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The 2008 Chinese melamine milk scandal resulted in six reported fatalities and affected around 300,000 children, of whom 54,000 were hospitalised. Previous studies have used linear approaches to examine the root causes of the melamine milk scandal.

In the present study, we applied a systems approach to the melamine milk scandal to identify the complex systems-level failures across the supply chain leading to the incident and why food fraud incidents such as this occurred in the dairy sector. Additionally, systemic failures associated with food fraud vulnerability factors were considered (i.e. opportunities, motivation and control measures).

48 contributory factors of influence were identified and grouped across six sociotechnical levels across the Chinese dairy system, from government to equipment and surroundings. Lack of vertical integration (processes and communication) contributed to the failure. When viewed from a broader perspective, the melamine milk scandal can be linked to a series of human errors and organisational issues associated with government bodies, the dairy supply chain, individual organisations and management decisions and individual actions of staff or processes.

This approach is of value to policymakers and the industry as it supports public health investigations of food fraud incidents and proactive food safety management.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to analyse a food safety or fraud incident using the AcciMap approach and the food fraud vulnerability assessment (FFVA) technique. AcciMap analysis is applied to both unintentional and intentional aspects of the incident.

Any topic can be sensitive, and every subject area will have sensitive issues and topics that academics in higher education and further education settings will be expected to negotiate. Your ability to negotiate sensitive topics is important because the ways in which you engage and teach about sensitive topics will affect your ability to provide a positive learning experience and teaching alliance with students. In practice, you will face enormous pressure to ‘deliver’ on teaching, which will only be mirrored by similar freedoms in deciding on how and what needs to be done to get students to where they need to be. Negotiating, identifying, preparing for and delivering teaching on sensitive subjects and topics can be difficult in individual academics. This chapter, seeks to prepare you for developing a deeper understanding of some of the philosophical, theoretical, and practical-based concerns and issues related to teaching sensitive topics and subjects. This chapter begins with providing a rationale for what follows, and it explores some of the key themes, positionality, identity, transformational learning and lived experience, that are explored in greater depth in the collection. This chapter also contains a detailed breakdown of the structure and the content of this edited collection, and it concludes with some reflective comments about the implications of the collection for you as an individual and your career.

This paper aims to offer the first known synthesis of peer-reviewed literature on trade-based money laundering (TBML). Given the topic is in its nascent stage yet gaining prominence across scholarship and practice, this foundation is pertinent for future TBML research.

A systematic literature review was undertaken with a formulaic search string. Both qualitative (thematic) and quantitative (meta) analysis methods were used to illustrate the findings.

The systematic literature review, using qualitative and quantitative synthesis, led to a thematic categorization of extant TBML literature into four categories: TBML risk assessment, TBML detection, the role of professionals and understanding of TBML. Due to the limited number of studies, insights that can be drawn from the extant literature on the best way to combat TBML are also limited.

As the first systematic literature review on TBML, this study identified that the existing TBML literature has focused on increasing the understanding of the phenomenon in terms of its definition and mechanisms, detection, linkage with other crimes, such as organized crime and terrorism financing, and risk assessment frameworks. The originality of these findings lies in identifying areas future researchers might explore to broaden the academic literature.

Australian agriculture is facing increasingly uncertain weather patterns which is impacting financial performance, exacerbated by worsening terms of trade and a decline in commodity prices. Increasing the resilience and adaptive capacity of the primary production sector is of key importance. Governments and farmer groups often depict technology adoption as the salvation of farming, frequently ignoring the importance of decision-making processes and soft information skills and needs. The purpose of this study is to explore farmer decision-making and resilience and, in doing so, address ongoing challenges with soft information, including the inaccessibility of accounting data and a lack of awareness of its formal role in strategic decisions.

Drawing on a strategic choice perspective, we explore the links between farmer characteristics, attitudes, technology orientation, decision-making and financial performance to investigate how accounting data and tools could better support growers’ adaptive capacity. Detailed on-farm interviews were conducted with 25 grape growers across the Riverland in South Australia, with information thematically and descriptively analysed.

