Search results

This case presents an overview of the confectionary industry, a description of the Hershey Foods Corporation, and a look at the company's strategies and the impact of these strategies. The case focuses on the unintended consequences that result from the implementation of dramatic new strategies for a company and what occurs in a company town that displays a very strong paternalistic culture. Some analysts had previously thought that Hershey's profitability and its close relationship with the town, the trust and the school made the company untouchable, but events proved otherwise.

After reading this case, the reader will feel compelled to answer the following questions. What is the best strategy for future growth of Hershey? How important is organizational culture on a corporation's strategic direction? Should the company indeed be sold to a larger corporation?

Voluntary changes in accounting principle represent explicit and fundamental decisions by managers to exercise accounting discretion. This paper develops an organizing framework to review prior literature on voluntary changes, provides descriptive insights on contemporary changes, and identifies opportunities for future research on voluntary changes. The voluntary change literature is robust and has examined many questions using data prior to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX). We find that contemporary voluntary changes often vary across the pre-SOX, post-SOX, and post-SFAS No. 154 periods by the materiality of their income effect, issue type, and justifications provided by managers, suggesting that manager use of voluntary changes has evolved over time. Our future research opportunities consider potential determinants of voluntary changes including strategic incentives, environmental conditions, and manager characteristics, as well as the potential direct or moderating role of corporate governance and auditors on manager use of voluntary changes. They also consider user reactions to voluntary changes. By providing insight into both extant voluntary change research and the contemporary use of voluntary changes, our study informs standards setters who grant managers the ability to exercise this form of accounting discretion, as well as researchers who plan to study accounting choice through voluntary changes.

This qualitative inquiry reports the ways in which three graduate-level preservice elementary teachers conceived of the relationship between diversity and democracy, and explores how their understandings of this relationship informed their planning for democratic citizenship education with young learners. Findings indicate while the participants exhibited a certain measure of variance in their thinking about diversity and democracy, all of them planned their lessons at a lower level of multicultural support than their views suggested they would. This primarily highlights the ongoing lack of understanding regarding what it might mean to teach democratic citizenship through its practice as well as its study.

In the highly gendered academic sector, womens’ high participation rates have not translated into equal career progression with men. Existing literature suggests that early career publication success is a good indicator of long-term publication success. This research is intended to provide a better understanding of whether the notions of success espoused by neo-liberal universities align with the subjective measures of what constitutes academic success for women ECRs (early career researchers).

The study examines the perceptions of nine successful women ECRs at an Australian university. It uses collaborative autoethnography with thematic analysis of participants’ self-reflective narratives on being a successful ECR.

Five themes were identified. One focussed on objective academic success, which included publications, grants and citations. The other four themes – living a balanced life, making a difference, labour of love and freedom and flexibility – offered more subjective views of success. These included: research making a contribution to society, undertaking research they are passionate about, having autonomy in their role and achieving work-life balance.

The findings demonstrate that women define success in broader terms than neo-liberal universities, and future studies should consider these divergent definitions. Universities committed to equality should understand differences in how women may approach career progress and incorporate this into support processes and in alignment of individual and university goals.

This research offers unique insights into the experience of post-doctoral employment for women in the academic environment and the factors influencing their success in this early career phase.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how fieldwork impacted the author's own and one participant's positioning; the author's reflexivity, experiences and feelings of alterity; the participant's performances and conversations between the author and participant.

The author uses a confessional tale to describe the time spent with the participant and confesses how it impacted on the author as the researcher. The author examines her biases, feelings, and vulnerabilities, and explores some of the methodological and positioning issues with which she struggled.

The author ponders on what she learned while being in such close quarters with a participant and discusses what she should keep in mind about herself as the researcher during subsequent data collection forays. Researchers should know themselves well before attempting such closeness because when we are researchers, we can’t change who we are as people.

It is believed that the extreme researcher/participant closeness was unique but was, at the same time, an extremely useful form of data collection.

The 2014/2015 UK requirement for involvement of service users and carers in training mental health professionals has prompted the authors to review the work of involvement in clinical psychology training in the university programme. Have the voices of service users and carers been heard? The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The authors update the paper of 2011 in which the authors described the challenges of inclusion and the specific approaches the authors take to involvement. The authors do this in the context of the recent change to UK standards for service user and carer involvement, and recent developments in relation to partnership working and co-production in mental healthcare. The authors describe the work carried out by the authors – members of a service user involvement group at a UK university – to ensure the voices of people affected by mental health difficulties are included in all aspects of training.

Careful work and the need for dedicated time is required to enable inclusive, effective and comprehensive participation in a mental health training programme. It is apparent that there is a group of service users whose voice is less heard: those who are training to be mental health workers.

For some people, involvement has increased. Trainee mental health professionals’ own experience of distress may need more recognition and valuing.

The authors are in a unique position to review a service-user-led project, which has run for 12 years, whose aim has been to embed involvement in training. The authors can identify both achievements and challenges.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

Increasingly, U.S. firms voluntarily issue standalone corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports to demonstrate to society a commitment to social and environmental activities (Bebbington, Larrinaga, & Moneva, 2008; Erusalimsky, Gray, & Spence, 2006). To ascertain the effect of standalone CSR reports on investors, we compared the association between CSR performance scores and subsequent stock returns for firms that issue standalone CSR reports versus those that do not. Consistent with a signaling perspective (Akerlof, 1970), we found that firms that voluntarily issue standalone CSR reports have a stronger association between total CSR and CSR strengths and subsequent stock returns than firms that do not. Our findings indicated that investors are relying on standalone CSR reports because they reward CSR performance for firms that issue standalone CSR reports CSR performance for those that do not issue standalone CSR reports.

This chapter scrutinizes the role of ethnic categorizations in everyday-lived experiences in a diverse neighbourhood. It was found that ethnic categorizations do play an important part in use and perception in widely divergent ways. Users of public space categorize relevant others in terms of ethnicity in various situations and in relation to several activities. Ethnic categories provide meaningful frameworks both in the case of negative evaluations of behaviour and in understanding spatial segregation. Indigenous Dutch are ethnically categorized in terms of them avoiding public space. Established newcomers are aware of an ethnic hierarchy and feel abandoned by indigenous neighbours. On their part, these established newcomers consider more recently arrived new migrants as a sign of decay of the neighbourhood. Next to (perceived) ethnicity, language is taken in account as a separate important classifying principle.

The following is an annotated list of materials dealing with information literacy including instruction in the use of information resources, research, and computer skills related to retrieving, using, and evaluating information. This review, the twentieth to be published in Reference Services Review, includes items in English published in 1993. A few are not annotated because the compiler could not obtain copies of them for this review.