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In the last years the penetration of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems within small, medium and large organizations increased steadily. Organizations are forced to adapt their systems and perform ERP upgrades in order to react to rapidly changing business environments, technological enhancements and rising pressure of competition. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the critical success factors for such projects.

The paper is based on a literature review and qualitative interviews with CEOs, CIOs, ERP consultants and project managers who recently carried out ERP upgrade projects in their respective organizations.

This paper identifies 14 critical success factors for ERP upgrade projects. Amongst others, effective project management, external support, the composition of the ERP team and the usage of a multiple system landscape play a key role for the success of the ERP upgrade. Furthermore, a comparison to the critical success factors for ERP implementation projects was conducted, and even though there are many similarities between these types of projects, several differences emerged.

ERP upgrade projects have a huge impact on organizations, but their success and antecedents for it are currently under-researched.

This paper aims to highlight myriad accomplishments of C. Bertrand Thompson, who is perhaps most well known as a scientific-management bibliographer and a Taylor disciple, in the belief that his contributions as a pioneer management theorist and consultant in Europe deserve to be more widely known and more deeply appreciated.

Archival, primary and secondary sources were used in the research.

Thompson was among the first to bring management consulting to Europe. He understood the importance of adapting scientific-management principles to meet the diverse needs of each client for whom he consulted. Thompson’s strong belief and value system remained constant throughout his life.

Understanding the needs of customers or clients and adapting systems to meet those needs is essential in achieving success as a consultant.

By drawing on rarely accessed published and unpublished materials, this paper discusses Thompson’s many contributions to management thought and practice, most of which previously have not been highlighted in the referent literature.

This chapter offers a reading of the inclusion of Susan Glaspell's short story, A Jury of Her Peers, in the casebook, Procedure. What does it mean that the editors turn to a secular, literary narrative to ground a consideration of “The Problem of Judgment?” How should we read the irony of the reading instructions they provide, which reproduce the blindness to form – to the significance of “trifles” – that the text describes? How do we read literature in the context of law? More specifically, what does attention to the form of the story yield for an understanding of legal judgment?

This paper takes a unique approach to provide additional insight into the agency view of tax avoidance. We directly investigate the association between the presence of agency conflicts and corporate tax avoidance. Using a measure of CEO centrality, developed by Bebchuk, Cremers, and Peyer (2011), we identify settings in which agency conflicts are likely to be high. In contrast to prior literature, our primary tests do not rely on the inferences of market participants regarding tax avoidance. We find that CEO centrality is positively and significantly associated with tax avoidance. Additionally, we analyze the mediating role of monitoring by institutional investors in our setting. We find that the relation between tax avoidance and the existence of agency conflicts is strongest for firms with low levels of CEO monitoring. We also add to prior literature by investigating the implications of our setting on future accounting performance and future firm value.

While the literature contains a number of studies of ethical investment funds, relatively little is known about church investment processes and practices despite the significant role they have played in the development of the sector. This paper attempts to address this lacuna by studying the ethical investment programmes of two UK churches: the Methodist Church and the Church of England. The paper initially explores the relationship between the Judaeo‐Christian church and the development of the ethical investment movement. This history reveals an engagement both at the institutional and individual level that challenges the assumed sacred secular divide now commonplace within the literature and the more recent guardian‐advocate dichotomy. Second, the paper delineates the way in which the churches theologically conceptualise this engagement and describes how these values are proceduralised through the operation of the funds. The final section provides an immanent critique of church investments both at a performative and theological level. The aim of this concluding section is to engage with the churches in exploring the broader potential for the church in effecting social change.

The late Nancy Jay described a striking feature of animal sacrifice: in many different cultures it functions to establish paternity. This article develops a theoretical framework for understanding just what it is about animal sacrifice that makes it so cross‐culturally well‐suited for establishing paternity. The main premise of this framework is that sacrifice communicates menace – not so much towards the domesticated animals ritually killed, but primarily towards those subordinated humans (children in particular) who are similarly disempowered vis‐à‐vis the class of male sacrificers. By demonstrating their willingness and ability to kill, sacrificing men gain a material basis for claiming credit for human reproduction, namely, that children live only by virtue of the sacrificers’ decision to kill animals in their stead. This framework is explicated through reference to Old and New Testament discourses of sacrifice.

Accounting comparability has been the subject of significant interest in empirical financial accounting research. Recent literature, particularly that following De Franco et al.’s (2011) influential study, has focused on utilizing the output of the financial reporting process to measure accounting comparability. In this paper, we conduct an early survey of studies using output-based measures of comparability. We provide two distinct contributions to the literature. First, we describe and comment on four important measurement concepts as well as the studies that introduced them. With this methodological contribution, we aim to facilitate the measurement choice for empirical accounting researchers engaged in comparability research. Second, we classify the sub-streams of literature and related studies. In providing this content-related contribution, we sum up what has already been achieved in output-based accounting comparability research and highlight potential areas for prospective research. As a whole, our study attempts to guide empirical researchers who (plan to) undertake studies on accounting comparability in selecting relevant topics and choosing adequate approaches to measurement.

The Neoclassical approach to analysing personal choice is compared with an approach contained in a Biblical Christian mode of analysis. This paper compares the Neoclassical and Christian positions via analysis of characteristics of the Neoclassical rational choice model. The main characteristic examined is a basic assumption of the rational choice model that human choice is explained as the optimisation of utility via rational self‐interest. The two positions are compared in terms of how they treat self‐interest and rationality, the degree to which basic assumptions about human behaviour are specified, the importance they attach to the realism of assumptions underlying their models, and the explanatory and predictive purposes for which the models are used. The conclusion of the comparison is that the Biblical Christian perspective encompasses the variables regarded as important in Neoclassical explanation, but presents them in the context of a more embracing worldview perspective than the Neoclassical. This Christian belief perspective is applicable to human behaviour in both “economic” and “non‐economic” domains.