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1 – 10 of 123Nancy E. Landrum and Brian Ohsowski
This study aims to identify the content in introductory business sustainability courses in the USA to determine the most frequently assigned reading material and its…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to identify the content in introductory business sustainability courses in the USA to determine the most frequently assigned reading material and its sustainability orientation.
Design/methodology/approach
In total, 81 introductory sustainable business course syllabi reading lists were analyzed from 51 US colleges and universities. The study utilized frequency counts for authors and readings and R analysis of key words to classify readings along the sustainability spectrum.
Findings
The study reveals the most frequently assigned authors and readings in US sustainable business courses (by program type) and places them along the sustainability spectrum from weak to strong. In total, 55 per cent of the top readings assigned in the sample advocate a weak sustainability paradigm, and 29 per cent of the top readings advocate a strong sustainability paradigm.
Research limitations/implications
This study focused on reading lists of introductory courses in the USA; cases, videos and supplemental materials were excluded, and the study does not analyze non-US courses.
Practical implications
The findings of this study can inform instructors of the most commonly assigned authors and readings and identify readings that align with weak sustainability and strong sustainability. Instructors are now able to select sustainable business readings consistent with peers and which advance a weak or strong sustainability orientation.
Originality/value
This is the first research to identify the most commonly assigned authors and readings to aid in course planning. This is also the first research to guide instructors in identifying which readings represent weak versus strong sustainability.
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Sajjad Tofighy and Seyed Mostafa Fakhrahmad
This paper aims to propose a statistical and context-aware feature reduction algorithm that improves sentiment classification accuracy. Classification of reviews with different…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to propose a statistical and context-aware feature reduction algorithm that improves sentiment classification accuracy. Classification of reviews with different granularities in two classes of reviews with negative and positive polarities is among the objectives of sentiment analysis. One of the major issues in sentiment analysis is feature engineering while it severely affects time complexity and accuracy of sentiment classification.
Design/methodology/approach
In this paper, a feature reduction method is proposed that uses context-based knowledge as well as synset statistical knowledge. To do so, one-dimensional presentation proposed for SentiWordNet calculates statistical knowledge that involves polarity concentration and variation tendency for each synset. Feature reduction involves two phases. In the first phase, features that combine semantic and statistical similarity conditions are put in the same cluster. In the second phase, features are ranked and then the features which are given lower ranks are eliminated. The experiments are conducted by support vector machine (SVM), naive Bayes (NB), decision tree (DT) and k-nearest neighbors (KNN) algorithms to classify the vectors of the unigram and bigram features in two classes of positive or negative sentiments.
Findings
The results showed that the applied clustering algorithm reduces SentiWordNet synset to less than half which reduced the size of the feature vector by less than half. In addition, the accuracy of sentiment classification is improved by at least 1.5 per cent.
Originality/value
The presented feature reduction method is the first use of the synset clustering for feature reduction. In this paper features reduction algorithm, first aggregates the similar features into clusters then eliminates unsatisfactory cluster.
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Philippe Touron and Peter Daly
The paper analyzes four cases of IAS adoption (Aérospatiale in 1989; Usinor in 1991; Coflexip in 1993; and Péchiney in 1995) to better understand the instructional logics behind…
Abstract
Purpose
The paper analyzes four cases of IAS adoption (Aérospatiale in 1989; Usinor in 1991; Coflexip in 1993; and Péchiney in 1995) to better understand the instructional logics behind the use of alternative or additional standards by French companies in the early 1990s.
Design/methodology/approach
The study employs multiple case studies to explain how and why the heterogeneity of adoption (IAS versus US GAAP) is a response to institutional complexity.
Findings
This research shows that French companies adopted IAS as long as they were not required to use US GAAP by their financial backers. The results highlight how the companies combine logics to respond to the complexification of the field. The authors outline how endorsement of logics by outside carriers (auditors, financial analysts, stock exchange commissions) and framing of logics by managers evolve in time and space within this complexification process.
Research limitations/implications
This study contributes to the institutional complexity literature in that it focuses on distinct organizational responses to multiple institutional logics. More precisely, the choice of standards in primary consolidated accounts are viewed as an organizational response to compatible and conflicting demands from several levels: home countries, transnational areas and host countries with the aim of raising funds in the US.
Originality/value
This research makes a distinct link between institutional complexity and international accounting standards and US GAAP.
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Clive Long, Andrew McLean, Anita Boothby and Clive Hollin
Self‐reported quality of life (QOL) was examined in a cohort of detained psychiatric in‐patients. Two patient groups, categorised as high and low on the Lehman Quality of Life…
Abstract
Self‐reported quality of life (QOL) was examined in a cohort of detained psychiatric in‐patients. Two patient groups, categorised as high and low on the Lehman Quality of Life Interview (QOLI) in terms of their ‘satisfaction with life in general’, were compared. A model of satisfaction with life derived from a logistic regression analysis contained three measures: (high) QOLI satisfaction rating for living situation, (low) suicidality and (high) motivation and energy. The practical implications of these findings are discussed in terms of assessment, symptom relief and environmental change.
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GERALD ALONZO SMITH and STEVEN HICKERSON
When E. F. Schumacher first wrote Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, the initial reaction was mixed. For the first year or so, the book sold slowly. Then in…
Abstract
When E. F. Schumacher first wrote Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, the initial reaction was mixed. For the first year or so, the book sold slowly. Then in 1974, the sales exploded. In a very short time, E. F. Schumacher became widely acclaimed as his book sold more than a million copies. On both sides of the Atlantic, the common person, as well as the scholar, realized that this was a new voice, a fresh and wholesome breath of wind that was blowing in the stodgy halls of economics.
