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This paper is an initial attempt to discuss the American institutionalist movement as it changed and developed after 1945. Institutionalism in the inter-war period was a relatively coherent movement held together by a set of general methodological, theoretical, and ideological commitments (Rutherford, 2011). Although institutionalism always had its critics, it came under increased attack in the 1940s, and faced challenges from Keynesian economics, a revived neoclassicism, econometrics, and from new methodological approaches derived from various versions of positivism. The institutionalist response to these criticisms, and particularly the criticism that institutionalism “lacked theory,” is to be found in a variety of attempts to redefine institutionalism in new theoretical or methodological terms. Perhaps the most important of these is to be found in Clarence Ayres’ The Theory of Economic Progress (1944), although there were many others. These developments were accompanied by a significant amount of debate, disagreement, and uncertainty over future directions. Some of this is reflected in the early history of The Association for Evolutionary Economics.

This chapter grapples with the relationship between dis/ability and narrative inquiry through the authors’ personal stories that push back at the cultural-historical, policy, and professional master narratives of dis/ability in order to contribute to efforts that theorize critical emotion praxis. We ask: what is the relationship between dis/ability and narrative inquiry? What are the lived experiences of those living within a variety of intersectional and emotional dis/ability narratives that resist and navigate the cultural-historical, policy, and professional master narratives of dis/ability at the intersections?

We use a Disability Studies in Education (DSE) paradigm to construct a collective autoethnography that challenges socially circulating cultural narratives of disability.

Our individual and collaborative narratives illuminate: (1) how master narratives impact self, (2) the ways that dis/abled women of color elevate human dignity and spiritual practices in ways that subvert and speak-back to master narratives, (3) the emotional impact of Learning Disability labeling, (4) forms of epistemic and personal experiences at various institutions of higher education, and (5) the liberatory practices manifest from co-created narratives with DSE students concerning disability identity within higher education.

This collaboration contributes to efforts that theorize critical emotion praxis with diverse positionalities of DSE scholars, teacher educators, and professionals within educational contexts. The chapter also suggests ways in which construction of collaborative narratives of resistance can point to paths for positive organizational change.

This chapter compares student performance and course satisfaction in two large sections of an introductory financial accounting course. The students in one section used an online homework management system (OHMS), whereas the students in the other section used traditional homework methods. While an OHMS saves instructors’ valuable time, there is little extant research on how these systems affect students. Our study compares several performance measures and a general course satisfaction survey across the two groups of students. The results provide some evidence that an OHMS enhances students’ performance on some of the performance measures. Our results also show that there is no effect on students’ satisfaction in the course.

Although accounting professors around the globe have addressed various social aspects of accounting, very rarely does that research address the concerns of students. This is despite the fact that students are the focus of the educational mission of most universities. In an effort to address this gap, this chapter extends the field of social accounting to an issue critical to students: the cost of accounting textbooks in the United States. Textbook cost is drawing increasing attention from public interest groups and government regulators as costs are growing at a more rapid rate than many other costs, and constitute a significant portion of the total cost of obtaining a higher education degree. For accounting students, these costs are exacerbated by the fact that accounting textbooks are among the most expensive of any major, and they are being revised with increasing frequency – which eliminates students’ ability to buy less expensive used books – often with little or no discernible benefit to students. We argue that in some subfields of accounting – especially managerial/cost and introductory courses – topics are relatively stable, and that frequent textbook revisions are unnecessarily costly for our students, many of whom, along with their families, are making significant financial sacrifices to earn their degrees. In this study, we provide background on the textbook pricing issue, include data from a survey of accounting faculty demonstrating that they consider the revisions too frequent, document the increasing frequency of accounting textbook revisions over recent decades, analyze content in a leading accounting textbook, and discuss options for reducing the cost of accounting textbooks, including following student activists’ lead in advocating for open-source, free textbooks.

The evolution of MIS technology has affected traditional auditing and created a new set of audit issues. This paper describes the Continuous Process Auditing System (CPAS) developed at AT&T Bell Laboratories for the internal audit organization that is designed to deal with the problems of auditing large paperless real-time systems. The paper discusses why the methodology is important and contrasts it with the traditional audit approach. CPAS is designed to measure and monitor large systems, drawing key metrics and analytics into a workstation environment. The data are displayed in an interactive mode, providing auditors with a work platform to examine extracted data and prepare auditing reports. CPAS monitors key operational analytics, compares these with standards, and calls the auditor’s attention to any problems that may exist. Ultimately, this technology will utilize system probes that will monitor the auditee system and intervene when needed.

Despite its resonances, the sociological concept of agency – the ability to ‘make a difference’ – has not been widely applied to entrepreneurialism. This chapter makes a case for a relational conception of agency. It extends our thinking about entrepreneurialism into areas that, despite their empirical importance, have received little systematic theoretical attention, specifically, the role of emotions, corporeality and social interactions. The relational theory of entrepreneurial agency allows us to address, in new ways, one of entrepreneurship's enduring questions: why do some individuals rather than others become entrepreneurs? Theoretically, by placing emotion at the heart of agency we propose a theory that can recognise individuality without recourse to individualism. We illustrate this approach through a re-analysis of structural hole theory, which is an attempt to explain (unsatisfactorily in our view) entrepreneurial behaviour by recourse to social network theory. We show how a relational concept of agency can resolve the unhelpful tension between the structural qualities of network relationships and the capacity for individual action.

The increasing use of complex, nonfinancial environmental performance measures in managerial decisions motivates consideration of contextual influences that potentially impact managerial judgments in environmental settings. This study extends general evaluability theory (GET: Hsee & Zhang, 2010) to environmental accounting by investigating the combined effects of evaluation mode and incomplete supplemental evaluability information (SEI; e.g., benchmark data) on management decisions. To elaborate, evaluation mode is the display format in which the accounting information system (AIS) provides available information for analysis; e.g., a manager’s or business unit’s performance is assessed either comparatively (i.e., in joint mode) or individually (i.e., in separate mode). GET suggests more decision weight on measures containing SEI in separate mode because that evaluation mode contains less context in which to analyze information. On the other hand, more decision weight should result for measures that do not contain SEI in joint mode because that mode already contains more context for analysis (e.g., comparing multiple performances with each other). To test these predictions, experimental participants (n = 53) evaluated environmental measures for factories with similar environmental performances. To operationalize the information available in many environmental AIS, some, but not all, performance measures contained benchmark data (incomplete SEI); factories were evaluated either jointly or separately. Participants evidenced decision intransitivity; i.e., in separate evaluation mode, factories rated higher when a favorable measure contained SEI, while in joint evaluation mode, factories rated higher when a favorable measure lacked SEI. The results extend previous AIS and management accounting research by investigating contextual influences, and potential systems design elements, in judgments using environmental AIS.