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As advocates and scholars dedicated to advancing equality for women and girls, we believe that sport can empower all people – and to change the world. Exclusion and restrictions for transgender athletes undermine this cause. Transgender athletes are not and have never been a threat to women's sport. There are, however, serious and well-documented threats to women's sport that warrant attention, including unequal opportunities in participation and leadership, inequitable funding and pay, uneven media coverage, a lack of sponsorship opportunities, sexual harassment and abuse and incomplete implementation of gender equality policies (Bisgaard & Støckel, 2019; Cooky et al., 2021; Hindman & Walker, 2020; Lough & Greenhalgh, 2019; Novkov, 2019; Pape, 2020; Raso, 2019; Schultz, 2018; Staurowsky et al., 2020; Yanus & O'Connor, 2016; Zerunyan, 2017).

A close reading of peer-reviewed, researched-based and credible sources allow us to better understand the experiences of trans athletes, to dispel the dangerous misinformation peddled in recent media accounts and political debates, to outline critical legal and policy discussions about trans athletes, and to highlight why access to sport matters for everyone. There is a clear consensus across multiple disciplines: the future of sport includes transgender women and girls.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the experiences of Ibrahim, an ex-offender who has embraced Islam. Ibrahim professes Islam to be the influential element to his desistance process. This study explores Ibrahim’s journey, emphasising and reflecting upon youth; criminality and religiosity. Much of the current research relating to Black men and offending is limited to masculinity, father absence, gangs and criminality. The role of religiosity in the lives of offenders and/or ex-offenders is often overlooked. The authors suggest that identity, religiosity and desistance can raise a host of complexities while highlighting the unique challenges and benefits experienced by Ibrahim, following the practice of religion.

This paper took a qualitative, ethnographic approach, in the form of analysing and exploring Ibrahim’s personal lived experience. The analysis of semi-structured interviews, and reflective diaries, utilising grounded theory allowed the formation of the following three core themes: desistance, religion and identity.

The findings within this paper identify an interlink between desistance, religion and identity. The role of religiosity is becoming increasingly more important in academic social science research. This paper highlights the complexities of all three above intersections.

This paper explores the complexities of religiosity in the desistance process of Ibrahim. Research in relation to former gang members in the UK and the role of religiosity in their lives is fairly under-researched. This paper seeks to build on existing research surrounding gang, further exploring religiosity from a UK context.

Time spent with Ibrahim had to be tightly scheduled, due to the work commitments of both Ibrahim and the researcher. Therefore, planning had to be done ahead in an efficient manner.

Researching the way individuals experience the world is a “growing phenomenon”. This paper aimed to explore the lived experience of religiosity from the perspective of Ibrahim. However, it was important to not stereotype and label all Black males who have embraced Islam and desisted from crime. Therefore, this paper’s intention is not to stereotype Black men, but to raise awareness and encourage further discussion surrounding the role of religiosity in the lives of ex-offenders’.

To the authors’ knowledge, studies specifically focusing on the role of Islam in the life of an ex-offender are few and far between. Therefore, findings from this study are important to develop further understanding surrounding religiosity, offending and desistance. This study explores the lived experiences of Ibrahim, an former gang member and ex-offender who professes Islam to be a fundamental source to his desistance process.

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to analyze how campaigns, movements, new media outlets, and professional journalism organizations interact to produce political discourse in an information environment characterized by new actors and increasingly fragmented audiences.

Design – To do so, this chapter offers a rare inside look at contemporary strategic campaign communications from the perspective of staffers. Twenty-one open-ended and semi-structured interviews were conducted with former staffers, consultants, and vendors to the 2008 Obama campaign.

Findings – During the primaries the Obama campaign worked to create and cultivate ties with activists in the mediated “netroots” movement, what Todd Gitlin has referred to as the “movement wing of the Democratic Party.” The campaign sought to influence the debate among the principals and participants in this movement, given that they play an increasingly central role in the Democratic Party networks that help shape the outcome of contested primaries. During the general election, when the campaign and its movement allies shared the goal of defeating the Republicans, sites in the netroots functioned as important conduits of strategic and often anonymous campaign communications to new specialized journalistic outlets and the professional, general interest press. It is argued that campaigns and movements have extended established and developed new communication tactics to pursue their goals in a networked information environment.

Implications – This chapter's contribution lies in showing how much of what scholars assume to be the communicative content of amateurs is often the result of coordination among organized, and often hybrid, political actors.

International Integrated Reporting Council is in its 10th year of establishment and the integrated reporting (IR) framework released in 2013 was under revision in the year, 2020. Despite some significant developments in the past 10 years, the authors know very little about the perception of preparers towards IR. This paper aims to study the perception of the preparers and to understand the current status of the adoption of IR in India.

The top 500 companies from ET 500 list have been analysed. Banks and financial institutions (a total of 69) have been excluded for the study. Out of 431 companies, the status of IR has been checked by the questionnaire-based survey. Principle component analysis, a dimensionality reduction technique was performed on the responses to understand the important components impacting the perception of companies. Also, a case study methodology has been adopted to compare and analyse the IR trends in the manufacturing and industrial sector.

The result shows that the majority of companies have a positive opinion about IR and the three major components impacting their perception are – concise reporting, effective and transparent reporting and finally, better decision-making.

The result of this study will be useful for the policymakers, regulators, companies who have or will adopt IR. Paper gives a relevant view to academicians for assessing the effectiveness and perception of IR.

