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During the 1990s the value to an intending professional accountant of undertaking a period of liberal (general) studies was promoted internationally by a number of individuals and organisations, including the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) and the New Zealand Institute of Chartered Accountants (the “Institute”). The Institute significantly changed its admissions policy for Chartered Accountants in 1996 and one change was to require four years of degree level study with a compulsory liberal studies component. This study surveys the perceptions of New Zealand accounting practitioners on the impact of this compulsory liberal component. The results of this study demonstrate that there is little support from accounting practitioners for IFAC’s claim that liberal education “can contribute significantly to the acquisition of professional skills”, including intellectual, personal and communication skills. In addition, the majority of respondents did not perceive any improvements in the professional skills of the staff that had qualified under the Institute’s current admissions policy. However, any perceived improvements were mainly attributed to the Institute’s admissions policy change. Notwithstanding the lack of support for the assertion that liberal education develops professional skills, there is a strong belief by respondents in the value of liberal education for intending professional accountants.

Theory of planned behavior (TPB) has been used to study the impact of entrepreneurial education (EE) on entrepreneurial intention (EI) for more than 20 years, yet an intensive literature review reveals that there are gaps in both the conceptual models and the research methods. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of EE on EI with a view to address the gaps in previous research.

This research proposes a conceptual model that links the entire antecedent variables of TPB and the elaborated four components of entrepreneurship education (Why, What, How, and Who). The model is tested by a structural equation modeling with the empirical data from 200 engineering students from three universities in Hong Kong.

The empirical test reveals that the four components of entrepreneurial education do influence attitude, social norm, self-efficacy, and EI, correspondingly. Additionally, it also reveals that the four EE components and the three TPB antecedent variables are also interrelated with each other.

This study bridges specific education components and EI, providing significant insight into how the key components influence the entrepreneurial attitudes and intentions of students. It fills the gap in the knowledge required for fostering EI through entrepreneurship education. It not only answers the question on whether EE influences EI but also on how to nurture the intention by designing a relevant EE course.

The growing popularity of quality management has left no sector untouched, and educational services are no exception. In the face of the innumerable demands that the stakeholders place, educational institutions like other organizations are realizing the significance of customer‐centered philosophies. The enhancement of quality and the attempt to define, conceptualize, implement and measure it are areas of focus, and are being addressed by policy makers, educational planners and administrators. This paper is an attempt towards identification of the elements that would help design quality for the higher educational system.

Based on a theoretical foundation, this paper is an empirical study conducted on select higher educational institutions to identify the various design characteristic constructs which would form the quality element/components for an educational system, and which, if implemented, would help design quality in education. The literature review helped conceptualize the variables that would constitute quality components for education. These were empirically tested and a comparative assessment made between internal and external customers of the educational system, the internal customers being the faculty and the administrative staff, and the external customers being students and the industry. Such an emphasis on customers of the educational system would assure a customer‐centric design of the educational system, something which is prima facie to “quality management”.

The study helped identify the quality components, which would help design quality for institutes of higher education.

The paper could be useful to policy makers, educational planners and administrators in developing a system that could lead to customer satisfaction.

While studies have been conducted on customer requirement and the constructs, research on what would comprise the quality components is lacking. A study on this could help design an educational system that would lead to quality management in education and thereby lead to customer satisfaction.

Understanding the linkages between poverty and inequality is vital to any sustainable development and poverty reduction strategies. In Ghana, while poverty has reduced significantly over the years, inequality has increased. The purpose of this paper is to examine the linkages between inequality in household expenditure components and overall inequality and poverty in Ghana.

Using microdata from the sixth round of the Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS 6) conducted in 2012/2013, marginal effects and elasticities were computed for both within- and between-component analysis.

The results suggest that, in general, reducing within-component inequality significantly reduces overall poverty and inequality in Ghana, compared with between-component inequality. Specifically, inequality in education and health expenditure components were the largest contributors to overall poverty and inequality. The findings imply that policies directed toward reducing within-component inequality will be more effective. Specifically, the findings of the study corroborate recent policies on education and health in Ghana aimed at inequality within these components. Sustaining and scaling up these policies will be a step in the right direction.

