Search results

This paper aims to explore controls within an inter-organisational relationship involving outsourced management accounting services from the contractor’s perspective.

Qualitative data from within the relationship are analysed in a legitimacy-theory framework, illustrating how controls within the relationship are intended to build the contractor’s legitimacy and what kinds of implications the controls have in relation to conflicts between interests inherent in the relationship.

The legitimacy perspective clarifies that while controls are aimed at ensuring efficiency for the client, they may also provide symbolic displays of the appropriateness of the contractor’s actions both at an inter-organisational level for the client and at an individual level for the contractor’s employees. While the contractor intends to build legitimacy with the client by demonstrating utility in the form of efficiency, the process also gives the client influence and allows the disposition in terms of shared values to be demonstrated. However, this process has some negative consequences for the contractor’s employees as it is insufficient for serving the boundary-spanning employees’ interests connected with the nature of their work. Hence, the same controls need to yield benefits and fair outcomes for employees. The controls simultaneously foster interconnections that contribute to permanence and formalise the outsourcing of complex services, thereby rendering such processes comprehensible and transferable to other settings, which can be seen to serve the contractor’s continuity interests.

The paper contributes to academic research by illustrating how controls within inter-organisational relationships not only steer boundary-spanners’ work to conform to a client’s needs but may also help to build legitimacy via symbolic properties in the presence of conflicting interests at both an inter-organisational and individual level. It specifically highlights the important role of boundary-spanners lower in the organisational structure, who both affect and are influenced by the intentions to build legitimacy with the client.

An updated version of the original (1985) text, the book covers all aspects of marketing and selling bank services: the role of marketing; behaviour of customers; intelligence, planning and organisation; product decisions; promotion decisions; place decisions; price decisions; achieving sales. Application questions help to focus the readers' minds on key issues affecting practice.

Generally, the user requires customized information reflecting his/her current needs and interests that are stored in his/her profile. There are many sources which may provide beneficial information to enrich the user’s interests such as his/her social network for recommendation purposes. The proposed approach rests basically on predicting the reliability of the users’ profiles which may contain conflictual interests. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This approach handles conflicts by detecting the reliability of neighbors’ profiles of a user. The authors consider that these profiles are dependent on one another as they may contain interests that are enriched from non-reliable profiles. The dependency relationship is determined between profiles, each of which contains interests that are structured based on k-means algorithm. This structure takes into consideration not only the evolutionary aspect of interests but also their semantic relationships.

The proposed approach was validated in a social-learning context as evaluations were conducted on learners who are members of Moodle e-learning system and Delicious social network. The quality of the created interest structure is assessed. Then, the result of the profile reliability is evaluated. The obtained results are satisfactory. These results could promote recommendation systems as the selection of interests that are considered of enrichment depends on the reliability of the profiles where they are stored.

Some specific limitations are recorded. As the quality of the created interest structure would evolve in order to improve the profile reliability result. In addition, as Delicious is used as a main data source for the learner’s interest enrichment, it was necessary to obtain interests from other sources, such as e-recruitement systems.

This research is among the pioneer papers to combine the semantic as well as the hierarchical structure of interests and conflict resolution based on a profile reliability approach.

The purpose of this study is to introduce the homophone emotional interest superiority effect in phonological, or sound-based, priming, whereby pseudohomophone brand names (i.e. non-words that are pronounced identically to English words, for example, Bie) prime brand meaning associated with the member of the homophone pair that is emotionally interesting (i.e. Bie will be prime brand avoidance (purchase) when consumers are emotionally interested in the homophone bye [buy]).

Studies 1 and 2 examine the effect of homophone emotional interest on brand judgements and behaviours. Study 3 investigates the role of boredom with the brand name in attenuating the homophone emotional interest superiority effect.

Findings indicate that pseudohomophone brand names prime brand judgements and behaviours associated with the word from the homophone pair that evokes emotional interest. Study 2 provides further evidence of homophone emotional interest as the process influencing brand judgements and behaviours. Study 3 establishes that the effect of pseudohomophone brand names on brand judgements weaken when boredom with the brand name is induced.