Considers the causes of the high bankruptcy rate in small firms inthe hotel and catering industry and suggests that although the majorcauses of failure must lie within the scope…
Abstract
Considers the causes of the high bankruptcy rate in small firms in the hotel and catering industry and suggests that although the major causes of failure must lie within the scope of the small firms themselves, the contribution and actions of the major lending institutions have done little to help to alleviate this situation. Explores the present relationship between the small firms, the banks and the Government and considers the effect that the turbulent competitive market of the lending institutions has had on the small firms in the industry. Finally the structure and nature of relationships between banks, small firms and the governments of other European countries are considered before conclusions are drawn.
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Eniola Abe, Pamela Dawson and Jason Scott
At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic the United Kingdom Government implemented a policy to rapid discharge hospital patients into care homes. This study aimed to examine how the…
Abstract
Purpose
At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic the United Kingdom Government implemented a policy to rapid discharge hospital patients into care homes. This study aimed to examine how the media in the United Kingdom portrayed hospital discharge to care homes during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Design/methodology/approach
This study was a qualitative document analysis. Four sources (Daily Mail, The Independent, The Guardian and BBC News) were selected to represent political orientations encompassing right-wing, centrist and left-wing perspectives, and were searched for mention of hospital discharge, care homes and Covid-19 pandemic between 1st January 2020 and 24th February 2022. Article text was copied verbatim into Microsoft Word documents prior to analysis. Data were thematically analysed, followed by coding the sentiment in the included articles as well as coding the sentiment of themes and sub-themes.
Findings
Of 722 identified articles, 133 were eligible for inclusion as the final corpus. Data represented a moralistic narrative consisting of four themes: (1) Government as villain, (2) care homes as antiheroes, (3) patients as ideal victims and (4) moral outcomes. Most of the corpus had a negative sentiment (78.1%). One theme, moral outcomes, had considerably more positive sentiment (32.4%) than others (range 15.1%–21.9%).
Originality/value
A moralistic argument for improving cross-boundary interactions between health and social care services is provided, and the media can play a role pushing cross-boundary working higher up the policy agenda. Future work should examine how direct stakeholders, including those working in healthcare and care home settings, perceived the discharge policy.
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The purpose of this paper is to understand if accounting is an un‐Australian activity, contrasting the notion of the bush and bushman present in popular Australian poetry and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to understand if accounting is an un‐Australian activity, contrasting the notion of the bush and bushman present in popular Australian poetry and cultural myth with the notion expressed by Maltby of the link between the soul of the middle class and the practice of bookkeeping. The paper aims to explore the notion of a tension between what might be seen as indigenous values and the values of Western capitalism.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper presents an analysis of Australian poetry to identify in this culturally significant media how the city and the technologies of accounting are negatively contrasted with the bush and the bushman. Since many Australians migrated from European countries, we might expect bookkeeping to claim a foundational place in the Australian soul.
Findings
This literature shows bush dwellers as being exploited by those from the city, and city professionals such as the accountant and the lawyer as having lost their sense of self and soul. The sense of “other” reflected by the concept of the bush in Australian literature represents a tension between a structured and ordered European sense of self expressed by Maltby and an archetypical sense of self implied by the character of the bushman and connected to the Australian landscape, with its inherent but little acknowledged debt to the Aboriginal. In this landscape the absence of both accounting and the associated rhetoric of economic rationality allow other forms of rationality to emerge.
Originality/value
This is the first time that poetry has been examined in relation to accounting. It shows a deep insight into the place of archetype of the accountant in Australian cultural identity. In addition it argues that responses to accounting can reflect underlying rhetorics of rationality.
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Andrew J. Templer and Tupper F. Cawsey
In this exploratory article we argue that changes in society, the nature of work and of the employment relationship have changed the nature of careers and consequently require a…
Abstract
In this exploratory article we argue that changes in society, the nature of work and of the employment relationship have changed the nature of careers and consequently require a re‐conceptualization of the nature of career development. The traditional functional models of human resource management are hopelessly inadequate in addressing the changed reality of competitive advantage in business organizations of today. We propose new models of career development in the context of the era of the portfolio career reality, draw implications for human resource management practice and suggest fruitful avenues for future research.
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Priscilla Wohlstetter, Joanna Smith and Andrew Gallagher
The purpose of this paper is to report findings from an exploratory study of New York's Children First Networks (CFNs); to examine what is known about the CFNs thus far, drawing…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to report findings from an exploratory study of New York's Children First Networks (CFNs); to examine what is known about the CFNs thus far, drawing on new empirical research, as well as document review and analysis of secondary sources.
Design/methodology/approach
Organizational learning theory guided this qualitative study. As such, in‐depth interviews conducted with central office staff, network leadership teams, cluster leaders, and principals focused on the flow and management of information within the networks; the ways in which stakeholders developed shared meanings; how collective intelligence was built and transmitted; and organizational responses to the early experience of the CFNs.
Findings
Findings highlight the tools and processes the NYC Department of Education (DOE) has put into place to operationalize the CFNs. Respondents identified as critical the replacement of supervisory leadership from the district with customization of services provided by the network teams to promote principal‐led reforms. Increased efficiency was noted by interviewees, but a number of challenges in the reform’s implementation also surfaced that point to the limitations of the CFNs as a capacity‐building mechanism.
Research limitations/implications
As an exploratory study, this research is intended to inform larger‐scale, mixed‐methods investigations of school networks, especially those implementing reforms aimed at improving teaching and learning in schools. Research is needed into the resource exchanges between individuals and groups in networks, what differentiates high‐performing from lower‐performing networks, and how data are used to inform the evolution of network structures and practices.
Originality/value
This study is the first peer‐reviewed article on the evolution of New York City's Children First Networks.
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