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This will be an attempt to construct a pragmatist theory of the self, drawing on the four major classical pragmatists. From John Dewey, I will take the self as actor or agent; from George Herbert Mead the social self; from Charles Sanders Peirce the semiotic or significative self; and from William James the emotion of self feeling. The four fit together reasonably well, and the result is a highly egalitarian, democratic and humanistic idea of what it means to be a human being.

This chapter investigates the effects of the corporate sector on the effectiveness of selected tax compliance instruments in the context of large corporate taxpayers belonging to the finance, manufacturing, and service sectors. Applying multilevel logit models based on real tax office and survey data from Bangladesh, it is found that the filing compliance of large corporate taxpayers is influenced by penalty, tax audit, and taxpayer services, while reporting compliance is influenced by tax audit, criminal prosecution, and tax simplification. In the case of payment compliance, two coercive instruments – penalty and tax audit – have been found to be statistically significant. However, when sector characteristics are considered, the extent of the influence of these instruments, and, in some cases, their statistical significance changes. This suggests that the effectiveness of tax compliance instruments, among other things, largely depends on the sector affiliation of corporate taxpayers. Overall, this study establishes that corporate sector plays an important role in the effectiveness of tax compliance instruments, with the caveat that findings might be different if working definitions of the study variables were measured differently.

This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.

Various achievements of Australia in the field of applied ethics from the 1980s to 2016 are outlined. The review covers academic scholarship, research and teaching; the ethics of business and actions to build ethics into the structures of enterprises. This follows the 3-fold categorization developed by De George (2012). A brief account of the formation and history of the Australian Association for Professional and Applied Ethics is included, as is a selection of scandals involving Australian organisations. Australia is shown to have made a significant contribution to the academic discipline of applied ethics and to have been aware of its position, distant from the English-speaking West and in the midst of nations of the global south.

The role of firm attributes as a source of competitive advantage has been discussed previously in the tourism marketing strategy field. Benchmarking, a recognized learning model, is recommended as a tool to identify and improve the competitiveness of a firm. The present study employs the importance–performance analysis (IPA) to benchmark five nature- and culture-based attractions in Northern Norway. Altogether, 701 respondents participated in the on-site survey, i.e., during their vacation experiences. The present study reveals several interesting and useful managerial insights and implications for the tourist attraction industry in general as well as for the individual tourist attraction firm measured. Consequently, this study contributes to management by integrating theory and empirical data to investigate whether benchmarking, as a company learning tool, may lead to improved performance. Based on the study results, the present work suggests strategies and potential improvements for the respective tourist attractions.

Family controlled businesses (FCBs) have been found to out-survive and out-earn non-FCBs, and their market valuations reflect that. This edge may be attributed in part to the agency- and stewardship-related consequences of ownership – consequences that via organization governance and design allow many family businesses not only to reap advantages of continuity and focus (“exploitation”), but also to reorient themselves when needed (“exploration”). These capacities rest on qualities such as owners’ discretion, knowledge and incentives, and their stewardship over the mission, core capabilities, people, and external relationships of the firm. We suggest a research agenda to investigate these issues.

The present work assesses destination and service quality attributes, in terms of exploring the stronger and weaker points within these entities. In addition, it explores the relative effect of holistic experiences of destinations and the service-specific attributes on tourists’ overall satisfaction with destinations. Building on the perception, performance, and service quality literature a survey is carried out at 5 different tourist attractions among 701 tourists from over 15 countries worldwide visiting Northern Norway. The results divulge that many destination attributes are important; however, tourists find that the destination performs correspondingly with the perceived importance of destinations. The service quality attributes are also important, but reveal a perceptual gap between importance and performance. The study finds that Northern Norway as a tourist destination should concentrate on “uniqueness” and “novelty” to enhance tourist satisfaction. Service providers are advised to keep up the good work on “giving a good impression and a nice welcome” to enhance tourist satisfaction.

Importance-performance analysis (IPA) remains one of the lesser used quantitative techniques to analyze cultural differences in image perceptions. Therefore, this chapter analyzes differences in international visitors' image perceptions for the island of Mauritius in its key generating markets. Using the mixed method, the study identifies image attributes in a qualitative phase initially, followed by the administration of a survey instrument to a quota sample of 1,000 visitors, resulting in 705 useable questionnaires. IPA reveals the existence of significant differences between importance and performance scores on image for the whole sample as well as significant differences by nationality sub-groups. For example, Germans on average have the lowest importance scores, whereas Indians have the highest in comparison with other nationalities. For each market, the study also identifies the influence of fluency levels in main languages spoken on importance and performance scores. Using IPA, the gaps in scores reflect degrees of product customization and re-positioning that is needed for the different markets of Mauritius. Similarities in scores across nationalities suggest the universal importance of some image attributes in destination selection. The chapter contributes to the dearth of literature on cultural differences in image perceptions for island destinations.

We examined how Conservation of Resources (COR) theory has been applied to work and stress in organizational settings. COR theory has drawn increasing interest in the organizational literature. It is both a stress and motivational theory that outlines how individuals and organizations are likely to be impacted by stressful circumstances, what those stressful circumstances are likely to be, and how individuals and organizations act in order to garner and protect their resources. To date, individual studies and meta-analyses have found COR theory to be a major explanatory model for understanding the stress process at work. Applications of COR theory to burnout, respite, and preventive intervention were detailed. Studies have shown that resource loss is a critical component of the stress process in organizations and that limiting resource loss is a key to successful prevention and post-stress intervention. Applications for future work, moving COR theory to the study of the acquisition, maintenance, fostering, and protection of key resources was discussed.