The study contributes to existing studies in several ways: first, this study becomes the first attempt to examine inequality-poverty nexus using household expenditure components in Ghana. Second, the use of expenditure in place of income is an addition to the literature. Income is usually subject to reporting biases and is minimal in expenditure. Finally, the findings highlight the need for poverty reduction strategies to focus on specific household components including education and health. Blanket interventions may not be effective in reducing inequality and poverty.

Coordinated school health programs (CSHPs), a type of health promoting school (HPS) program adopted by Canada and the USA, were developed to provide a comprehensive approach to school health in the USA. Community partnerships are central to CSHP and HPS efforts, yet the quality of collaboration efforts is rarely assessed. The purpose of this paper is to use Himmelman’s strategies for working together to assess the types of partnerships that are being formed by CSHPs and to explore the methodological usefulness of this framework. The Himmelman methodology describes four degrees of partnering interaction: networking, coordinating, cooperating, and collaborating, with each degree of interaction signifying a different level of partnership between organizations.

Data were collected as part of the 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 CSHP annual Requests for Proposal from all 131 public school systems in Tennessee. Thematic analysis methods were used to assess partnerships in school systems. Descriptive analyses were completed to calculate individual collaboration scores for each of the eight CSHP components (comprehensive health education, physical education/activity, nutrition services, health services, mental health services, student, family, and community involvement, healthy school environment, and health promotion of staff) during the two data collection periods. The level of collaboration was assessed based on Himmelman’s methodology, with higher scores indicating a greater degree of collaboration. Scores were averaged to obtain a mean score and individual component scores were then averaged to obtain statewide collaboration index scores (CISs) for each CSHP component.

The majority of CSHPs partnering activities can be described as coordination, level two in partnering interaction. The physical activity component had the highest CISs and scored in between coordinating and cooperating (2.42), while healthy school environment had the lowest score, scoring between networking and coordinating (1.93), CISs increased from Year 1 to Year 2 for all of the CSHP components. Applying the theoretical framework of Himmelman’s methodology provided a novel way to quantify levels of collaboration among school partners. This approach offered an opportunity to use qualitative and quantitative methods to explore levels of collaboration, determine current levels of collaboration, and assess changes in levels of collaboration over the study period.

This study provides a framework for using the Himmelman methodology to quantify partnerships in a HPS program in the USA. However, the case study nature of the enquiry means that changes may have been influenced by a range of contextual factors, and quantitative analyses are solely descriptive and therefore do not provide an opportunity for statistical comparisons.

Quantifying collaboration efforts is useful for HPS programs. Community activities that link back to the classroom are important to the success of any HPS program. Himmelman’s methodology may be useful when applied to HPSs to assess the quality of existing partnerships and guide program implementation efforts.

This research is the first of its kind and uses a theoretical framework to quantify partnership levels in school health programs. In the future, using this methodology could provide an opportunity to develop more effective partnerships in school health programs, health education, and public health.

Counselor educators graduating from accredited doctoral programs complete training in counseling, supervision, teaching, research, scholarship, leadership, and advocacy. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the valued components of doctoral degree training in counselor education among new graduates.

Recent graduates in full-time counselor education positions were surveyed using the Delphi method to determine which aspects of their doctoral training best prepared them for their current positions.

The participants valued or desired training in teaching, research, supervision, and potential mentorship.

A serendipitous finding of the research was that mentorship, which was not a deliberate training feature, was highly valued by new counselor educators. Further research on which mentorship styles are best suited for counselor educator training is necessary. Continued training in teaching, research, and supervision is also necessary.

Some form of mentoring is desirable in counselor educator training programs to facilitate transition from year to year of doctoral study, as well as to assist transition from the role of student to faculty.

A desire to be mentored by faculty, specifically for students in counselor education doctoral programs, is revealed.

The purpose of this paper is to report the findings of a survey on the perception of the globalisation of accounting education among academics teaching at tertiary schools in Japan. With the acceleration of globalism in accounting education, the aim of this exploratory research is to investigate the perceptions of Japanese academics toward this global convergence.

The sample was collected from accounting educators who were teaching at the undergraduate and postgraduate level of the tertiary institutes in Japan. The subjects chosen for the survey were 300 members of the Japanese Accounting Association (JAA) and were randomly selected from the 2010 JAA Members’ Directory. A total of 87 responses were received producing an effective response rate of 29 per cent.

