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This study, based on our analysis of survey data from 1,242 partners and employees of a U.S. national public accounting firm, examines the impact on psychological well-being from the moderating effects of flexibility and role clarity on work-home conflict experienced by public accountants. Most prior research in public accounting deals with the antecedents and consequences of role stress and primarily focuses on job outcomes of turnover intentions and job satisfaction as dependent variables. Public accounting firms have responded to stressors with worker-friendly policies, largely by introducing flexibility and clarity in their organizational culture. Using a multi-disciplinary research model, we analyze the causal relationships of flexibility and clarity as moderators of the bi-directional nature of work-home conflict (work interference with home and home interference with work) on psychological well-being. Our study finds that perceptions of flexibility and role clarity drawn from a career position in public accounting can mitigate role conflict between work and home environments and contribute to enhanced psychological well-being. We also find that certain relationships described in the model are moderated by family status and age, but not by gender. Results of our study have implications to both individual public accountants and to their firms.

A recurring theme in Government policy documents has been the need to change the culture of the NHS in order to deliver a service “fit for the twenty‐first century”. However, very little is said about what constitutes “culture” or how this culture change is to be brought about. This paper seeks to focus on an initiative aimed ostensibly at “empowering” staff in an English Primary Care Trust as a means of changing organisational culture.

It presents findings from an ethnographic study which suggests that this attempt at “culture change” is aimed at manipulating the behaviour and values of individual employees and may be interpreted as a process of changing employee identity.

Employees reacted in different ways to the empowerment initiative, with some resisting attempts to shape their identity and others actively engaging in projects to bring their unruly self into line with the ideal self to which they were encouraged to aspire.

The challenges presented by the need to respond to conflicting Government policies created tensions between individuals and conflicts of allegiance and identity within individual members of staff. Alternative forms of selfhood did not merely replace existing identities, but interacted with them, often uncomfortably. The irony is that, whilst Government seeks to promote culture change, the frustrations created by its top‐down target‐driven regime acted to mitigate the transformational and reconstitutive effects of a discourse of empowerment aimed at achieving this change.

Determinants of Electric Utility Betas. One important aspect of utility regulation is the estimation of cost of equity capital of the firm. Several techniques have been used to estimate the cost of equity, including the discounted cash flow model and the capital asset pricing model (CAPM). CAPM has its foundations in modern portfolio theory and its application has generated a lot of controversy — both from academia and the professional world. Much of the problem in using CAPM in utility rate cases has centered on the issue of estimating the beta coefficient. Myers (1972) points out that problems exist in the following areas: measurement of beta; stability of beta; and incomplete description of risk and return by CAPM. There is evidence to believe that CAPM is still widely used be expert witnesses to explain risk‐return relationships in utility rate cases (Cooley, 1980).

Borden's Elsie leads the herd of logos that actually enhance the image of their brands. Elsie's presence boosts her company's image a whopping 15%. IBM and Mercedes Benz icons enhance the images of their brands 9% and 8% respectively. So says the LogoValue survey conducted by the Schechter Group in New York. Many logos, in fact, actually downgrade a company's image to varying degrees. What people don't realize, notes Alvin H. Schechter, chairman and CEO of the eponymous company, “High recognition of an icon is no guarantee that the logo is making a positive image contribution.”

The writer has recently been engaged in a research project addressing the theme of retailing internationalisation. The thrust of the research has been an identification of the extent and geographical orientation of cross‐frontier retailing, and the strategies employed by major retailers to enter and subsequently operate in overseas markets. This paper reviews the recent activities of a number of major retailers, principally from the UK and continental Europe but also from North America, Australia and Scandinavia, to have developed such an international presence. The writer suggests that in considering the location of their overseas interests together with the strategies employed to enter foreign markets, a number of distinct groupings are identifiable. Furthermore, these groupings are, to some extent, indicative of the way in which retailers will pursue their international ambitions in the future. The research presented in this paper was funded by Coopers & Lybrand as part of a joint programme of research into the retail trades being conducted by Coopers & Lybrand and OXIRM.

The purpose of this paper is to undertake a comparative examination of the media types used in projecting positioning strategies of service brands, and to establish whether there is evidence of congruence/fit between managerial decisions, adopted communications and target audience perceptions of positioning strategies of the brands. The relative congruence among intended, conveyed and perceived brand positions is an important research task. Also, how to ensure such synergy and minimize incongruence is an important research question both to theory and to practice.

Following extensive review of the literature, triangulation research method (face-to-face long interviews, survey and content analysis) characterized this study.

The findings reveal that overall parity between the three media (TV; newspaper; and pamphlets, leaflets, brochures and billboards) is evident in terms of failure to translate managerial decisions into corresponding positioning messages. The findings also show that fit or congruence between managerial decision and communicated message fails to deliver the desired message in 19 per cent of the observations. Further 23 per cent of the adopted strategies are neither present in communications nor perceived by the target audience. Irrespective of a positioning strategy being adopted or not, there is total congruence/fit between messages in newspapers and target audience’s perceptions, while the corresponding results for TV and other media are moderate. Moreover, channels for positioning offerings can be multifaceted and they do not strictly have to occur via communications. Only “brand name” positioning strategy demonstrates total fit, while “top of the range” shows high frequency of failure to translate managerial decisions into appropriate communication messages.

This paper offers useful insights into the overall differences between the three media (TV; newspaper; and pamphlets, leaflets, brochures and billboards) in the positioning of service brands. The study is a step forward in the diagnosis of the congruence/fit or coherence in the positioning activities between managers, firm practices and consumers’ perceptions. Without this knowledge, executives may encounter difficulties and challenges in their efforts at establishing, maintaining or reframing market “positions” for their offerings.

The author's career experience provides the impetus for a survey of the extent to which marketing journals succeed in transferring useful knowledge from academics to practitioners. The Flesch Reading Ease measurement method is used to compare 475 articles published in 14 English‐language journals during 2003. Scores are found to range from zero to a figure only just inside the “fairly easy” range, the average is in the middle of “difficult”, and the mainstream marketing titles are grouped at the low‐readability end of the distribution. Analysis of variance confirms that differences within the sample are significant. The author draws personal conclusions, and suggests possible extensions of this exploratory study.