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The purpose of this paper is to explore the origins of tensions between the benefits (such as technologies and skills) and the substance of knowledge (often described as “pure inquiry”) in Australian universities. There are advantages to considering this debate in Australia, since its universities were tightly connected to scholarly networks in the British Empire. After the Second World War, those ties were loosened, enabling influences from American research and technological universities, augmented by a growing connection between universities, government economic strategy and the procedures of industry. This paper thus traces some of routes by which arguments travelled and the ways they were articulated in post‐war Australia.

Ideas do not travel on their own. In this paper, the author takes a biographical approach to the question of contrasting attitudes to university knowledge in the post‐war period, comparing the international scholarly and professional networks of two British scientists who travelled to Australia – contemporaries in age and education – both influencing Australian higher education policy in diametrically opposing ways.

This research demonstrates that the growing connection with economic goals in Australian universities after the Second World War was in part a result of the new international and cross‐sectoral networks in which some scholars now operated.

Australian historiography suggests that shifts in the emphases of post‐war universities were primarily the consequence of government policy. This paper demonstrates that the debates that shaped Australia's modern university system were also conducted among an international network of scholars.

The purpose of this paper is to respond to Modell’s arguments regarding the relative usefulness of critical realist philosophy in relation to actor-network theory.

The authors outline the challenges in applying critical realism to critical accounting. The authors then consider Modell’s criticisms of actor-network theory, providing a counterargument highlighting the methodological choices distinguishing actor-network theory from critical realism.

The authors argue that critical realism, whilst providing an interesting addition to the critical accounting research project, confronts challenges disentangling intransitive and transitive forms of knowledge. Actor-network theory is presented as a way of examining accounting practices as local associations, providing practical opportunities to study (the assembly of) “the social”.

Methodological diversity is to be explored, acknowledging the ontological politics of our choices.

This paper is an original commentary contributing to critical accounting research.

The purpose of this study is to characterise types of practices – or “routings” as they are denoted in this paper – that have been developed to incorporate non-financial inscriptions, representing value-in-kind (VIK) sponsorship resources, into accounting systems.

This study adopts field-based research, utilising Latour's (1999) concept of “circulating reference”, to illustrate how VIK (non-cash) resources were managed in an Australian sporting organization.

This paper contributes to our understanding of: first, how accounting infrastructure is constituted and stabilised by a network of multiple and overlapping accounting practices; second, how VIK resources are allocated and managed via local practices; and third, the importance of “budget relief” as a method of valuation in accounting practice.

Our paper has implications for understanding how financial and non-financial accounting inscriptions are related in practice, requiring both integration and separation within networks of multiple and overlapping routings of accounting practices.

Our work highlights previously unexplored accounting practices, which assist in the process of utilizing VIK resources in the context of a sporting organization.

Unlike quantitative studies, interview data generally cannot be validated; yet, they are typically the only evidence of the research. This study develops protocols for using verbatim interview quotations in research and for assessing the quality of interview quotations.

This research reviews 20 empirical papers using in-depth interviews containing 600 interview quotations to examine authors' approaches to verbatim interviewee quotations. The research analyses the sample papers for interview transcript handling, selection of quotations, the number and length of interview quotations, how they are placed and presented, the proportion of interviewee voices reproduced in quotations and the disclosure of protocols for translating and editing quotations. This paper includes illustrative interview quotations as exemplars of best practice.

Given the modest discussion of the principles influencing the reproduction of quotations in research, this study develops a framework for evaluating prior research. Researchers use a wide variety of practices to reproduce interview quotations in accounting research. The issues derived from this review, and their application to interview-based papers, frame an argument for a general set of quality criteria and protocols rather than rigid rules for assessing qualitative work. These criteria can serve as anchor points for qualitative evaluation.

There is little guidance on the use of interview quotations in qualitative research which this study bridges.

As Lindsay (1994, 1995) encourages validation of existing results, this research replicates Guilding and McManus (2002) in a New Zealand (NZ) context. The usage and perceived merit of customer accounting practices were lower in NZ than in the Australian study. Few of the regressions where customer accounting usage and perceived merit were dependent variables revealed a statistically significant role for competition intensity and market orientation. There was some minor support for the perceived merit of customer accounting being higher in companies experiencing medium levels of competition intensity.

THERE has quite recently occurred among professional and other periodicals a sort of epidemic of comparisons between the work of European and American libraries, some of which are more or less misleading and calculated to stir up national annoyance. The Transatlantic journals are particularly condescending in tone, and arrogant in their claims, and some statements in the New York Nation and Chicago Dial are not only written with a most lofty sense of American superiority, but are manifestly based on ignorance of library conditions in Europe. They are indeed typical of the attitude of the average American librarian towards library work outside the borders of the United States. With a few notable exceptions, American librarians are a somewhat narrow‐minded, self‐sufficient and wilfully‐ignorant class of public officials; but more especially the younger generation. They are eternally shutting their eyes to the accomplishments of other nations, and assuming that the last word on all library matters has been spoken in America. They are, for the most part, ignorant of European library literature, as none save the largest libraries ever purchase anything but American professional books. This is further proved by the absence of such works from their catalogues and from among the text‐books prescribed for the various library schools; while in all their select bibliographies or lists of “best” books the most notice‐able feature is this studied omission of European books. In the proceedings of British professional associations the work of American libraries is frequently referred to in the most appreciative and broad‐minded manner; but at similar meetings in America, European library work, if not entirely ignored, is most often casually mentioned as something quite obsolete, and a legitimate target for oblique criticism. It is difficult to understand why American librarians will not study library questions from both the historical and international standpoints, because it is such an obvious and interesting manner of freeing the mind from the fetters of a cock‐sure provincialism. That it is true no such attempt is made by the average American librarian to attain knowledge of foreign conditions, is proved by the universally accepted opinion in the United States, that there is no European library work worth attention, in comparison to the immensity of the American achievement in the same field.

