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This paper aims to contribute to an understanding of the process of the construction of the professional businessman in Britain in the early twentieth century.

Two books authored by the prominent British industrialist Sir Samuel Turner III are analysed as a form of contemporaneous discourse. This allows for examination of the texts as a particular genre of social media within their social, economic and political contexts.

Sir Samuel Turner III derived the elite status from his family’s standing as a prominent Lancashire, church-going, industrial dynasty. The role of business and the businessman as a professional are recast as the means to restore Britain to its former pre-World War I glory – a position that continues to resonate in a variety of contexts today.

The paper contributes to our understanding of the construction of the social world through discourse. While Turner’s ideology of the relationship between labour, capital, business and society may appear quaint to our twenty-first-century experiences, it is nevertheless an important reminder that the elite voice influences political and social action.

The purpose of this paper is to answer two main research questions. First, the authors ask the degree to which the UK corporate governance code has changed in response to both systemic perturbations and the subsequent enquiries established to recommend solutions to perceived shortcomings. Second, the authors ask how the solutions proposed in these landmark governance texts might be explained.

The authors take a critical discourse approach to develop and apply a discourse model of corporate governance reform. The authors draw together data on popular, corporate-political and technocratic discourses on corporate governance in the UK and analyse these data using content analysis and the historical discourse approach.

The UK corporate governance code has changed little despite periodic crises and the enquiries set up to investigate and make recommendation. Institutional stasis, the authors find, is the product of discourse capture and control by elite corporate actors aided by political allies who inhabit the same elite habitus. Review group members draw intertextually on prior technocratic discourse to create new canonical texts that bear the hallmarks of their predecessors. Light touch regulation by corporate insiders thus remains the UK approach.

This is one of the first applications of critical discourse analysis in the accounting literature and the first to have conducted a discursive analysis of corporate governance reports in the UK. The authors present an original model of discourse transitions to explain how systemic challenges are dissipated.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the presence and influence of US advertising in Italy between the early 1950s and the mid-1970s.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the presence and influence of US advertising in Italy between the early 1950s and the mid-1970s.

The paper argues that there is a need to further qualify and deconstruct the notion of “Americanization” by integrating the now well-established notions of “hybridization” and “mediation” with more specific attention to the competing “hearts and souls”, the different strategies and discursive practices that different individual actors (American, British and Italian) operating within the Italian advertising business tried to instil into goods and consumers and the economic and cultural results that they achieved.

This is the first research on the history of Italian advertising that fully places it within a transnational and comparative perspective using so far unpublished records, aiming at moving beyond traditional, eastbound Americanization frameworks through a detailed empirical investigation.

This tribute is in memory of Professor David Campbell, who sadly died in June 2017. David was an influential and inspirational global researcher in accounting. This tribute summarises his significant contribution to the discipline as well as providing insights into his career at Northumbria and Newcastle Universities.

The tribute provides a review of David’s research and his key publications in accounting. Specifically, his invaluable contribution to social and environmental accounting disclosure and related corporate accountability is highlighted.

David was a hugely popular personality in the accounting research discipline and he will be missed by colleagues and friends across the world. His insightful research, thinking and engaging personality led to enduring friendships and significant collaborative research publications. David was a great supporter of international conferences at which he actively encouraged and nurtured research by others around him.

David leaves a legacy of influential publications in accounting that have shaped the discipline and have helped develop solid foundations for rigorous future research in the area.

David’s research had significant practical implications with regard to the usefulness of voluntary accounting disclosure narrative to stakeholders. As well as highlighting the policy implications in relation to corporate disclosure, his work contributed to the debate concerning the accountability and ethics of organisations. Beyond research, David was also influential in professional accounting education as ACCA chief examiner for “Governance, Risk and Ethics”, embedding these issues into the curriculum.

The tribute highlights David’s global collaborative research friendships and their fruitful publications. He will be a huge loss to those people and others who knew him closely, as well as to the accounting community in general.

David enhanced the discipline as we know it and through his work will continue to shape the discipline in years to come. David had a love for research and for others whom he knew through it.

Argues that a mission statement should contain goals, differentiation factors identify organisations’ aspirations and define the role of all stakeholder groups. Additionally they should establish the behaviour standards required to achieve the goals set out. David (1989) stated that every organisation has a unique purpose, set of goals and priorities and concludes that these priorities currently focus on three determinants of competitive advantage which are reflected in the mission statements of the UK’s top business organsations. Reports on an examination of the components of the mission statements of a large cross section of organisations.

This chapter explores the mindset inside companies and how they plan and interact in society. Corporate strategy and leadership are discussed. Specific models illustrate a process of engagement including the sustainable livelihoods approach, The Partnership Continuum by Johnson (2011), Stages of Corporate Citizenship by Mirvis and Googins (2006), and Saul's (2012) social value spectrum and social innovation quartile. Finally, to illustrate best practices with highly driven corporate efforts, a case study at Campbell Soup Company in Camden, New Jersey, illuminates a broad range of perspectives and strategies that foster, manage, and report corporate practices in action.

An agenda for a social constructionist perspective on corporate communication. It seeks to do so by focusing on the mission statement as an aspect of corporate communications. Previously unpublished research on mission statement design and use in the UK is used as a basis for an analysis of the theoretical assumptions which are often presupposed in corporate communications. It is suggested that these assumptions represent one (cognitivist) model of communication meaning‐making. The alternative model of socially constituted meaning‐making is developed in the context of mission statement use. Some further, more general suggestions are made concerning the implications of social constructionism for corporate communications.

And for this relief give much thanks. A certain buildup of copy requires me to be brief.

The purpose of this research was to determine how regular exercise impacted leadership scores on two multi‐rater leadership assessment instruments – the Executive Success Profile® (ESP), and the Campbell Leadership Index^TM (CLI). Since 1997, data have been collected from over 600 senior‐level executives attending Leadership at the Peak, a five‐day course at the Center for Creative Leadership. Prior to attending, the participants completed a health and physical activity questionnaire that included questions about their exercise, dietary and smoking habits and assessment data were collected from both the participants and their observers. After they arrived at the program, fitness professionals collected additional data including percent body fat, blood‐pressure and exercise routine. The health data were compared with the results of the ESP and CLI. These instruments required a self‐assessment of performance on various leadership indices along with parallel ratings by an observer group of bosses, subordinates and peers. The results indicated that the observers rated exercisers significantly higher than the non‐exercisers on many of the ESP and CLI scales. The weighted averages of all the scales for both instruments were also significantly higher for the exercisers. Further, the bosses also rated smokers lower on 14 out of 22 ESP scales compared with those who had never smoked. Overall, these data indicate that engaging in regular exercise is positively correlated with how others rated executives on various leadership indices.

While the term “competency” is widely used, and widely criticized, we use it here, in agreement with Spencer and Spencer (1993) as an underlying characteristic of an individual (motive, trait, self-concept, knowledge, skill) that is causally related to superior performance in a job or situation. As Fig. 1 shows, we believe there are both universal leadership competencies and context-specific competencies that contribute to effective global leadership. David Campbell's chapter in this volume argues for nine universal competencies of global leadership, all nine needing to be present for an organization to be sustainable and an international leader to be effective. This fits with other experts who believe in universal competences. Morgan McCall and George Hollenbeck (2002) could not resist the urge to identify seven common competencies among the international executives in their research. For another example, Goldsmith, Greenberg, Robertson, and Hu-Chan (2003) concluded that there are 14 core competencies for future global leadership.