Search results

Despite the appeal of studying successful organizations, valuable tools have also been developed by social scientists for understanding organizations that fail. This study applies one such tool − a model of stages of decline − to the case of the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations), an organization that has arguably been in decline for decades. The AFL-CIO is an interesting case due to the lack of agreement among key constituencies about the appropriate criteria for measuring organizational performance. Reformers and conservatives have struggled over this issue, each viewing the conflict over performance criteria as crucial in determining who will ultimately control the organization. As the AFL-CIO has moved through successive stages of decline, struggle over the organizational mission has grown increasingly intense, finally leading to the exit of major constituencies. This study confirms the value of the concept of stages of decline, and underscores the role of internal politics, especially in a non-profit organization, in setting the criteria for evaluating performance.

The U.S. labor movement is in decline and a crisis of national leadership has emerged over conflicting prescriptions for labor's revival. Union leaders have seemingly established consensus on the need for change, but disagree about the nature of needed reform, and methods for accomplishing meaningful changes that might address the long-term crisis.

This paper strives to inform and advance debates on these issues. Two national union surveys conducted in 1990 and 1997 provide the primary evidentiary base. Given their critical role in this study, measures from the surveys and certain aspects of the surveys are scrutinized. These surveys span the “Sweeney Insurgency” and the early years of the Sweeney AFL-CIO administration. Although both surveys have supported previous cross-section based studies, no published work has expressly focused on the change and stability within national unions or the longitudinal potential these data collectively provide. Using this potential to reexamine relations between union structures, strategies, and performance, this paper seeks to establish an evidentiary base to inform the current debate about union reforms and their likely consequences. In addition, suggestions for future research on unions and approaches to studying unions are offered.

Unions representing 40 percent of union membership broke away from the AFL-CIO in 2005 to form a rival federation, Change to Win (CTW). CTW leaders argued that the AFL-CIO placed too much emphasis on politics and too little on organizing new workers. This study looks at the potential impact of the split on laborʼs political action in lobbying and electoral mobilization. It examines differences between Change to Win and AFL-CIO affiliates in their political action committee spending, their support of Democrats, and their overall political spending on lobbying and electoral mobilization and concludes that CTW unions are no less reliant on political action than AFL-CIO unions and are likely to continue their involvement in politics.

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.

The explosion of accounting ethics research in the past decade has been fuelled by the availability of the Defining Issues Test (DIT: Rest 1979–1993). Despite existing criticisms regarding the DIT (Emler et al., 1983) and research indicating that the measure is a biased reflection of accountants' moral reasoning (Sweeney & Fisher, 1998,(Sweeney & Fisher,1999), the validity of the instrument is rarely questioned. This paper discusses the evolution of the political attitude-moral reasoning debate. A between-subjects experiment provides further support for the existence of political bias, implying that ethics researchers may have confounded political ideology with moral reasoning when interpreting results.

Despite its widespread acceptance and application in the psychology literature, exhaustion, the core dimension of job burnout, has only recently been examined in the domain of public accounting. These studies highlighted the problem of exhaustion within the profession and examined its causes relative to the environment of public accounting. Another factor, not previously addressed in the context of public accounting, is the role personality plays on public accountants’ exhaustion. The current study addressed this void by examining how the personality traits of hardiness, workaholism, neuroticism, and Type-A behavior in public accountants affect exhaustion. The results indicated that public accountants who were high in hardiness experienced significantly less exhaustion. The role stressors of overload and conflict were also significant contributors to public accountants’ exhaustion.

This study models auditors’ professional commitment as the product of socialization forces operating within the public accounting profession. The results of a structural equation analysis from a sample of 349 auditors representing international, national and regional firms indicate that firm size is inversely related to professional commitment. Furthermore, the findings indicate that a strong relationship exists between an auditor’s political ideology and professional commitment. Politically conservative auditors, reflecting the dominant ideology in public accounting, reported significantly higher professional commitment than politically liberal auditors.

Describes the continuing “cancellation crisis” in academic libraries in both the USA and the UK. Gives current prices of academic journals in the UK. Outlines methods used to measure the use of paper journals in libraries. Details a study revealing which of these methods are currently employed by the “new universities” in the UK. Stresses the need for accountability and the importance of use measurement to validate cancellation decisions.

In recent years, the long-declining U.S. labor movement has refocused in new and promising ways on rank-and-file mobilization, in organizing drives, collective bargaining conflicts and political campaigns. Such efforts are widely viewed as the best hope for revitalizing the labor movement: breathing new life into tired old unions, winning organizing drives and raising membership levels, increasing political influence, pushing toward the power necessary to reform labor law and ineffective labor institutions. The stakes are high and the goals ambitious: to close the “representation gap” at the workplace, reverse growing economic and social inequality, and build new coalitions for expanded democratic participation in local, national and global politics.