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The author looks back over ten years of the UK asset and liability management profession and compares the US and UK banking industries. He suggests that the value of ALM techniques is still undervalued and left to specialists rather than being embraced by the banking business.

The author, one of the founders of the UK Asset and Liability Management Association ten years ago, looks back at developments since. He looks at how the embryo skills of asset and liability management used to be used and at the threats, like the international accounting standard dealing with financial instruments and proposals on liquidity ratios, and how they should be dealt with.

The Australian National Standards for Mental Health Services (Commonwealth Department of Health and Family Services, 1996) were developed as a plank of the first National Mental Health Plan (Commonwealth Department of Human Services and Health, 1992). Over the two subsequent national five‐year plans, they have become the basis for accreditation surveys for all Australian mental health services, both hospital and community components, whether acute or rehabilitation oriented, throughout the psychiatric career of all mental health service users and their families. The development and implementation of these standards are described. Innovations in this set of standards are detailed, specifying requirements of each phase of care, including access, entry, exit and re‐entry, and the parallel development and training of paid consumer and family carer surveyors. Largely due to the brevity and clarity of these innovations, because of a broad consultation process, and incorporation of interventions and service delivery systems that are both evidence‐based and congenial to service users, they have achieved a wide acceptance among, and championing by, service user and family carer networks. A recent review of the national standards was timely and welcomed, but is still incomplete, contentious in its protracted process, has a lack of consistent consultation and contains diluted and disorganised results. Implementation guides will now be developed to be superimposed on this revision in an attempt to improve and navigate it.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the proliferation of scientific management and then to consider its effect on business and society. Our examination begins with a brief survey of various management approaches that emerged in the early twentieth century. We focus on Frederick Taylor, the originator of scientific management, as the person with the greatest influence on management scholarship. We assert that the propagation of scientific management in all sectors of business and society is so pervasive that is it ubiquitous, making it exceedingly difficult to consciously detect or question. We examine how core ideas from scientific management have facilitated the dehumanization of stakeholders in management scholarship and practice. We then discuss how dehumanizing tendencies — informed by the hidden ubiquity of scientific management — have permeated research in corporate social responsibility and management theory. We conclude with suggestions for integrating humanity into management theory.

This article examines the role the Australian Trade Union Training Authority (TUTA) played in international education through the provision of trade union courses and exchanges. We consider how an investigation of trade union networks contributes to a richer understanding of international education linkages.

This paper is based on research conducted for an Australian Research Council (ARC)-funded project: Trade union training: reshaping the Australian industrial landscape (ARC LP180100500). This research involved a critical analysis of 60 semi-structured oral history interviews and textual archives, including the official records held by the National Archives of Australia and papers held by the Noel Butlin Archives, the Australian Council of Trade Unions and in private collections.

TUTA was established primarily as a national union training organisation, but from its inception, it also acted as a hub for the development of regional and international labour networks. The nature of TUTA’s work placed it at the intersection of international trade union and educational domains. Although there were some points of contact with formal international programs (e.g. Japan–Australia and Kellogg Foundations, the Colombo Plan and US Department of Labour exchanges schemes), the specific contribution of TUTA is overlooked in the educational exchange literature. The role of TUTA is revealed through institutional connections and individual experiences.

Further research is required to gain a deeper understanding of the impact of TUTA from the perspective of former participants in international TUTA course and current and former trade unionists in the Asia–Pacific.

This article builds new knowledge by examining the connections forged in the Asia–Pacific region at the intersection of trade union and educational networks, an area often overlooked in the literature on educational exchange.

The purpose of this paper is to explain how auditors’ professional and organizational identities are associated with commercialization in audit firms. Unlike previous studies exploring the consequences of commercialization in the firms, the study directs its attention toward the potential driver of commercialization, which the authors argue to be the identities of the auditors.

The paper is based on 374 responses to a survey distributed to 3,588 members of FAR, the professional association of accountants, auditors and advisors in Sweden. The study used established measures of organizational and professional identity and introduced market, customer and firm process orientation as aspects of commercialization. The study explored the data through descriptive statistics, principle component analysis and correlation analysis and tested the hypotheses with multiple linear regression analysis.

The findings indicated that the organizational identity of auditors has a positive association with three aspects of commercialization: market orientation, customer orientation and firm process orientation. Contrary to the arguments based on prior literature, the study has found that the professional identity of auditors is also a positively associated with commercialization. This indicates a change of the role of professional identity vis-à-vis commercialization of audit firms. The positive association between professional identity and commercial orientation could indicate the development of “organizational professionalism.” The study also found differences between the association between professional identity and commercialization in Big 4 and non-Big 4 firms. While in Big 4 firms, professional identity is positively associated only with the firm’s process orientation, in non-Big 4 firms, professional identity has a positive association with all three aspects of commercialization.

The paper provides insight into how auditors’ identities have influenced commercialization of audit firms and into the normalizing of commercialization within auditing. The study also developed a new instrument for measuring commercialization, one based on market, customer and firm process orientation concepts. This paper suggests that this instrument is an alternative to the observation through proxies.

The aim of this paper is to examine how managerial ability affects corporate tax aggressiveness.

The study follows the work of Demerjian, Lev, and McVay (2012) and quantifies managerial ability by calculating how efficiently managers generate revenues from given economic resources using the data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach. The study uses a wide range of measures of tax aggressiveness. Firm fixed-effects regressions and a difference-in-differences approach using information regarding CEO turnover to control for endogeneity are used.

The study finds a negative relationship between managerial ability and corporate tax aggressiveness. Further tests show that this negative relationship is more pronounced for firms with higher investment opportunities or firms with more reputational concerns.

Given the significant costs associated with tax aggressiveness and the negative effect it can have on managerial reputation if discovered, the results suggest that more able managers invest less effort in aggressive tax avoidance activities. This study furthers the understanding of how managerial personal traits affect corporate decision-making.

This chapter posits that we underestimate the way in which our immersion in the ‘social logic’ of capitalist consumption constrains our attempts to understand and respond to the ecological crises at both a personal and political level – and that both dimensions of our response are bound together.

Survey of literature on psychology, well-being and mindfulness.

How has the culture of capitalism – its psychic investment in colonizing our attention – compromised our ability to respond meaningfully to the challenges of sustainable development? In an acknowledgement of a certain closure around such themes within Western thought, I look to a point of exteriority in Peter Hershock’s work, drawing on China’s Chan Buddhist philosophy, for intimations of a worldview that challenges the West’s over-commitment to forms of ‘control’ in favour of a cultivation of mindful and careful awareness – and an offering of unconditional attention.

Draws attention to a new phase of ‘enclosure’ in the cultural processes of capitalism.

Original introduction of a critical approach to mindfulness in the debate on well-being.