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The operating activities section of the statement of cash flows presents a long-standing teaching challenge for accounting educators. The direct method is easy to understand yet difficult to prepare; the indirect method is harder to understand but easier to prepare. Many instructors address the two methods separately, requiring students to learn two different ways for preparing the operating section of a statement of cash flows. Because of this focus on the mechanics of preparation, the result is often an emphasis on how to prepare the cash flow statement rather than on the essential information the statement provides. In this paper, the authors note that both direct and indirect methods begin at the same point, that is, the income statement, and end at the same point, that is, cash flow from operations. Then, the authors describe one process by which the income statement and the balance sheet can be analyzed to provide the information required to present operating cash flow using either the direct or the indirect method. Using this approach allows students to apply one intuitive process for computing cash flow from operations rather than memorizing two different sets of rules for direct and indirect methods.

Mission statements are used for a variety of reasons in organizations, including defining the purpose of the institution, communicating with its stakeholders, shaping its strategic planning process, providing a realistic snapshot of its everyday work, and outlining its future goals or objectives (among many others). For many academic libraries, mission statements are used to showcase resources, services, technologies, and innovations. The purpose of this study is to examine the mission statements of libraries that have won the ACRL Excellence in Libraries Award and analyze whether (or not) the winning libraries used innovation to create a distinct environment that was reflected through their mission statements. The study uses the work of Pearce and David (1987) to determine what elements are included in the mission statements. This chapter utilizes qualitative methodology in the study.

Pearce and David (1987) outline eight elements found in mission statements: target customer; principal products/services; geographic domain; core technologies; survival, growth, or profit; company philosophy; self-concept; and public image. This qualitative study finds that the mission statements of the academic libraries collectively included seven of the elements, omitting survival, growth, or profit universally. Also, the inclusion of these elements allows many of the libraries to create their unique description, unveiling a commitment to innovation.

As an original research study, this chapter adds a unique perspective to the concept of innovation in academic libraries, particularly as it examines the mission statements of award-winning libraries to determine if innovation is found in these foundational documents.

We revisit the model of socialism proposed in our Towards a New Socialism (1993) and attempt to answer various questions that have been raised regarding the connection between our view of socialism and our perspective on capitalism, the process of transition to socialism, the failings of the Soviet model, the relationship between socialism and communism, the role of direct democracy under socialism, and the use of labor-time calculation in a socialist economy. We argue that the contradictions of capitalist property relations, and of the accumulation process on a world scale, are set to present once again the necessity of the abolition of private property during the 21st century, and offer some thoughts on transitional forms that could implement this abolition. We defend the ideas of direct democracy and economic calculation in terms of labor time, and argue that these elements distinguish our proposals from the Soviet model. We trace the demise of the latter both to specifics of the Russian situation and to more general problems of Leninism, notably Lenin’s conception of the council state, and of socialism as a long period during which the productive forces are built up in preparation for an eventual communism.

The chapter examines the core framework of A. C. Pigou’s Theory of Unemployment (TU) with the aim of providing a rational reconstruction of his analysis of the determinants of unemployment in the short period. This is accomplished without any comparison with Keynes’s criticism of TU, as often found in the previous literature.

I reconstruct Pigou’s two-sector model, which only accounted for output in the wage good sector but not in the non-wage good sector, as a complete two-sector model to reveal his implicit assumptions about the passive behaviour of non-wage earners in the non-wage good sector. I also find classical elements, most notably the wage fund doctrine and the hypothesis on profits, in Pigou’s approach, which partly explains why the model is incomplete when viewed in terms of its neoclassical elements. In the “A Rational Reconstruction of the Two-Sector Model” section, I sketch a mathematical model to make Pigou’s analysis consistent.

The chapter shows how unemployment is determined and how economic policy to deal with it is conceived in the work of a major exponent of the pre-Keynesian approach.

During the last two decades, many Marxian economists have brought forth empirical evidence that supposedly supports a version of the “labor theory of value” that Marx rejected, namely the theory that individual commodities’ prices tend to equal their values. However, recent studies have challenged this conclusion. The present paper offers additional evidence and arguments against it. Firstly, the theory in question implies that prices will be higher, ceteris paribus, in industries in which variable capital is a relatively large component of total cost, but regression analysis of U.S. data compels us to reject this hypothesis. Secondly, although sectoral values and prices are very strongly correlated, simulation results indicate that the observed correlations are no higher than the correlations that can be obtained by aggregation, even if the disaggregated values and prices are uncorrelated and extremely far apart. Finally, many studies have found that average price-value deviations are small, but it is shown here that this finding is meaningless, since aggregation of the data tends systematically to reduce measures of average deviation.

Popular understandings of the financial crisis tend to focus on the rents extracted by elite personnel in the financial sector. Professional discussions, however, have addressed the faulty assumptions underlying theory and practice – in particular, the assumption that returns to financial assets follow the Gaussian distribution, in the face of much empirical evidence that these have power law distributions with far higher kurtosis. It turns out that the power law tails of returns to financial assets are also a feature of the distribution of company rates of profit, a discovery that stems from proposals to ‘dissolve’ the traditional transformation problem by abandoning the condition of a uniform rate of profit and instead considering its distribution.Marx himself was aware of the importance of considering the distributional properties of economic variables, based on his reading of Quetelet. In fact, heavy-tailed distributions characterise a wide range of variables in capitalist economies, the best-known probably being the Paretian tail component in distributions of income and wealth. Nor is this simply an empirical fact – such distributions emerge readily from a range of agent-based simulations.Capitalist economies are, in a particular technical sense, complex self-organising systems perpetually on the brink of crisis. This modern understanding is prefigured in Marx’s discussion of how the compulsive character of social relations emerges from the atomistic exercise of human free will in commercial society. The developing literature of probabilistic Marxism successfully applies these insights to the wider fields of econophysics and complexity, demonstrating the continuing relevance of Marx’s thought.