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As the cost of powerful microcomputer hardware continues to decrease each year, the demand for sophisticated software designed to take advantage of these low cost machines increases. This inverse relationship is especially true in the human services field where budgets are almost always tight and the need for information continues to increase as the client population grows.

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.

Technological advances, globalization, network complexity, and social complexity complicate almost every aspect of our organizations and environments. Leadership educators are challenged with developing leaders who can sense environmental cues, adapt to rapidly changing contexts, and thrive in uncertainty while adhering to their values systems. In a complex leadership context, inadequate leader responses can result in devastating organizational impacts akin to the butterfly effect from chaos theory. This paper advances a simple model for leadership education based on a program we designed to develop leaders who understand the nature of complex systems, reliably use their ethical value systems, are emotionally intelligent and resilient, and can adapt to emergent situations.

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.

Addresses recent industrial and services market research literature that points out the need for improving product quality and customer service in response to stiffer competition. Offers a quantitative approach for measuring current levels of satisfaction with one′s product or service relative to the competition. Provides some basic marketing research tools for identifying the components of customer satisfaction and measuring the relative importance of each in managers′ overall evaluations of the company and its products.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate to what extent hedge funds are subject to irrationality in their investment decisions. The authors advance the hypothesis that irrational behavior affects hedge fund returns despite their sophistication and active management style.

The irrational component may follow a pattern consistent with the observed hedge fund returns yet far distant from market fundamentals. The authors include factors beyond the original version of capital asset pricing model such as Fama and French and Carhart models, as well as less stringent models, such as APT and Fung and Hsieh, to test whether these models are able to capture the irrational nature of the residuals.

After finding that institutional irrational sentiments play a role in hedge fund returns, we note that the returns are not completely shielded against irrational trading; however, hedge fund returns appear to be affected only by the irrational component derived from institutional trading rather than that emanated from individuals.

Different sources of irrationality may have asymmetric effects on hedge fund returns. Using a different set of sophisticated investors along with different market sentiment proxies may yield different results.

The authors argue that investors can use irrational beta to gauge the extent of institutional irrational sentiments prevailing in markets for the purpose of re-adjusting their portfolios and therefore use the betas as an early warning sign. It can also guide investors in avoiding funds and strategies that display greater irrational behavior.

The study advance the idea that the unexpected, hereafter irrational, component may follow a pattern consistent with the observed hedge fund returns, yet different from market fundamentals.

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.

This study seeks to examine, from the viewpoint of 12 adult fiction readers who are members of book clubs, how they go about selecting fiction books to borrow from the public library.

Each participant took part in an individual, semi‐structured, face‐to‐face interview. Using Williamson's Ecological Model of Information Seeking and Use as the conceptual framework, the study examined the role that fiction readers' “internal environments” and “external contexts” played in their book choices.

The selection of fiction books at the public library occurred, to a large extent, outside it. Fiction books were selected as part of everyday life information seeking, influenced by study participants' personal characteristics and circumstances as well as sources from their everyday lives, which typically included family, friends, book club and the mass media. While the public library was the main means by which study participants obtained their fiction books, it was not the first source to which they turned for ideas on what to read.

The study moves from a preoccupation of readers' actions at the public library to examine, more holistically, how everyday life information sources influence their choices of fiction books at the public library. It highlights the purposive and serendipitous dimensions of book selections and also underscores the importance of recognizing trust as a determining factor in book selection.

Commentators have claimed that business schools encourage unethical behavior by using economic theory as a basis for education. We examine claims that exposure to agency theory acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy, reducing ethical behavior among business students. We experimentally test whether economics coursework or a manipulated competitive vs. cooperative frame affects measured ethical behavior in simulated decision settings. We measure ethical behavior using established tasks. We also measure ethical recognition to test whether agency theory reduces recognition of ethical issues. Exposure to agency theory in either prior classwork or the experiment increased wealth-increasing unethical behavior. We found no effect on unethical behavior that does not affect wealth. We found no effect of exposure to agency theory on ethical recognition. Usual laboratory experiment limitations apply. Future research can examine why agency theory reduces ethical behavior. Educators ought to consider unintended consequences of the language and assumptions of theories that underlie education. Students may assume descriptions of how people behave as prescriptions for how people ought to behave. This study contributes to the literature on economic education and ethics. We found no prior experimental studies of the effect of economics education on ethical behavior.