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It has been widely acknowledged that education takes on a pivotal role in reducing disasters and achieving human security in the attempt to achieve sustainable development. Previous experiences have shown positive effects of education in disaster risk management. Children who have been taught about the phenomenon of disasters and how to react to those situations have proved to be able to respond promptly and appropriately, thereby warning others and protecting themselves during times of emergencies. One of the classic examples illustrating the power of knowledge and education is the story of the 10-year-old British schoolgirl, Tilly Smith, who warned the tourists to flee to safety moments before the Indian Ocean tsunami engulfed the coast, saving over 100 tourists' lives in 2004. She had recognized the signs of an approaching tsunami after learning about the phenomenon in her geography lessons at school, just weeks before visiting Thailand (UN/ISDR, 2006a). Although the United Kingdom is not a tsunami-prone country and the schoolgirl did not have any previous experiences, with the knowledge acquired at school, she was able to save the lives of many.

During the first half of the twentieth century, “accounting theory,” developed primarily by accounting scholars and academics, provided the primary basis for the practice and teaching of financial accounting in the United States. Since the creation of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) in the early 1970s, the FASB conceptual framework has provided the primary basis for accounting standards setting as well as for the practice and teaching of financial accounting. While the purpose of creating a conceptual framework has been to develop an agreed upon set of concepts and principles to guide accounting standards setting, a related goal has been to reduce diversity in accounting practice and to move toward greater uniformity. This chapter traces the influence of accounting theory on the conceptual framework and explores some of the consequences of this influence.

Purpose: Risk is a multifaceted concept, and its identification requires complex approaches that are often misunderstood. The consequence is that decisions are based on limited perception rather than the full value and meaning of what risk is, as a result, the way it is being tackled is incorrect. The individuals are often limited in their perceptions and ideas and do not embrace the full multifaceted nature of risk. Regulators and individuals want to follow norms and checklists or overuse models, simulations, and templates, thereby reducing responsibility for decision-making. At the same time, the wider use of technology and rules reduces the critical thinking of individuals. We advance the automation process by building robots that follow protocols and forget about the part of risk assessment that cannot be programed. Therefore, with this study, the objective of this study was to discover how people define risk, the influencing factors of risk perception and how they behave toward this perception. The authors also determine how the perception differed with age, gender, marital status, education level and region. The novelty of the research is related to individual risk perception during COVID-19, as this is a new and unknown phenomenon. Methodology: The research is based on the analysis of the self-administered purposely designed questionnaires we distributed across different social media platforms between February and June 2020 in Europe and in some cases was carried out as a interview over communication platforms such as “Skype,” “Zoom” and “Microsoft Teams.” The questionnaire was divided into four parts: Section 1 was designed to collect demographic information from the participants; Section 2 included risk definition statements obtained from literature and a preliminary discussion with peers; Section 3 included risk behavior statements; and Section 4 included statements on risk perception experiences. A five-point Likert Scale was provided, and participants were required to answer along a scale of “1” for “Strongly Agree” to “5” for “Strongly Disagree.” Participants also had the option to elaborate further and provide additional comments in an open-ended box provided at the end of the section. 466 valid responses were received. Thematic analysis was carried out to analyze the interviews and the open-ended questions, while the questionnaire responses were analyzed using various quantitative methods on IBM SPSS (version 23). Findings: The results of the analysis indicate that individuals evaluate the risk before making a decision and view risk as both a loss and opportunity. The study identifies nine factors influencing risk perception. Nevertheless, it must be emphasized that we can continue to develop models and rules, but as long as the risk is not understood, we will never achieve anything.

Accounting conventions, norms, and standards play an important role in modern society in various areas related to the measurement of economic performance, allocation of capital, regulation of commercial activity, and taxation. From a historical perspective, the emergence of accounting standards-setting bodies at national and international levels is a recent phenomenon, dating perhaps only to the early years of the twentieth century. Accounting standards setting as a whole has been influenced by several key factors, including the practices of commercial enterprises and professional accountants, rules and regulations created by law, and academic theories regarding the nature of assets and the measurement of business income. The purpose of this chapter is to trace the historical development of accounting standards setting in the United States during the first part of the twentieth century, until approximately 1939, which marked the creation of the Committee on Accounting Procedure of the American Institute of Accountants, which was most likely the first accounting standards-setting body in the industrial world. From 1900 to 1939, there were significant debates about the advisability and feasibility of uniform accounting standards and the manner in which such standards ought to be implemented. These debates formed the basis for subsequent national and international accounting standards-setting bodies and are worthy of detailed examination.

This book aimed to conceptualise a construction workforce management model suitable for effectively managing workers in construction organisations. To this end, this chapter presents the conceptualised model, which consists of seven workforce management practices with their respective measurement variables. Drawing from existing theories, models, and practices, the chapter concludes that a construction organisation that will attain its strategic objectives in the current fourth industrial revolution era must be willing to promote effective recruitment and selection, compensation and benefits, performance management and appraisal, employee involvement and empowerment, training and development, as well as improving workers emotional intelligence and handling external environment pressure. These practices can promote proactiveness, participation, and improved skills and can lead to effective commitment, better quality, and flexibility within the organisation.

This study draws on the natural resource-based view to analyze the effects of technologies, managerial commitment, and firm strategy on sustainability performance, in terms of both environmental and social profits. It also examines how the effect of green technologies on sustainability performance can be triggered by a managerial commitment to sustainability issues, and by the adoption of a prospector strategy. Multiple linear regression was used to test research hypotheses on a sample of 426 Spanish tourism firms. The results provide important insights into the importance of the adoption of explorer strategies fostering the strategic exploitation of green technologies to obtain new efficient processes, organizational procedures, and products. This research also shows the contingent moderating effect that managerial commitment exerts on the strategic implementation of green technologies for sustainability performance.

Strategic management is traditionally seen as an exclusive managerial task rather than inclusive where accountability is reserved for top managers. However, contemporary strategy management practices increasingly pay attention to equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) by engaging with broader internal and external stakeholders via more open business models such as ecosystems. Hence, central to our examination is the concept of openness disposition, which in the context of strategic management refers to the tendency of individuals, collectives, and managers to make strategy transparent, participatory, and/or inclusive, or look for closure. While openness in strategy is regarded as a positive means of contemporary management, fostering diversity, creativity, innovation, and empowerment, there are some researched downsides too. The purpose of this chapter is to address the openness puzzle in strategy and gain a deeper understanding of the dilemmas of bottom-up strategy initiatives, and investigate the associated dilemmas, if any in the context of manufacturing small and medium enterprises (SMEs). We contribute to addressing the performative effects of the dynamic expansion and contraction in openness within the SME strategy process while using the concept of openness dilemmas, tensions, and disposition. Using the Management Control Theory, this chapter will combine theory with SME practitioners’ experiences of bottom-up strategy initiatives to increase EDI in their organisations. Based on findings that emerged from a four-year longitudinal multiple case study research with 10 European SMEs, we found that bottom-up strategy exercises are more interactive. They consider a greater number of views, increase legitimacy, and EDI at the workplace, and yield more process benefits, but are time-consuming and difficult to organise that require special attention to the capability, reciprocity, and credibility dimensions.

We examine the translation of the concept of privacy in the advent of digital communication technologies. We analyze emerging notions of informational privacy in public discourse and policymaking in the United States. Our analysis shows category change to be a dynamic process that is only in part about cognitive processes of similarity. Instead, conceptions of privacy were tied to institutional orders of worth. Those orders offered theories, analogies, and vocabularies that could be deployed to extrapolate the concept of privacy into new domains, make sense of new technologies, and to shape policy agendas.