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This study examines how firms’ use of competitor-focused accounting information, specifically competitor monitoring information, impacts their pricing, demand, and overall revenue performance. The monitoring activities examined are the scope of monitoring, monitoring above and below one’s own hotel class (i.e., market segment), and the extent of reciprocity of monitoring. Competitor analysis is a central element in strategic management accounting (SMA), yet little empirical research has been done since companies do not disclose competitor monitoring activities. Proving the value of competitive monitoring provides strong support for SMA. Archival, proprietary monitoring information regarding pricing, demand, and revenue were obtained from one of the largest hotel markets in the United States. Using regression, we modeled the relationships between performance measures (pricing, demand, and revenue) and monitoring behaviors, while controlling for quality (hotel characteristics and management skill), competitive intensity, hotel class, geographic location, and ownership type. Our results indicate that two aspects of competitor monitoring impact hotel pricing that, in turn, impacts hotel demand and revenue performance. Specifically, a hotel monitoring more competitors (what we refer to as Scope) achieves higher prices with unchanged demand, resulting in higher revenue performance. Most hotels monitor within their class. However, deviating from one’s class has profound outcomes: looking at lower (higher) quality hotels results in a hotel setting lower (higher) prices, resulting in higher (unchanged) demand and lower (higher) revenue performance. Surprisingly, we did not find support for the reciprocity of monitoring. That is, whether the competitors monitored by a hotel, in turn follow the target, has no impact on hotel revenue performance outcomes. While the SMA literature notes the importance of competitor monitoring, this study fills a gap in an important, under-researched area by documenting the link between competitor monitoring behaviors and organizational revenue performance. This may help promote greater diffusion of SMA practices.

Aim – This empirical study explores the association between competition, business strategy, and the uses of a multiple performance measurement system in Bangladesh manufacturing firms.

Design/methodology – The study uses a questionnaire survey of 50 manufacturing companies. Data were analyzed using multiple regression analysis and other descriptive statistics.

Findings – The results suggest that greater emphasis on multiple measures for performance evaluation is associated with businesses that are facing high competition. The practices of multiple performance measures are also significantly related to the types of business strategy being followed. Specifically, firms pursuing a prospector strategy have relied more on multiple performance measures to rate business performance than the firms pursuing a defender strategy.

Practical implications – The article notes that the designers of performance measurement systems need to consider contingent factors that affect an organizations’ control system.

Originality/value – Substantiating the connection between contingent variables and the use of multiple performance measures in manufacturing firms facilitate a better acceptance of firms’ tendency toward new measurement tools. The study contributes to the performance measurement and contingency literature since it presents empirical evidence of the state of multiple performance measures with organizational contingent variables using a developing country's manufacturing sector data.

The purpose of this chapter is to identify the most appropriate ways of defining the adoption and non-adoption of activity-based costing (ABC). This chapter uses the responses to a questionnaire survey of management accountants working in British manufacturing industry to test if there are differences across various definitions of adoption and non-adoption in the level of competition, product customization, manufacturing overhead cost percentage and operating unit size. When there are no significant differences between the groups making up each definition this indicates that the definition is appropriate and can be used to define adoption or non-adoption. The results of the research show that the only appropriate definition for ABC adoption is operating units that are currently using ABC. It is possible to define non-adoption in three ways as operating units that are not using ABC, but have considered it; those that are not using ABC, but have considered it except those intending to use it; and those that have rejected ABC, but have never adopted activity-based principles or have never previously used ABC. Comparisons between these two groups show that operating units that have adopted ABC are significantly larger than non-adopters, regardless of how non-adoption is defined. Prior research into the adoption of ABC has used a variety of definitions for the adoption and non-adoption of ABC without examining the appropriateness of these definitions. This chapter overcomes this deficiency by empirically testing the most appropriate definitions.