This study is limited, as it focuses only on fictitious brands and methodologically creates boredom in a way in which may not be typical of what would be experienced in the real world.

This study has important implications for brand managers in the development of new brand names and in prioritising the intended homophone pair from a pseudohomophone brand name to influence consumer judgements and behaviours.

This study introduces and provides evidence of a homophone emotional interest superiority effect. This study also identifies a condition under which the homophone emotional interest superiority effect is attenuated.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the determinants of interest rate in emerging markets, focusing on banking financial institutions in Uganda.

Using the net interest margin model, interest rate was estimated by applying a panel random effects regression method on 24 banks, while controlling for bank-specific factors, industry and macroeconomic indicators. Data were drawn from annual reports provided by Bank of Uganda Depository Corporation survey from 2008 to 2016.

The results indicate that liquidity, equity capital, market power and reserve requirement have a positive effect on interest rate. The study further finds that operational efficiency, lending out ratio, concentration, public sector borrowing and private sector credit have a negative effect on interest rate. However, credit risk does not influence interest rate.

Studied banks are grouped in one panel data set; future studies would focus on the differences in banks and establish how these differences affect interest rate. Future study would also focus on how the determinants of interest rate in Uganda are compared with those of other banks in other emerging market countries.

Bank managers need to take interest in equity mobilization because it is a reliable and cheaper source of funding bank operations. Banks should emphasize efficient operations to reduce on the cost of doing business. Government should utilize funds borrowed from banks in efficient ways to improve economic growth. The central bank should minimize the use of reserve requirement as a means of controlling money in circulation.

This is the first paper that uses annual report data from several banks and periods to investigate the determinants of interest rate in an emerging country.

This paper demonstrates the impact of recognition and valuation of youth interest on potential career trajectory and future pathway choices.

This paper presents data from two ethnographies. The first ethnography is of an online professional wrestling fan community, which took place between October 2012 and May 2013. The second ethnography is of the online Scratch community, Scratch is a free online coding program. Observations of the community took place between October 2014 and October 2015, with interviews ongoing as of the writing of this paper.

This paper details the importance of valuing youth learning and the impact that receiving recognition and valuation can have on youths’ future choices.

This research focuses on two online communities and presents four examples of the phenomena of valuation and recognition described in the paper. To draw broad conclusions, a wider sample would be required.

This paper can offer examples to practitioners and researcher alike as to what the impacts of valuing youth learning in interest-driven contexts can be for youth long-term learning and career trajectory and forms that the valuation of interest to support growth and interest can take.

The paper demonstrates the importance of valuing learning in all parts of youths’ lives and the impact that the valuation can have on the future pathways and career trajectory of youth.

The low number of women in the information technology (IT) field is a concern. The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors behind the exclusion of girls from the IT field.

The present work includes a narrative literature review and an exploratory interview study with ten girls and six study guidance counsellors (GCs) from Finnish senior high schools. Using the nexus analysis as a theoretical lens, the authors examined the exclusion of girls from IT.

Earlier literature directed attention to the cultural norms, assumptions and stereotypes still prevalent in society and the lack of role models and positive media as factors contributing to girls excluding themselves from the IT field. In this research study’s data, the authors not only found evidence of the unintentional exclusion of girls from IT by others but also by the girls themselves. Findings of this research study illustrate the various discourses, actors and their interactions, their background and history-related factors affecting girls' career choices. The novelty of this study is in approaching high school as a site of exclusion, where problematic discourses, interactions and histories come together, reproducing exclusion of girls from the IT field.

The authors contribute with a literature review of the research study on gender and IT and the inclusion/exclusion dynamics around IT. Using the nexus analysis, the authors identify the exclusion dynamics in this complex social issue. Several decades of research have shown that the inclusion of women remains low in IT disciplines. In this study, high schools are viewed as sites of exclusion, engendering a prevalent lack of information and education on the field. The authors offer novel insights into the role of curriculum, GCs and online information excluding girls from the IT field.

