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Present-day courts, practitioners, and scholars continue to cite to and rely upon cases involving slavery and enslaved persons to construe, interpret, and apply common-law principles of property, contract, family, tort, and other areas of the law. Often a case’s connections to slavery are not acknowledged in citations. This erasing of context causes institutional harms by both embedding slave-based legal analysis in American legal structures and condoning the detrimental impacts of slavery in society. The deleterious effects of slavery persist through citations to cases involving enslaved persons to support such prosaic present-day issues as warranties on window glass. Slavery may no longer be legal, but its long shadow persists in citations and, thereby, is embedded in the information systems informing the legal profession. The information infrastructures that categorize case law and inform legal research ingrain racism in the American legal system by perpetuating and masking case law connections to slavery and enslaved persons. The legal profession has recently been criticized for the continued citation to cases that state good law or persuasive authority but are rooted in the institution of slavery. This chapter builds on this important research and contributes a necessary element to the discussion – namely how legal information infrastructures contribute to continuing citation to slave cases and how the library and information science (LIS) field can help institute change and promote racial justice.

This paper seeks to establish the influence of several types of factors on the use of accounting information in the public sector within a developing country context. Institutional theory with its branches NIS and OIE underlies the theoretical framework for explaining the factors influencing the use of accounting information. The analysis was based on structural equation modelling to test nine hypotheses. The data were collected by administering 208 questionnaires to the Tanzanian Local Government Authorities’ political and administrative actors.

At large, the findings of this study comprehend the role of institutionalised social and legal rule with professionalism in shaping actors to use accounting information instrumentally and symbolically in budget decision-making processes. Furthermore, the findings establish the importance of education and experiences on accounting and financial aspects of the actors who are involved in the public sector budget decision-making process. The findings also provide an understanding of the differences between political actors and administrative actors in terms of the factors influencing the symbolic use of accounting information in LGA’s decision-making processes.

Our findings challenge development partners (i.e. donors), reformers such as Central Government and National Accounting professional board such NBAA in Tanzania to coerce pressure by adoption of implementation of NPM techniques, which can lead to positive change in LGAs to influence instrumental rather than symbolic use of accounting information in the budgetary decision-making processes. For example, adoption of accrual basis accounting should also concur with the improvement of accounting information systems, legal and regulatory frameworks together with creation of trainings that increase skill and knowledge of using accounting information by the actors. This might ensure financial sustainability to LGAs that can increase provision of service with relevant quality to citizens. Moreover, the findings need the political parties to take responsibility of building capacity of their candidates. It might ensure that their representatives in the council are capable of making appropriate use of the accounting information at their disposal to improve the quality of budget decision making and their representation of the population for the benefit of their organisation and eventually of their political parties. The citizens are needed to be sources of professional behaviours to both councillors and administrators by making closer follow up and demands of quality services from their LGAs through budgeting processes.

The generalisation of this study’s findings can be limited because they were obtained only from LGAs operating in Tanzania

This is the first paper that establishes the factors influencing the instrumental–conceptual use and the symbolic use of accounting information in LGAs’ budgetary decision-making processes in developing country context, in particular, in Tanzania.

This chapter explores the ways in which a large-scale accounting system, known as Marijuana Enforcement Tracking Reporting and Compliance, contributes to the construction and organization of a new market for recreational cannabis in the US state of Colorado. Mobilizing the theoretical lenses provided by the literature on market devices, on the one hand, and infrastructure, on the other hand, the authors identify and unpack a changing relationship between accounting and state control through which accounting and markets unfold. The authors describe this movement in terms of a distinction between knowing devices and thinking infrastructures. In the former, the authors show that regulators and other authorities perform the market by making it legible for the purpose of intervention, taxation and control. In the latter, thinking infrastructures, an ecology of interacting devices is made and remade by a variety of intermediaries, disclosing the boundaries and possibilities of the market, and constituting both opportunities for innovation and domination through “protocol.”