The analysis of this study found that the majority of Japanese accounting academics’ believed that the International Education Standards had no substantial effect on accounting education. Further it was found that most of the academics did not know how they could confront these obstacles to achieve global convergence, although they were aware of the impediments.

This study failed to portray any possible suggestions or solutions on how to improve future accounting education. Also the sample size was not large enough to generalise the findings. Finally, this study simply used the samples collected from the one single nation of Japan.

The findings will provide a positive direction for standard setters, policy makers and regulatory authorities on how they should proceed in both the design of their promotion strategies and on how to address obstacles that have arisen according to these perceptions.

The primary strength of this study was the fact that it was the first study in the literature to shed light on the perceptions of accounting academics in Japan on the global convergence of accounting education.

Critiques of international business (IB) have long pointed to the weaknesses in the understanding of context. This has ignited debate on the understanding of institutions and how they “matter” for IB. Yet how institutions matter ultimately depends on how IB applies institutional theory. It is argued that institutional-based research is dominated by a narrow set of approaches, largely overlooking institutional perspectives that account for institutional diversity. This paper aims to forward the argument that IB research should lend greater attention to comparing the topography of institutional configurations by bringing political economy “back in” to the IB domain.

Using principal components analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis, the authors provide IB with a taxonomy of capitalist institutional diversity which defines the landscape of political economies.

The authors show institutional diversity is characterised by a range of capitalist clusters and configuration arrangements, identifying four clusters with distinct modes of capitalism as well as specifying intra-cluster differences to propose nine varieties of capitalism. This paper allows IB scholars to lend closer attention to the institutional context within which firms operate. If the configurations of institutions “matter” for IB scholarship, then clearly, a quantitative blueprint to assess institutional diversity remains central to the momentum of such “institutional turn.”

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of institutional theory, serving as a valuable resource for the application of context within international business. Further, our taxonomy allows international business scholars to utilise a robust framework to examine the diverse institutional context within which firms operate, whilst extending to support the analysis of broader socioeconomic outcomes. This taxonomy therefore allows international business scholars to utilise a robust framework to examine the institutional context within which firms operate.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the synergies, similarities and differences between entrepreneurship and innovation education and training programs, with the aim of challenging the context of such programs.

This study utilises an extensive review of extant literature in the fields of innovation, entrepreneurship and education. The literature, propositions and discussion are intended to provide a bridge between entrepreneurship and innovation education and training programs and seek to address the scientific legitimacy of these education and training disciplines as separate, yet integrated disciplines.

Identifies a need to reconsider the diversity and relationship between innovation and entrepreneurship education and training, primarily from contextual, theoretical, measurement, distinctiveness, content, pedagogical and typology points of view. The range of multiple teaching models and learning processes to embrace in various contexts.

The propositions allow for the combination of teaching initiatives in a theory-driven framework and their applicability to specific entrepreneurship and innovation education and training situations.

The authors’ contribution identifies the synergies and differences between entrepreneurship education and training programs. The propositions highlight areas of contextualisation and practice-based view application, to adopt specific learning initiatives between constructs.

The authors address a gap in the literature regarding the delineation of entrepreneurship and innovation education and training, which has thus far remained sparsely addressed in the education and training literature. The authors provide a practice-based view of propositions, developed for future testing.

The aim of this article is to investigate the relationship between Chinese university students' higher educational background and their entrepreneurial intentions.

The TPB model was adopted and tested for the formation of Chinese university students' entrepreneurial intentions using structural equation modeling. Data were collected from students of Tongji University in Shanghai, China.

The main results of this empirical research suggest that diversity of educational background offers plausible explanations on the difference of entrepreneurial intentions of Chinese university students. Higher educational institutions should develop more flexible approaches with focus on different groups of students in accordance with their various educational backgrounds.

In response to the change of graduate labour market and the quest for sustainable competitive advantage in China, higher educational institutions have to integrate the change of mindset, skills and abilities about entrepreneurship in their general academic education in order to nurture university students' entrepreneurial intentions in China.

The paper provides comprehensive empirical evidence about the impact of higher education on entrepreneurial intentions of university students in mainland China and thus fills an important gap in the entrepreneurship literature.