This paper aims to present an analysis of the role of financial incentives, moral hazard and conflicts of interests leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.

The study’s analysis has identified common structural flaws throughout the securitization food chain. These structural flaws include inappropriate incentives, the absence of punishment, moral hazard and conflicts of interest. This research sees the full impact of these structural flaws when considering their co-occurrence throughout the financial system. The authors address systemic defects in the securitization food chain and examine the inter-relationships among homeowners, mortgage originators, investment banks and investors. The authors also address the role of exogenous factors, including the SEC, AIG, the credit rating agencies, Congress, business academia and the business media.

The study argues that the lack of criminal prosecutions of key financial executives has been a key factor in creating moral hazard. Eight years after the Great Recession ended in the USA, the financial services industry continues to suffer from a crisis of trust with society.

An overwhelming majority of Americans, 89 per cent, believe that the federal government does a poor job of regulating the financial services industry (Puzzanghera, 2014). A study argues that the current corporate lobbying framework undermines societal expectations of political equality and consent (Alzola, 2013). The authors believe the Singapore model may be a useful starting point to restructure regulatory agencies so that they are more responsive to societal concerns and less responsive to special interests. Finally, the widespread perception is that the financial services sector, in particular, is ethically challenged (Ferguson, 2012); perhaps there would be some benefit from the implementation of ethical climate monitoring in firms that have been subject to deferred prosecution agreements for serious ethical violations (Arnaud, 2010).

The authors believe the paper makes a truly original contribution. They provide new insights via their analysis of the role of financial incentives, moral hazard and conflicts of interests leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.

The behavior of tourists strongly depends on the availability and quality of information. Too little information as well as too much can be disorienting and forces many tourists to join the majority visiting major sights. This causes a few crowded places in contrast to many which are under‐utilized. A Destination Management Organization has the goal to spread tourists more evenly, whereas the tourists would like to enjoy the destination to its full potential according to their personal interests. The paper aims to focus on the issues surrounding the creation of a mobile tourist guide.

A field trial was conducted in the summer of 2005 to study the following questions as a precondition for the development: Is it possible to seed generic interest profiles in the mobile context that allow the accurate prediction of actual rankings? Are the interest profiles sufficiently diverse to base personalized tours on individual interest profiles instead of interest prototypes? How do personalized tours affect the spatial behavior of tourist? Three methods to elicit the generic preferences of tourist in the mobile context are compared with actual rankings using Spearman's rank order coefficient.

The diversity of the interest profiles is analyzed in various ways leading to the conclusion that personalized interest profiles are necessary. For the gathered profiles tours are computed and simulated in order to gain a first insight into the effect on the spatial behavior of tourists.

The dynamic tour guide is supporting both goals by means of pervasive computing based on the actual context which is defined by personal interests, location and schedule of a tourist. It enables a personalized, spontaneous and guided tour.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of what a good grabber is and how to construct one. This is done by drawing on the insights provided by Professor Timothy L. Wilson, for whom this paper is written as an “honorary piece.”

The paper is based on a small sample of papers from the 48 journals that have received contributions from Professor Wilson throughout the years. A total of 12 papers have been selected, using a mix of convenience and haphazard sampling. The grabber of each paper has then been analyzed based on its nature and style.

Based on the review and analysis, five different types of grabbers were identified; the quote, the anecdote, the provocative question, the surprise, and the metaphor, each type representing a unique way (and strategy) of creating initial interest.

As this paper was intentionally based on a convenience sample, further investigation is needed to establish whether the presented categories have clear validity and/or whether there are additional categories/strategies for how to create good grabbers.

Creation of interest is an increasingly important part of everyday academic practice. As the grabber is a rarely addressed phenomenon in academic literature, the presented categories should be of both interest and practical use to academics in most fields.