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In the periods, following the First and Second World Wars, colonial states across the British empire underwent waves of reforms that were geared toward improving human well-being, from enhancing social conditions, such as health and education, to expanding opportunities for economic and political engagement. The literature on the colonial state typically traces these state-building efforts to the agency of European colonial officials. However, evidence from a historical analysis of Trinidad and Tobago reveals a different agent driving state reform: the colonized. A local labor movement during colonialism forced the colonial state to construct a number of state agencies to ameliorate the economic, political, and social conditions in the colony, thereby resulting in an increase in state capacity. This study, therefore, provides critical intervention into the colonial state literature by showing that the agency of the colonized, as opposed to just the colonizers, is key to state-building, and specifying the mechanisms by which the subaltern constrained colonial officials and forced them to enact policies that improved colonial state capacity.

This paper explores the value of financial statement auditing in the public sector. The study applies theory about auditing from the private sector as well as the public sector to explore ways in which public sector auditing can be expected to be valuable. It shows that there are a number of complementary explanations that can be applied to examine the value of public audit, including agency, signaling, insurance, management control, governance and confirmation explanations. The evidence from research and history is generally consistent with the agency and management control explanations. There is some support for the signaling and insurance explanations, while research evidence suggests that governance has differing impact in the public sector compared to the private. The confirmation hypothesis is also potentially relevant. Reviewing the history of the development of public sector auditing functions shows that at least some developments were consistent with explanations such as agency theory and management control. Auditing in the public sector is an area where more research is valuable. The paper concludes with a discussion of issues for further investigation.

Using a unique data set from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), we estimate the gender starting-salary gap for college graduates from 2000 to 2010. Simulation techniques are used to estimate how the salary gap would change if women had selected the same majors or job types as men. We find that about 90% of the starting-salary gap is explainable by gender differences in majors and types of job offers – a higher percentage than found in most other studies. Duncan indexes of dissimilarity also indicate that the gender distributions of job offers by college major and type of first jobs have not become more similar over the past 10 years. Although differences in college major and types of first jobs explain most of the gender gap in starting salaries of college graduates, small but unexplained gender pay differences reveal themselves in the NACE statistics.

This paper poses the question of whether the mainstream feminist movement in the United States, in concentrating its efforts on achieving gender parity in the existing workplace, is selling women short. In it, I argue that contemporary U.S. feminism has not adequately theorized the problems with the relatively unregulated market system in the United States. That failure has contributed to a situation in which women’s participation in the labor market is mistakenly equated with liberation, and in which other far-ranging effects of the market system on women’s lives inside and outside of work – many of them negative – are overlooked. To theorize the effects of the market system on women’s lives in a more nuanced manner, I borrow from the insights of earlier Marxist and socialist feminists. I then use this more nuanced perspective to outline an agenda for feminism, which I call “market-cautious feminism,” that seeks to regulate the market to serve women’s interests.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to assess the main and interaction effects of activity-based costing (ABC), internal information systems integration (IISI), and external information systems integration (EISI) on manufacturing plant operational performance, controlling for plant characteristics.

Methodology/approach: The study uses survey data from a cross-section of 369 U.S. manufacturing plants. Data were analyzed using hierarchical regression model.

Findings and implications: The results indicate partial support for the main and two-way interaction effects on plant operational performance. The three-way interaction effects are significant and positive, suggesting that deploying all three resources (i.e., ABC, IISI, and EISI) leads to the higher plant operational performance.

Originality/value: The paper significantly extends prior research and contributes to the understanding of the main and interaction effects of ABC, IISI, and EISI on manufacturing plant operational performance. The paper would also be of interest to practitioners interested in keeping up with academic literature.

The paper provides an overview of research published in the innovation and operations management (IOM) literature on 15 methods for cost management in new product development, and it provides a comparison to an earlier review of the management accounting (MA) literature (Wouters & Morales, 2014).

This structured literature search covers papers published in 23 journals in IOM in the period 1990–2014.

The search yielded a sample of 208 unique papers with 275 results (one paper could refer to multiple cost management methods). The top 3 methods are modular design, component commonality, and product platforms, with 115 results (42%) together. In the MA literature, these three methods accounted for 29%, but target costing was the most researched cost management method by far (26%). Simulation is the most frequently used research method in the IOM literature, whereas this was averagely used in the MA literature; qualitative studies were the most frequently used research method in the MA literature, whereas this was averagely used in the IOM literature. We found a lot of papers presenting practical approaches or decision models as a further development of a particular cost management method, which is a clear difference from the MA literature.

This review focused on the same cost management methods, and future research could also consider other cost management methods which are likely to be more important in the IOM literature compared to the MA literature. Future research could also investigate innovative cost management practices in more detail through longitudinal case studies.

This review of research on methods for cost management published outside the MA literature provides an overview for MA researchers. It highlights key differences between both literatures in their research of the same cost management methods.