn focus on regulation and centralized power. This has contributed to the benign neglect of Parker Follettʼns work in the administrative and management literature. Parker Follettʼns work has been lost and found repeatedly over the past half century. In the rapidly changing and uncertain times of the new millennium we need once again to rediscover her holistic and healing approach to administration and management.

This chapter addresses a sensitive topic in the field of education: the relationship between and among narrative inquiry, critical analysis, and critical theory. It argues that narrative inquirers are critical – but not in the same way that critical theorists are critical, although they may draw on the same literature and terms. To make our point, we unpack three of our peer-reviewed articles and highlight our theoretical frames and research moves to demonstrate criticality in narrative inquiry. We specifically discuss (1) titles and topics, (2) research frameworks, (3) historical and contemporary data, (4) use of participants' voices (words and feelings), (5) themes, and (6) new knowledge. We mostly argue that narrative inquiry exists because of experience. From experience, everything else unfolds – including criticality – depending on where the researcher in relationship with research participants, takes the inquiry. This chapter explicitly addresses a lived issue known both inside the narrative inquiry community and outside of it.

This study examines how assurors make sense of sustainability assurance (SA) work and how interactions with assurance team members and clients shape assurors’ sensemaking and their actual SA work.

To obtain detailed accounts of how SA work occurs on the ground, this study explores three SA engagements by interviewing the main actors involved, both at the client firms and at their Big Four assurance providers.

Individual assurors’ (i.e. partners and other team members) sensemaking of SA work results in the crafting of their logics of action (LoAs), that is, their meanings about the objectives of SA work and how to conduct it. Without organizational socialization, team members may not arrive at shared meanings and deviate from the team-wide assurance approach. To fulfill their objectives for SA work, assurors may engage in socialization with clients or assume a temporary role. Yet, the role negotiations taking place in the shadows of the scope negotiations determine their default role during the engagement.

Two options are available to help SA statement users gauge the relevance of SA work: either displaying the SA work performed or making it more uniform.

This study theoretically grounds how assurors make sense of SA work and documents how (the lack of) professional socialization, organizational socialization and socialization of frequent interaction partners at the client shape actual SA work. Thereby, it unravels the SA work concealed behind SA statements.

The purpose is to evaluate the performance of consumers' cooperatives in the United States over the last 100 years. This evaluation is based on an overlooked series of surveys undertaken by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics between 1920 and 1950. Where possible, the series are brought up to date.

The surveys did not follow a single consistent organization. Therefore, the observations require rearrangement so that a single meaningful design is achieved.

In a number of instances, consumers' cooperatives have not merely survived but thrived. Indeed, some of their original and continuing methods of operation have been copied and adopted by firms that are not cooperatives.

The series constructed are original and singular. The author knows of no such comparable data.

Karl Marx could only pen the memorable line, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” because he was heir to the sanitary and public health reforms of the nineteenth century (Marx [1848] 1972, p. 335). The Black Death, which had wiped out much of fourteenth-century Florence and which had regularly decimated sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London, was now but a faint memory. Yet had a historian of some earlier period of European history thought to pen a line as presumptuous as Marx's, it might have read: “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of struggle with plague or pestilence.” Epidemics and pandemics have haunted human societies from their beginnings. The congregation of large masses of humans in urban settings, in fact, made the evolution of human infectious disease microorganisms biologically possible (McNeill, 1976; Porter, 1997, pp. 22–25). Epidemics have been as determinative of the course of economic, social, military and political history as any other single factor – emptying cities, decimating armies, wiping out generations and destroying civilizations.

Scholars have argued that different forms of proactive behaviors (e.g., career initiative, feedback seeking, and taking charge) all involve employees’ self-initiated and future-focused efforts to bring about change in a situation (Parker et al., 2006). There are at least three important elements that define proactivity: future-focus, change-orientation, and self-initiation (Frese & Fay, 2001; Parker et al., 2006). First, proactive behavior is future-focused, which means that this action is targeted at anticipated problems or at opportunities with a long-term focus. Second, proactive behavior is change-oriented, involving not just reacting to a situation but being prepared to change that situation in order to bring about a different future. Third, and underpinning the prior two elements, proactive behavior is self-initiated, which means that employees initiate a proactive goal without being told to, or without requiring explicit instructions from supervisors. Accordingly, proactivity has also been conceived of as a process in which employees generate and implement, under their own direction, a proactive goal to bring about a different future (Bindl, Parker, Totterdell, & Hagger-Johnson, 2012; Frese & Fay, 2001; Grant & Ashford, 2008).