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To alert public company management and directors to several recent SEC enforcement actions involving executives and other senior personnel arising out of securities law violations.

Reviews a series of enforcement actions against four chief executive officers, four chief financial officers, an audit committee chair, and one outside auditor (BDO USA LLC) and five of its partners arising out of securities law violations by four different corporations (MusclePharm Corporation, Bankrate, Inc., KIT Digital, Inc. and General Employment Enterprises, Inc.). Each of the actions involved financial reporting and disclosure violations. Also highlights the need for directors and senior management to maintain a sharp focus on their company’s controls and disclosure practices.

The SEC’S actions may portend renewed determination by the agency to hold executives and directors, as well as outside professionals, accountable for securities fraud and disclosure violations committed by corporations.

Practical guidance from experienced securities lawyers.

To analyze and draw conclusions from the “Framework for ‘Investment Contract’ Analysis of Digital Assets” (the “Framework”), released by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) on April 3, 2019, and the SEC’s corresponding no-action letter to TurnKey Jet, Inc. (“TKJ”), which is the SEC’s first no-action letter publicly agreeing with the view that the digital asset described therein is not a security.

Explains how the Framework assists market participants in analyzing whether a digital asset is a security, by applying the Howey factors for identifying an investment contract. Discusses the SEC’s TKJ Letter, highlighting the factors the SEC emphasized in its analysis of the Framework.

While largely reiterating prior guidance, the Framework provides a helpful overview of the SEC’s views on when a digital asset is a security and how to properly analyze the prongs of Howey with respect to digital assets. The Framework also leaves certain important questions unanswered, including, for example, whether digital assets distributed by means of a so-called “Airdrop” are securities under the Framework, and the extent to which the Framework is meant to interact with digital assets that were issued or otherwise operate on platforms that are primarily overseas.

Expert guidance from lawyers with broad experience in financial services, securities, investment funds, derivatives, and digital assets regulation and compliance.

To discuss how two recent court decisions applied the materiality standard concerning information disclosed to investors and the definition of a “reasonable investor”.

Explains the origins and evolution of the materiality standard and the “reasonable investor” paradigm, discusses the difficulty in applying the materiality standard in the absence of a clear definition of the “reasonable investor”, and addresses potential implications of two 2016 cases, Flannery v. SEC and United States v. Litvak, on whether materiality should be applied on a subjective, rather than objective, basis and evidentiary burdens in proving materiality.

Flannery and Litvak suggest that, in assessing what information is material to a “reasonable investor”, courts may place increasing weight on the relative sophistication of investors, the types of securities and the nature of the markets in which they are investing, and types of information investors in those securities and markets typically consider to be material.

Informed analysis by experienced practitioners in capital markets, financial services and securities litigation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of organizational culture as a company migrates through a four-stage model for designing a performance measurement system (PMS) focused on customer profitability.

This is a single-site phenomenological case study, at Growth Spurt Marine Accessories (Growth Spurt), a manufacturing organization headquartered in the USA. Data were collected over a two-year period through interviews with accounting staff, internal company documents and recording observational notes.

The paper identifies three major factors that prevented Growth Spurt from transitioning its customer profitability analysis (CPA) reporting package through Kaplan and Cooper’s four-stage model of PMS design: executives exerting their power and spending political capital to prevent implementation without providing rationale, executives believing that the allocation methods were too subjective and executives relying on their own intuition in analyzing customer profitability rather than relying on data. These factors suggest that organizational culture plays an important role in migrating a customer-focused profitability PMS through Kaplan and Cooper’s four-stage model of PMS system design.

The findings suggest that a PMS focused on customer profitability that does not advance beyond Stage II (financial reporting-driven) may still suit the needs of an organization. Additionally, managers should advocate for a multidisciplinary PMS design and implementation team to minimize potentially adverse effects of organizational culture.

This paper is unique because it applies Kaplan and Cooper’s four-stage model for PMS design to CPA and it uses a phenomenological case approach to explore impediments to a comprehensive CPA implementation.