The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the aging effect in dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) sealed with thermoplastic film and to compare it with unsealed DSSCs.

The paper presents the steps of the fabrication of standard DSSC, as well as the DSSC-sealing processes, by using thermoplastic film. Current-voltage characterization was performed to observe the changes in efficiency, fill factor, short circuit current density and open circuit voltage for both unsealed and sealed DSSCs for aging time up to 336 h.

The unsealed DSSC showed significant drop in efficiency from 4.26 to 2.42 per cent within the first 5.5 h of aging time because of the leakage and volatilization of the solvent in the electrolyte. On the other hand, the sealed DSSC exhibited a gradual improvement of efficiency from 4.16 to 4.73 per cent after the first 216 h of aging time. The initial efficiency increment can be ascribed to the improved adsorption of electrolyte into the titanium dioxide film because of the gradual desorption of excess dye from TiO2 with increasing aging time.

This paper demonstrates the importance of the proper sealing process for the long-term operation of DSSC.

THIS Indicator was invented by Mr. Alfred Cotgreave, the present Librarian of West Ham, when he was librarian of the Wednesbury Public Library, in 1877. At the time of his invention an Elliot Indicator was in use at Wednesbury, and it was owing to the misplacement of borrowers' tickets in this Indicator, that Mr. Cotgreave's attention was drawn to the question of providing some remedy. He tried various schemes to prevent such mistakes, but ultimately decided that movable numbered blocks, filling up every space in the Indicator would best meet the difficulty. An Indicator on this principle was thereon designed, and later, the numbered blocks were replaced by wooden blocks having a record book attached. The Handsworth Public Library first adopted this Indicator. Subsequently the wooden block was superseded by a metal slide in which the little book carrying the record of issues was placed. In this form the Cotgreave Indicator has existed for a number of years, and it is so well known that it is almost unnecessary to give a description of it in detail. However, I have transcribed an account of its structure and working from one of the descriptive circulars issued in connection with it, from which anyone can gather a good idea of its appearance and use :—

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the corporate governance literature by examining the aggregate effect of board and audit committee characteristics on earnings management practices, particularly in the period following the introduction of the second edition of the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) Corporate Governance Principles and Recommendations.

This paper begins by embarking on an extensive review of extant empirical research on boards of directors and audit committees. Then, the paper reports on the use of a quantitative analysis approach to specify the relationship between board and audit committee characteristics (introduced by the ASX Corporate Governance Council) and the level of absolute discretionary accruals as a proxy for earnings management.

The findings suggest that greater compliance with board and audit committee principles is linked to lower earnings management, indicating that deliberate structuring of boards and audit committees is an effective approach for enhancing a firm’s financial reporting quality and providing support for the efficacy of the second edition of principles and recommendations related to boards and audit committees suggested by the ASX Corporate Governance Council.

This study significantly extends the literature and has notable implications for financial reporting regulators, as the findings regarding the monitoring role of boards and audit committees should be beneficial for future revisions of corporate governance principles and recommendations.

This study focuses on the aggregate effect of board characteristics recommended by the Australian Corporate Governance Council on earnings management practices, and the results support the effectiveness of the board and audit committee characteristics recommended by the ASX Corporate Governance Council. New directions for future improvements to the principles and recommendations are identified.

In the second edition of Greenwood's “Public Libraries,” 1887, p. 137, there is a description of the Dent Indicator, from which it may be gathered that such an indicator was actually constructed. The inventor, however, is of opinion that his idea never got so far as realization in material form, though there can be hardly any doubt that Mr. Dent's indicator is the first to combine indicating with charging, and that it suggested several succeeding devices. His account of it is interesting, as it mentions the existence of an early form of card indicator which has since been reinvented in various styles. “A certain Mr. Christie, Librarian of the Constitution Hill Branch Library (Birmingham), about 1868, constructed a small rack with cards bearing the titles of a selection of the books in history, science, &c, open to the public, and the presence of one of these tickets in the rack indicated that the book was ‘in.’ If anyone wished to take one of the books thus shown, he lifted the ticket out of the rack (there was no glass in front) and handed it to the attendant who put it in a box till the book came back, and then replaced it almost anywhere in the rack. This gave me an idea that the cumberous system of day‐book, posting‐book, and constant piles of books to be marked off as returned might be done away with, if tickets in a rack representing every number in the library were substituted for book‐entry, &c.” Mr. Dent's improvement upon this idea consisted in the provision of a series of numbered shelves in columns, with spaces between to take the borrowers' cards when the books were out. The back of the borrower's card was to be ruled to allow of numbers and dates being pencilled thereon, and, of course, the presence of a borrower's card under a number indicated a book “ out.”