This chapter focuses upon two types of interaction. One is the interaction between departments within the Danish Trademark and Patent Office (DKPTO). Additionally, the interaction between the DKPTO and firms is analysed. The chapter discusses in what ways an institution like a national patent office is important for product innovation, not just by providing an appropriability system for product innovations in firms, but additionally by improving the long-run capabilities of both firms and the DKPTO itself. The research builds upon interviews in the DKPTO, case stories from firms and of patent granting procedures.

With respect to internal competencies, it is found that no efforts were carried out to create environments for learning between the departments in line with the “learning organizations” described in earlier chapters. However, taking the tasks of the departments into account, the need for such efforts was not obvious. Links to external organizations are not only confined to industrial firms. Many firms, especially the large firms, would not mind if the tasks of the national patent system were moved to the EPO-level. On the other hand, in particular, small, new firms may feel more confident with a national patent office.

This chapter is concerned with the question that is indigeneity, and its situation within literary and juridical imaginaries. As a persistently unsettling presence, indigeneity appears outside the law, before the law and beyond the law – indeed, in Derrida's terms, as an evocation of the unconditional. Whereas the law determines indigeneity to recognise it, I propose that its expression in Indigenous literature evokes a Derridean unconditional to which the law must perpetually, if momentarily, respond. This chapter elaborates a conception of indigeneity, as expressed in Indigenous literature, as disruptive and deconstructive of non-Indigenous law, opening its narratives to transformation.

Purpose – To present the Assessment to Instructional Planning (ATIP) framework that uses assessment to guide instructional planning.

Design/methodology/approach – The ATIP framework is comprised of three interconnected processes: data collection, data analysis and interpretation, and instructional planning.

Findings – In the ATIP framework, data collection includes reviewing background information and developing and implementing an assessment plan. The data analysis and interpretation process begins with scoring assessments and progresses to contextualizing results and making decisions. Instructional planning moves from setting goals to selecting instructional methods and materials, implementing instructional checkpoints, and monitoring and adjusting instruction.

Research limitations/implications – The ATIP framework provides a step-by-step process that educators can follow to use assessment to plan instruction. ATIP requires that educators already have knowledge of literacy assessment and instruction to apply the Framework appropriately.

Practical implications – The ATIP framework can be applied for students in grades K-8 in clinical settings, school-based intervention programs, and elementary and middle school classrooms.

Originality/value – This chapter provides three profiles to illustrate the ATIP framework in clinical, small-group intervention, and classroom settings with different levels of readers with varying strengths, needs, and backgrounds.

In this chapter, we draw upon data from a six-month study that took place in a progressive, multiage preschool classroom in the northeast United States. Our study focus was on the relationship between young children, gender, and curriculum. Using posthumanist concepts, we focus on how space and materials are actors who can aid in the production of gender in an early childhood classroom. Understanding place as assemblage, we draw upon political theorist Jane Bennett’s concepts of assemblage and thing power, as we map forces and actors in the preschool classroom: “loose parts” (a curated “natural” wooded, outdoor space) and “inner treetop” (the inside classroom space). Our findings show that gender emerges in different areas in preschool classrooms. We conclude with discussions of how separate and distinct possibilities and performances of gender configure into issues of equity and early childhood learning.

This chapter considers the mobilities of families subject to child protection involvement at the threshold of the birth of a new baby. The author presents data arising from an ethnographic study of child protection social work with unborn babies. This study aimed to draw near to social work practice within the Scottish context through mobile research methods and included non-participant observations of a range of child protection meetings with expectant families. Research interviews were sought with expectant mothers and fathers, social workers and the chair persons of Pre-birth Child Protection Case Conferences. Case conferences are formal administrative meetings designed to consider the risks to children, including unborn children. This chapter focusses on the experiences of expectant parents of navigating the child protection involvement with their as yet unborn infant. The strategies that parents adopted to steer a course through the multiple possibilities in relation to the future care of their infant are explored here. Three major strategies: resistance, defeatism and holding on are considered. These emerged as means by which expectant parents responded to social work involvement and which enabled their continued forwards motion towards an uncertain future.