This chapter explores religion and spirituality as a form and source of demographic differences relevant to the study of occupational stress and well-being. The purpose of the chapter is to provide a resource and starting point to occupational health and stress researchers who may be interested in religion/spirituality. A review of critical religion/spirituality concepts is provided, along with a discussion of how religion/spirituality can be integrated into common occupational stress theories and reconciled with commonly studied variables within this domain. A series of future research directions involving religion/spirituality and occupational health and stress are ultimately presented.

Purpose: The current study aims to cast light on the divide between academic research in management accounting and its applicability to practice by examining, from the standpoint of nursing, how this gap is perceived and what challenges may be involved in bridging it.

Design/Methodology/Approach: The current study compares the findings of Tucker and Parker (2014) with both quantitative as well as qualitative evidence from an international sample of nursing academics.

Findings: The findings of this study point to the differing tradition and historical development in framing and addressing the research–practice gap between management accounting and nursing contexts and the rationale for practice engagement as instrumental in explaining disciplinary differences in addressing the research–practice gap.

Research Implications Despite disciplinary differences, we suggest that a closer engagement of academic research in management accounting with practice “can work,” “will work,” and “is worth it.” Central to a closer relationship with practice, however, is the need for management accounting academics to follow their nursing counterparts and understand the incentives that exist in undertaking research of relevance.

Originality/value: The current study is one of the few that has sought to look to the experience of other disciplines in bridging the gap. Moreover, to our knowledge, it is the first study in management accounting to attempt this comparison. In so doing, our findings provide a platform for further considering how management accounting researchers, and management accounting as a discipline might, in the spirit of this study’s title, “Learn from the Experience of Others.”

Organizational behavior scholars have long recognized the importance of a variety of emotion-related phenomena in everyday work life. Indeed, after three decades, the span of research on emotions in the workplace encompasses a wide variety of affective variables such as emotional climate, emotional labor, emotion regulation, positive and negative affect, empathy, and more recently, specific emotions. Emotions operate in complex ways across multiple levels of analysis (i.e., within-person, between-person, interpersonal, group, and organizational) to exert influence on work behavior and outcomes, but their linkages to human resource management (HRM) policies and practices have not always been explicit or well understood. This chapter offers a review and integration of the bourgeoning research on discrete positive and negative emotions, offering insights about why these emotions are relevant to HRM policies and practices. We review some of the dominant theories that have emerged out of functionalist perspectives on emotions, connecting these to a strategic HRM framework. We then define and describe four discrete positive and negative emotions (fear, pride, guilt, and interest) highlighting how they relate to five HRM practices: (1) selection, (2) training/learning, (3) performance management, (4) incentives/rewards, and (5) employee voice. Following this, we discuss the emotion perception and regulation implications of these and other discrete emotions for leaders and HRM managers. We conclude with some challenges associated with understanding discrete emotions in organizations as well as some opportunities and future directions for improving our appreciation and understanding of the role of discrete emotional experiences in HRM.

This paper aims to describe the process of identifying, applying and assessing the balanced scorecard model on a five‐year, strategic plan in an academic, medical library two years into the five‐year period. The existing strategic plan consisted of eight inter‐connected pathways with multiple goals and objectives, generating a high volume of data, which made it difficult to track the implementation of the plan.

A research query seeking an alternative to the current strategic plan framework was developed and researched. This process identified the balanced scorecard as a possible successful alternative to the eight inter‐connected pathways in place. After the application of the balanced scorecard, a second query, with assessment criteria, was developed to determine if the balanced scorecard did, in fact, provide a better framework than the original plan.

The balanced scorecard restructured the eight pathways into four perspectives to create an aligned, cause‐and‐effect strategy. The original plan had too many themes to manage and lacked a cohesive strategy. Performance measures proved more meaningful and manageable in measuring the success of the strategic plan than the high volume of project management data. It was concluded that the balanced scorecard met the assessment criteria as a better framework for the strategic plan.

Aligning goals and objectives to form strategy simplified the implementation of the strategic plan. Performance measures focus on the performance of the organization, creating a process of continuous improvement.

While the balanced scorecard has been applied in academic libraries, this project successfully applied the model on a strategic plan two years after its implementation.