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Creates a future history of the evolution of the US telecommunications network infrastructure, by combining a scenario approach with the tool of concept mapping to explain how optical fibre technologies became the dominant technologies in that infrastructure.

The objective of this paper is to contribute to the accounting education literature by demonstrating that there are significant differences in judgments between Australian and Chinese subjects studying within an Australian university with respect to an important issue in accounting, namely, aggressive financial reporting practices. Aggressive financial reporting is the exercise of professional judgment by accountants (including students preparing for a career in accounting) that fails to depict ‘financial reality’. Our study provides some evidence on the influence of culture (operationalised as one's ethnic background), as well as a personal belief variable, ‘belief in a just world’, on students acceptance of aggressive financial reporting practices. The results have implications for improving accounting education. We suggest that assumptions about uniformity in perceiving Western notions of independence and objectivity embedded in official national and international accounting pronouncements are reflections of ‘culture‐blindness’. Additionally, we suggest that accounting educators may like to ensure that the meanings intended in the official accounting pronouncements which are used as primary teaching material are conveyed to students within specific cultural contexts. Moreover, accounting educators and students need to pay greater attention to the role of various contextual factors in the international accounting harmonisation process.

With large numbers of overseas students enrolled in university accounting courses in Australia, there is a growing trend in the postgraduate accounting courses to approach the problem of language and communication difficulties by offering discipline‐specific language training through an embedded curriculum approach in collaboration with English language specialists. This raises a general question about the nature of evidence required to demonstrate that students' professional language skills have been enhanced by these interdisciplinary programs. The paper aims to address the basic question: what evidence is available about the effectiveness of programs that align English language with disciplinary teaching?

The purpose of the paper is to review existing research to discover the nature of evidence that is available to address the effectiveness of programs that align English language with disciplinary teaching.

In the area of accounting research, it is very difficult to unbundle the effects of improvement in communication skills from improved understanding of discipline content.

At a subject level, language interventions could pay more attention to the attributes of “good” evidence, while at a program level a suite of data sources may support a persuasive argument for improvement in students' communication skills.

If associations between integration and language improvement can be established through quantitative and qualitative research methods and reliable evidence for this can be presented to educational policy makers, then interdisciplinary approaches may be seen as valid alternatives to the more readily available (and cheaper) “bolt‐on programs” at university‐wide levels, where language support is given separately from discipline content.

The research addressed the question of whether there is evidence of the effectiveness of initiatives that align English language with disciplinary teaching in accounting. The answer is “yes”. It was gathered from a variety of research methods including experimentation, use of available data, diagnostic tests and self reporting by students and staff. What is apparent from the collected evidence is the effectiveness of interdisciplinary approaches that integrate language support and accounting content.

The paper aims to introduce this special issue on LEAD, the research management system under which the papers collected in this issue were produced. The paper explains the background that led to the establishment of the system, presents a short history of LEAD, describes how it is managed, and details the various stages of a typical LEAD “cycle”. It concludes with a brief description of the papers to follow.

Reflective description.

LEAD is a successful collaborative system for organising “action research” in learning and teaching within a business faculty. The papers in this issue serve to demonstrate the system's outcomes.

The paper is essentially descriptive. The described system illustrates one way of organising collaborative research in a university faculty, in this instance focused on research into learning and teaching in a business faculty.

LEAD provides a model for managing collaborative university research, one that could be applied in any university faculty and across different research areas. Apart from illustrating the potential of the system, each of the papers collected in this issue is of interest in its own right, as a study of learning and teaching in a particular disciplinary context.

The LEAD system is a novel way of organising learning and teaching research in a university context.

Purpose – This chapter provides one aspect of the organizational side of the biology and politics enterprise.

Design/methodology/approach – This chapter provides a historical description of two organizations that help to structure the “business” of biology and politics: The International Political Science Association’s (IPSA) Research Committee #12 and the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences (APLS).

Findings – Research Committee #12 had its origins in the early 1970s, whereas APLS came about in the later 1970s. The discussion of these two organizations gives the reader a better sense of the twin enterprises. In the process of discussing APLS, the chapter also outlines the contributions of its professional journal, Politics and the Life Sciences.

Originality/value – Seldom has there been a detailed discussion of these two organizations in one place.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role that corporate political positioning taking is playing in exacerbating political polarization and to suggest that, by contrast, corporations could also play a role in healing some of the increasing divides in democracies around the world.

The paper looks at recent examples of companies taking political positions on controversial public issues and public reactions to those positions in the media.

The author’s analysis suggests that with each subsequent political position announced by companies, the stakes for more extreme and noisy pronouncements become higher and higher. This threatens to be an unsustainable journey, and companies will need to find new ways to communicate their commitment to customers and other stakeholders.

While there has been wide discussion of the increasing propensity of companies to take public positions on social and political issues, the author believes this is the first viewpoint to examine the consequences of this trends over the longer term and its impact on polarization.

Examines five companies from different market segments with initial public offerings in the past five years, representing a wide range of products. The companies were Cabot Microelectronics, Alliance Fiber Optics Products, Adams Golf, King Pharmaceuticals, and Gadzooks Networks. The companies’ stock price trend, revenue, and net gain or losses were evaluated to determine how each of them was performing financially. In addition, each company’s product offerings market trends, product innovations, and market success were examined to determine what factors aid in a company performing well financially. A small perspective was given on the future outlook for a typical company and its products.

Jim Keyes, CEO of Dallas-based Blockbuster Inc., was facing the biggest challenge of his career. In March 2010 Keyes was meeting with Hollywood studios in an effort to negotiate better terms for the $1 billion worth of merchandise Blockbuster had purchased the year before. In recent years, Blockbuster's share of the video rental market had been sharply decreasing in the face of competitors such as the low-cost, convenient Redbox vending machines and mail-order and video-on-demand service Netflix. While Blockbuster's market capitalization had dropped 47 percent to $62 million in 2009, Netflix's had shot up 55 percent to $3.9 billion that year. The only hope for Blockbuster, as Keyes saw it, was to shift its business model from primarily brick-and-mortar physical DVD rentals to increased digital and mail-order video delivery. In Keyes's favor, the studios were more than willing to provide him with that help. Hollywood wanted to see Blockbuster win the video-rental wars. Consumers still made frequent purchases of DVDs at its store—purchases which were much more profitable for studios than the rentals that remained Blockbuster's primary business. Blockbuster had made efforts at making its business model more nimble, but the results had been disappointing, and its debt continued to skyrocket. By the end of 2009, the company's debt had climbed to $856 million, its share of the $6.5 billion video rental business had fallen to 27 percent, and its revenues had tumbled 23 percent to $4.1 billion.

The objective of this case is to discuss how different business models and supply chain structures impact the financials of the firms in the DVD rental business. In particular, the goal is to convey that the characteristics of the movie (recent/big hit or old/eclectic) affect whether it is best rented from a centralized or decentralized model. In addition, as streaming gains market share, the impact will be different for movie types and business models.

Analyses the evolution of China’s telephone and cable systems, in terms of the public interest, discussing current bureaucratic conflicts and policy debates over convergence, and construction of an independent broadband cable network. Looks in depth at China’s problems and the different problems for its citizens with regard to poverty levels and access to the Web.