Empirical evidence shows that banking development has a significant impact on macro-level economic growth through the finance-growth nexus and also highlights the prominent effect of development on local economy and household welfare, particularly in developing countries with restricted access to financial systems. The authors investigated the role of local banking development in affecting household welfare in Thailand which is a modest degree of financial access compare to other countries. The authors focus on the development of the banking sector in four dimensions, including financial depth, financial stability, financial efficiency and financial inclusion, and its impact on household welfare using the generalized method of moments approach to address the endogeneity problem. The authors employ biennial household welfare data from the National Statistical Office survey from 2007 to 2019 which covers all provinces in Thailand. The findings suggest that each type of banking development significantly affects household income and consumption in Thailand, although in different ways. Financial depth decreases income and consumption expenditure, while financial inclusion increases income and consumption expenditure (level effect). However, there are insignificant impacts on volatility of household income and consumption (volatility effect). Our findings prove that the implementation of policies to promote banking development either promote or decrease household welfare. This study can provide insight on policy impact and assist policymakers in considering the adoption of banking development policies to promote growth of the local economy, while at the same time aiming to reduce welfare inequality.

One powerful public support instrument to support the economic interests abroad is via commercial diplomacy (CD). CD is practice gaining more importance in today's economy, but is poorly addressed in research. The available existing research, however, lack detail on the beneficiary perspective and the value-added function of CD, let alone specific enterprises to small and medium enterprises (SMEs). This study contributes to the field of CD by identifying the determinants of the value of CD from an SME (beneficiary) perspective. Out of a random sample of 450 SMEs contacted, 115 of them agreed to fill out a scale-based questionnaire and answer to open questions in the questionnaire. The results demonstrate that the perceived service quality by SMEs of CD influences the overall value SMEs attach to CD. No evidence was found in support of the hypothesis that institutional environment of a host country is negatively related to the value SMEs attach to CD. But we found a negative relationship between the international experience of an SME and the overall value SMEs attach to CD, and a positive relationship between the extent of having foreign public customers and the overall value attached to CD by SMEs. Opposite to what existing literature suggests, smaller SMEs do not attach more value to CD services. Also, for the business network we did not find evidence that SMEs with an established business network attach less value to CD. We did, however, find evidence that SMEs with an established business network attach less value to partner search services. Suggestions for further research are provided.

This chapter discusses recent information policy activities and initiatives in the European Union (EU). EU information policy refers to the legislation and strategies pertaining to the creation of the European information society. It is concerned with economic and industrial competitiveness, with an emphasis on the role that information and communication technologies play in revolutionizing everyday life. This discussion focuses on the information policy areas of greatest interest to information professionals. It addresses the EU's struggles with the concept of transparency with regard to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, the application of privacy measures to the Internet of Things, and open-access to EU-funded research.

The purpose of this article is to apply what social scientists have learned from decades of research on natural and technological disasters to better understand the short-term and potential long-term human impacts of the 9/11 attacks. The short-term response to the 9/11 attacks was similar to how people and communities typically respond to natural disasters. One year after the attacks, news reports suggest that factors identified in technological disaster research as causing collective trauma, rather than recovery, are beginning to surface. We identify three patterns typically present in (but not restricted to) the aftermath of technological disasters that contribute to slow recovery and ongoing collective trauma and evaluate the likelihood that these factors will impact the recovery process for those impacted by the 9/11 attacks. We conclude that due to perceptions of governmental failure, the likelihood of protracted litigation, and uncertainty regarding the mental and physical health of victims, the social and psychological impacts of the 9/11 attacks will likely be severe and long-term. As such, the concluding section recommends the implementation of a long-term clinical intervention program for mitigating these potential chronic impacts and facilitating the timely recovery of survivors.

This chapter is devoted to budget investments in the Russian Federation, which nowadays have a double meaning. This fact often causes confusion and misunderstandings in the implementation of investment activities.

Traditional Russian understanding of investment corresponds to the concept of capital expenditures or investments in fixed assets. As a result of budget investments, according to the budget legislation, the cost of public property necessarily increases. Such investments are budget expenditures for the creation (or purchase) of new capital assets. In this case, the budget investments are like a synonym for capital expenditures.

A new approach to the concept of cost of investments is linked to perception and rethinking of the concept of investment prevailing in the countries of Western Europe and North America. Under this approach, investments are understood as a commercial activity of the foreign investors, which consist of investing their funds in an unlimited range of objects of entrepreneurial activity in the territory of Russia. This approach is also embodied by the legislation of the Russian Federation.

However, in the second (not traditional for Russia) meaning, investment are carried out at the budget execution. These are, for example, assets of sovereign wealth funds of the Russian Federation, which are called the Reserve Fund and National Welfare Fund. These funds are formed by part of the revenues associated with oil production in the case of it exceeding its cost base per barrel, and the free assets of these funds are located in certain foreign currencies and securities.