Results show that farmers with low operating profit margins spend double the time making decisions and struggle with minimising variable costs, especially water costs. Lower profit growers were also less likely to perceive climate change as a threat and demonstrated lower resilience.

The results highlight the potential for accountants to make more use of data-driven technological advances and for this information to be used to enhance on-farm strategic decision-making and support innovative business models. Simply packaged biophysical and financial data could also support strategic decisions and adaptation of farmers struggling to make a profit.

This paper aims to inform the discussion on why and how non-profit organizations can experience a hybridization process to address the criticism that would assume hybridity as an intrinsic characteristic of all organizations. Specifically, by referring to the academies of intellectuals as the non-profit setting in which investigating the emergence of hybridity takes place, this paper aims at exploring, first, to what extent this emergence could be induced by institutional conditions, and, second, which structural innovations could sustain the academies’ “motion” towards hybridity.

This paper relies on the institutional logics perspective and adopts the case study method applied to a historical context. The case under analysis is the Academy of “the Immobili”, which, in spite of its name, experienced a hybridization process in 1720 because of the decision to involve an impresario in the management of its theatre.

The findings highlight the significant role played by institutional conditions in inducing the emergence of hybridity, even in presence of internal resistance to any “motion” from the non-profit setting. Moreover, the analysis of the innovations associated with this emergence detects the intertwined action of the different decision makers involved in the hybridization process, in spite of their formal separation. These findings strengthen the conceptualization of hybridity within non-profit organizations.

Besides referring to a historical period that is still little explored in terms of hybridity within organizations, the paper focuses on an original context, i.e. academies, representing an ancient typology of cultural organizations. Therefore, the paper also provides the first insights into the hybridization process of cultural organizations from a historical perspective.

Using longitudinal data, this study aims to provide a greater understanding as to how parenting factors, including the employment of various disciplinary techniques, during a young person's early adolescence may contribute to excessive Internet use (EIU) in later adolescence.

Employing “Problem Behaviour” theory (PBT) as a guiding framework, this study uses data from the Growing Up in Ireland ’98 Cohort to investigate the effect of proximal and distal parental influences, measured when children were 13 years old, on symptoms of EIU in young adults at 17 or 18 years. Multiple regression models control for other child and family factors, and separate models for males and females examine sex differentials.

Estimation did not find a statistically significant association between internet-specific mediation practices in early adolescence and EIU in later adolescence. However, regularly playing games or sports together is a protective factor. Parent-adolescent conflict and spending time home alone are estimated as risk factors. How parents deal with misbehaviour is a strong predictor of EIU, with the direction of association dependent upon the type and frequency of discipline employed.

The findings are of practical significance in informing parents of modifiable aspects of their behaviour that can lead to EIU.

The study applies a longitudinal modelling framework and considers the effect on EIU of various parental disciplinary techniques, representing a novel contribution.

This paper aims to explore the lived experiences of key stakeholders working with homeless people during the implementation of universal credit during the austerity years.

The literature on austerity reveals welfare reforms’ impact on support services staff. Service providers’ perceptions of the impact of austerity-led policies and welfare reform via nine interviews with people working in homelessness organisations in Brighton and Hove in the UK. Service providers see the situation for their service users has gotten worse and that the policies make it more difficult to extricate themselves from their current situation. Three central themes relating to the impact of austerity-led welfare reforms were, namely, Universal Credit: the imposition of a precarious livelihood on welfare claimants; a double-edged sword: “If people are sanctioned: people can’t pay”; and “Hard to maintain my own mental equilibrium”.

More precisely, this paper captures service providers’ perceptions and experiences of the impact of austerity-led policies on their services and how they believe this, in turn, impacts their clients and their own lives.

The dimension cuts across service provision to vulnerable people and is intertwined with health and well-being outcomes. Austerity is detrimental to the health of service users and their clients. It is known that when it comes to the health and well-being of the most vulnerable, who have suffered most from the impacts of austerity policies. However, in times of open austerity, it falls also on those trying to ease their suffering.

The data suggest that policies were developed and accentuated by austerity, which led to the stripping of welfare support from vulnerable people. This process has impacted the people who rely on welfare and service providers.