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Considers the structure of grocery retailing in Australia and, in particular, presents and contrasts the development strategies being pursued by the three major retailers in this highly concentrated market. Woolworth’s, the market leader, is a classic corporate recovery story and is emerging as one of the most impressive food retailers in the world. By contrast, the grocery businesses of Coles Myer, Australia’s leading retailer and one of the largest retailers in the world, are under intense pressure from both a rejuvenated Woolworth’s and the company’s own internal weaknesses, many of which are a legacy of a long period of unchallenged market dominance. Coles now faces the challenge of reinventing itself and is taking an approach quite different to that of Woolworth’s. Franklins is number three in Australian grocery retailing and its origins are as a price aggressive discounter. However, as Franklins’ own market position has come under pressure, the company is responding by moving towards more direct competition with Coles and Woolworth’s.

This paper examines how accounting either contributes to or undermines worker resistance to unfair pay, thereby enhancing our current understanding of the emancipatory potential of accounting.

We apply Jacques Rancière's concept of politics and build on recent calls to introduce Rancière's work to accounting by analysing a case based on workers in an Australian supermarket chain who challenged their employer Coles over wage underpayments.

We find that in this case, accounting is, in part, a means to politics and a part of the police in Rancière's sense. More specifically, accounting operated within the established order to constrain the workers, but also provided workers with a resource for their political acts that enabled change.

This empirical research adds to Li and McKernan (2016) and Brown and Tregidga (2017) conceptual work on Rancière. It also contributes more broadly to emancipatory accounting research by identifying radical possibilities for workers' accounting to bring about change.

Despite some outward signs of strength, all may not be as well with Australian retailing as appears on the surface. Our contributor, Steve Worthington, has just returned from a six month stay in Australia. He suggests that the dominance of the sector by Coles Myer, an over reliance on price as a competitive weapon, and the lack of segmentation of the Australian consumer all mean that Australian retailing has somewhat atrophied.

The purpose of this paper is to involve interviews with civilian oversight of law enforcement (COLE) directors from throughout the USA with the purpose of obtaining their perspectives on what it takes to create and sustain successful COLE programs.

The project involved 24 semi-structured interviews with experienced COLE directors. The interviews were transcribed and coded and this paper presents these perspectives according to patterns identified during analysis.

The research identified themes and patterns in the attitudes of the oversight directors which included numerous conditions necessary for success of an oversight agency. Amongst the most important conditions included agency independence, director job security, the need for professional qualified staff, unfettered access to information, the ability to publicly report on the agency’s work and a willingness on the part of government officials to tolerate criticism of the police.

This is the first study to identify the challenges and impediments to sustainable COLE mechanisms from the point-of-view of experienced agency directors. The findings can be used by future practitioners to learn from past experiences.

This paper aims to give a brief overview of dielectric properties, relative complex permittivity and its dependence on frequency. The significance of different approaches to complex permittivity is also discussed.

The different mechanisms of polarization are then presented. Dielectric measurements are given, and an RC parallel-equivalent circuit is used to simulate a parallel plate capacitor, and the way in which the impedance of the circuits is affected by frequency is illustrated in their respective diagrams. The way in which dielectric properties change with time is also discussed.

The goal of this paper is to give an overview of the characteristics of the dielectrics and how frequency affects the relative complex permittivity and to present different approaches to and equations for the relative complex permittivity, such as that of Debye, Cole–Cole, Cole–Davidson and Havriliak–Negami. In addition, three mechanisms of polarization, namely, electronic, atomic and bipolar, are presented. The most common dielectric characterization device, a capacitor with parallel plates between which the dielectric material under study is located, is also discussed. Ohmic and dielectric losses of a non-ideal capacitor are accounted for. Furthermore, this paper studies the equivalent circuits of a non-ideal parallel plate capacitor, those being a resistor and an ideal capacitor connected either in series or in parallel.

Finally, dielectric responses to both time and to stepwise excitation are given.

Many accounting departments have implemented assurance of learning (AoL) processes in the last few years because accreditation agencies have mandated it. In prior articles, we described an early assessment process (Stivers, Campbell, & Hermanson, 2000), a revised assessment process, and a suggested systems-oriented methodology for implementing an AoL process (Hill & Campbell, 2007). The purpose of this article is to provide the post-implementation review of our revised AoL process. We evaluate whether the AoL process is meeting the users’ goals effectively and efficiently. To do this, we provide the feedback we received from our Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) accreditation visit, the results of a faculty survey, and some output from our AoL system. Our review indicates that while the AACSB accreditation team viewed our AoL process as a “best practice,” the faculty members evaluated the process less positively. Faculty members were concerned about the number and clarity of the learning goals, the usefulness of the information generated, and the cost/benefit of the process with respect to the time involved. We conclude that different goals for the AoL process, accountability versus course improvement, drive the difference in opinion between the accreditation team and the faculty. Changes in senior management in the college along with faculty opinions have led to significant changes in the college’s AoL process including changing the name from AoL to TLC (Teaching and Learning Community). The results of this research emphasize the importance of treating the AoL program as a dynamic process that must be periodically evaluated to determine if it is meeting the organizations’ goals for the process. If the AoL program is not meeting goals or costing too much to meet them, then it should be revised and improved.

This paper revisits the early-20th-century British blueprint for Guild Socialism and discusses its similarities and differences with labor managed firm (LMF) theory and with the historic Yugoslav system. It finds that the Guild Socialist vision of a corporatist workers’ state based on universal, non-anonymous, multi-party negotiation of incomes, prices, and quantities comes much closer to anticipating the real-world Yugoslav experiment in worker-managed market socialism than the market-syndicalist utopia embodied in the Western economic model of the LMF and economy.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of the considerable Ag₂SO₄ content on the electrical and dielectric properties of (AgPO₃)_1−x(Ag₂SO₄)_x ion glass system as well as to extract thermodynamic parameters.

Glass samples of (AgPO₃)_1-x(Ag₂SO₄)_x with different mole ratios of Ag₂SO₄ [x = 0.00, 0.10,0.15,0.20 and 0.25] have been synthesized and used. X-ray diffraction and differential thermal analysis were used to investigate structural and thermal properties, and then the electrical characterizations of the bulk glasses were performed in different frequency and temperature range.

For different ratios of Ag₂SO₄ on AgPO₃, the bulk conductivity is enhanced with increasing the amount of Ag₂SO₄ until the composition of x = 0.20, after which the conductivity decreases. The general behavior of both ε’ and ε” decreases with increasing frequency and increases with increasing temperature. Complex impedance analysis studied by Z‘−Z’ and Cole–Cole plot at different temperatures revealed that bulk resistance decreases with temperature.

The calculated values of activation free energy, enthalpy and entropy change for different compositions of (AgPO₃)_1-x(Ag₂SO₄)_x showed an increase in activation energy and enthalpy when Ag₂SO₄ ratio is increased in (AgPO₃)_1-x(Ag₂SO₄)_x composition up to 20%, and then there is a decrease in their values at x = 25%, which may be explained based on non-bridging oxygen.