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Recent and presumable future developments tend to increase the risks associated with farming activities. These include climate risks, which have always played an important role in farming. Weather‐based instruments can be valuable tools to reduce the risk associated with unfavourable climate events. However, a number of factors could limit the hedging effectiveness of these tools. These factors include basis risk, the impacts of remaining price uncertainty, and diversification effects. This paper addresses the influence of each of these factors. In the final section, an integrated approach for a comprehensive assessment of weather derivatives and other hedging instruments is proposed that is based on the concept of portfolio optimization.

By now, change management programs for establishing knowledge management system at a national level for the countries have not been systematically explored. Available studies have derived their critical issues for change management from companies' perspectives and have not considered the needs of a larger scale such as a country and at a national level. This paper aims to fill this gap.

A qualitative case study technique has been used in this paper for data collection to gain insights into the topic being investigated. For that, “grounded theory” research approach has been selected by which the collected data from some case studies (European countries) are categorized and analyzed through specific stages. The extracted concepts can demonstrate critical issues of change management programs for knowledge management establishment at a national level.

The overall results from the case studies were positive, thus reflecting the appropriateness of the proposed concepts. In addition, ten concepts and a framework are the other findings of this research that clarify how to design and implement a change management program for knowledge management adoption at a national level.

The set of critical factors (concepts) can act as a list of items for countries to address when adopting knowledge management through a change management program. This helps to ensure that the essential issues and factors are covered during design and implementation phase. For academics, it provides a common language for them to discuss and study the factors crucial for the success of change management program designed for knowledge management adoption at a macro level.

This study is probably the first to provide an integrated perspective of critical issues for change management program during KM adoption at a national level in the countries. It gives valuable information and guidelines which hopefully will help the governments to mange essential changes for accomplishing knowledge management through their countries.

This paper aims to provide a “biography” of sorts on Agricultural Finance Review. The paper tracks the evolution of Agricultural Finance Review from its introduction in 1938 to its current status.

The paper is based on a complete review of every paper and every issue. Not all papers were read by the author, but key papers of interest that in one way or another made significant contributions to the study of agricultural finance were reviewed.

The paper shows the evolution of agricultural finance from the early days of reporting financial data in the 1930s and 1940s, to its emergence as a major and significant sub discipline of the general field of agricultural economics.

As indicated, not all papers were fully reviewed or read. It is possible that papers identified as “firsts” may have been preceded by other papers. Nonetheless the paper identifies the basic evolutionary path of the journal and defines key points in time when a paradigm shift emerged to change the direction of this discipline.

As Agricultural Finance Review transitions from the Department of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University to Emerald Group Publishing Limited, this “biography” provides readers with a general overview of the journal's and the discipline's historical development.

This paper is simply a review of the existing literature found in Agricultural Finance Review.

This study seeks to compare and contrast the contexts and processes of the formation and development of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Brazil and Mexico. Additionally, a research agenda is defined based on information generated by various sources regarding the initial stages of enterprise formation.

This research paper uses data collected from a 2002 study conducted by the Inter‐American Development Bank, along with institutional reports and academic literature, in order to perform a comparative analysis on the gestation and early development of SMEs in Brazil and Mexico.

This analysis of prior research studies indicates that emerging economies like Brazil and Mexico face enormous social and economic challenges that have in turn slowed down the efficiency and effectiveness of SME support programs. In addition, the differences found in the institutional, socio‐cultural, and economic context of Brazil and Mexico reveal that governments and entrepreneurs face the challenge of sustaining the existence of SMEs.

Since, there was no access to raw data and no statistical procedures could be conducted, the significance of the differences between SMEs in Brazil and Mexico discussed in this paper is perceptual. Future research resulting from this paper shall develop theories that would help to create effective SME support programs, identify how particularities in every country affect SME formation, development, and survival, and explore issues faced in the growth, maturity, and mortality stages of SMEs.

SMEs are extremely important to the economies of both Brazil and Mexico. However, an understanding of the micro and macro issues faced by these countries is very limited. This research paper identifies and analyzes such issues in order to specifically make way for future empirical research.

The greatest mistakes and delusions of human history have come about through logically drawing conclusions from an omissive set of premisses. Cybernetics, being the science of the study and redirection of feedback, is the science of consequences; its essential task is to recognize and deal with all feedback effects, including the consequences of such omissive conceptions – the so‐called blind spot. Gives some examples of the blind spot as it has manifested itself throughout history in the world of science. Concludes that cybernetics can defuse this blind spot which has perennially plagued human development, individually and societally.

The purpose of this paper is to look at the ways in which standardization for patient safety is approached from different positions in the field, namely nurses and managers in a hospital department, the hospital management and standard inventers. We understand safety standardization and the responses to it as a strategizing process, where standards are legitimized, taken up, handled or countered.

Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in a Danish hospital department. The study included observations, interviews and documents studies. The authors apply a Bourdieusian perspective, where the authors focus on the narratives told by standard inventers, managers and nurses to examine and understand their strategizing activities in relation to safety standardization. We understand strategizing as interested action emerging in the dialectics between a habitus and a position in a field.

The authors show how the standardization of work rests on the master narrative of patient safety management and how this narrative clashes with the nurses’ practical perception of good care, which rests on the counter-narrative of the clinical judgment.

Safety standardization in healthcare is often studied within the broader framework of performance management using functionalist outside-in and prescriptive approaches. This study contributes to this literature by approaching standardization and the responses to it as taking place in a dialectic movement between subjective shop floor experiences and wider field-level forces. Furthermore, the study contributes to the organization and management literature concerned with change and strategic action by endorsing the Bourdieusian conception of strategizing.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how virtual world communities employ new media as a repository to record information about their past.

Using the notions of documentary practice and memory-making as a framework, a case study of MMORPG City of Heroes’ (CoH) virtual community on Reddit discussion board “/r/cityofheroes” was conducted. The study consists of an interpretative analysis of posts, comments, images, and other materials submitted to /r/cityofheroes during a period of approximately seven months.

The principal finding of the study is that the CoH community, with varying levels of intentionality, documented a range of pasts on /r/cityofheroes, relating to CoH as a game world, a site of personal experience, a product, a nexus of narratives, and a game. The analysis also lays bare the community’s memory-making processes, in which the documented conceptions of CoH’s past were put to work in the present, informing community action and viewpoints.

Games and gaming practices are increasingly prevalent in leisure and professional settings. This trend, which makes virtual environments and online media proxies for or augmentations of “real life”, makes it necessary for information scholars to understand how the full range of human information behaviours, including documenting, and memory-making, emerge or are replicated online. Additionally, few studies have examined the interplay between new media affordances, documentary practices, and memory-making in the context of virtual world communities.

After some introductory words about the preeminence of German accounting research during the first half of the 20th century, the paper offers a survey of the most important theories of accounts classes that still prevailed during the first two decades or longer. Following World War I, the issue of hyperinflation in Austria and Germany stimulated a considerable amount of original accounting research. After the inflationary period, a series of competing Bilanztheorien, discussed in the text, dominated the scene. Two figures emerged supremely from this struggle. The first was Eugen Schmalenbach, with his “dynamic accounting”, a series of further important contributions to inflation accounting, to the master chart of accounts, to cost accounting, and to other areas of business economics. The other scholar was Fritz Schmidt, with his organic accounting theory that promoted replacement values and his emphasis on the profit and loss account, no less than the balance sheet. The gamut of further eminent personalities, listed in chronological order, contains the following names: Schär, Penndorf, Leitner, Gomberg, Nicklisch, Rieger, Prion, Osbahr, Passow, Dörfel, Sganzini, Walb, Calmes, Kalveram, Meithner, Lion, Töndury, Mahlberg, le Coutre, Geldmacher, Max Lehmann, Leopold Mayer, Karl Seidel, Alfred Isaac, Mellerowicz, Seyffert, Beste, Gutenberg, Käfer, Seischab, Kosiol, Münstermann, and others. Separate Sections or Sub‐Sections are devoted to charts and master charts of accounts in German accounting theory, as well as to cost accounting and the writing of accounting history.

The purpose of this paper is to seek to illuminate some of the dynamics of globalization that enable capital to advance its interests.

The paper uses theories of globalization focusing upon the “race‐to‐the‐bottom”. Such theories draw attention to the way major businesses are using their power to secure advantages, often by playing‐off one nation state against another. Increasingly, offshore financial centres (OFCs) are becoming key players in this race. The paper uses a case study relating to the enactment of limited liability partnership (LLP) in Jersey, a UK Crown Dependency. The legislation was financed and developed by the UK firms, Price Waterhouse and Ernst & Young in collaboration with a network of advisers.

The paper sheds light on the resources deployed by major accountancy firms to secure conditions necessary for the smooth accumulation of private wealth and power. Accountancy firms used OFCs or microstates to reposition the state‐capital relationship in globalization and reconfigure the UK auditor liability laws. The paper also highlights the importance of the state to capital and globalization.

In common with major capitalist enterprises, accountancy firms rarely provide background material to explain how they advance their interests. Inevitably, this limits the analysis. Nevertheless, the case study shows some trajectories that have enabled accountancy firms to advance their economic interests.

The paper shows that accountancy firms are able to use novel tactics to advance their interests and that national regulation cannot easily be understood without consideration of the wider international context.

Accounting researchers have rarely focused upon the use of offshore financial centres by major accountancy firms to advance their interests. It also shows that the local and the global are intertwined.