Very few studies can be found in India which focusses on analysing the perception of preparers towards the IR. Specially after the circular of SEBI in 2017, it becomes even more important to analyse the insight and awareness of the companies who have adopted IR. The paper is a timely and relevant contribution to the literature by providing insight over the opinion of preparers in India.

The starting point for the paper is an assessment of the impact of a 1993 special issue of Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, which provided an interdisciplinary analysis of the pursuit of accountable management reforms in the UK public sector. From this assessment, the paper offers a set of reflections on the development over the last two decades of “new” public management practice and research, and also indicates some of the obligations and responsibilities of academic researchers and managers alike in the context of a continuing appetite for such reforms.

The paper is written in a reflective fashion, including assessments of: our role as guest editors of the special issue; the continuing pertinence of key messages emanating from the special issue; and broader considerations drawn from our own working experience in managerial roles in universities and personal reflections on the state of the public management literature.

The paper highlights the long‐standing litany of failure attached to such public management reform movements, as well as the limited degree of cross‐disciplinary learning within the field. The paper emphasises that we need to rethink the parameters of “public sector” (accounting) research, and avoid the partitioning of (accounting) research into ever smaller and self‐referential sub‐areas. We need more cross‐national studies. We need to know more about which management practices travel readily, and which travel less easily, and what happens when implementation is problematic. We need also to reinforce the importance of historical analyses, if we are to derive the most benefit from studies of the interrelations among accounting and public management reforms and wider transformations in ways of governing economic and social life. Finally, we need to retain or reinstate curiosity at the heart of our concerns, in order to dispel the self‐evidence or taken‐for‐grantedness of so much of our present.

Personal reflections, while being beneficially close to the subject under consideration, inevitably suffer from claims of bias and a lack of independence. We have sought to control for such risks by drawing on a variety of sources of information with respect to impact, including (albeit ironically) citation counts and an analysis of the writings of individual authors contributing to the special issue.

The paper is novel in that it seeks to combine an analysis of the literature on public sector accounting and management reforms over several decades with our own, multi‐faceted, engagement with public management research and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the perceptions of potential users about water accounting reports prepared under Australian general purpose water accounting (GPWA), which applies financial accounting techniques to water and could be extended to other areas of natural resource management. In particular, the paper examines the extent to which users believe GPWA reports are useful and facilitate the discharge of accountability by water managers.

As a theoretical lens the authors apply an extended version of Gray et al.’s (1996) accountability model. The authors utilise mixed method research design comprising a questionnaire administered to users with water-related interests and an analysis of public submissions to the Water Accounting Standards Board on the Exposure Draft of Australian Water Accounting Standard 1.

Overall, users perceive the introduction of GPWA as useful and believe that the benefits will outweigh the costs. The adoption of a financial accounting approach in terms of accounting standards and prescribed methods for booking and disclosing water “transactions” was broadly supported. In terms of the main users of reports, there was some ambiguity but findings suggested that government agencies were likely to be the main users of GPWA. Users were also concerned about the degree of judgement required to determine the identity and boundaries of a “water report entity”. Perhaps the most controversial aspect related to accountability; while the Accountability Statement was broadly supported there was little consensus that GPWA collectively discharged the accountability of water managers. Taken collectively, these results suggest that GPWA may be more useful for improving management performance than accountability.

The findings suggest that future iterations of the standard need to reconsider how accountability might be discharged through the production of GPWA. The broad support for GPWA suggests, however, that the financial accounting approach – and hence the accounting community – may also make a valuable contribution to other areas of natural resource accounting.

This study contributes to the emerging but still limited literature on GPWA and the fundamentally different approach to natural resource accounting it represents. While some previous studies have examined potential users of GPWA none have done so after the standard has been fully developed, and no previous studies have adopted the mixed research design utilised in this study.

In this second part of the report on Printed Circuit World Convention IV held at the Tokyo Prince Hotel, Tokyo, from 3–5 June 1987, a general synopsis of the content of the papers presented in the eighteen technical sessions will be given. As three sessions were run in parallel throughout the 2½‐day conference, and therefore not all presentations were heard by those reporting on the technical programme, a number of them have been briefly summarised from the Convention Proceedings.

During my early years as a junior high school librarian, I was frequently beseiged with requests for heart‐throbbing love stories and mysteries. However, as the years passed and the divorce rate increased, I began to encounter students who specifically asked for books about “mean stepparents” or “families where there are problems.” I initially wondered whether these new entreaties emanated from a small minority or from a more substantial cross‐section of the school population. Several well‐received book talks concerning the impact of divorce and a few discreet inquiries regarding the number of single‐parent families at my school convinced me that a general need existed.

Within the context of recent post-localism developments in the English local government, this paper aims to show, first, how management controls have become more enabling in response to changes in rules of public sector corporate governance and, secondly, how changes in management control systems gave rise to new corporate governance practices.

Theoretically, the paper mobilises the concept of enabling control to reflect on contemporary changes in public sector corporate governance. It draws on the International Federation of Accountants’ (IFAC) and Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy’s (CIPFA) new public sector governance and management control system model and data gathered from a longitudinal qualitative field study of a local authority in North East England. The field study used interviews, observation and documentation review.

This paper suggests specific ways in which the decentralisation of policymaking and performance measurement in a local authority (present case) gave rise to enabling corporate governance and how corporate governance and management control practices went some way to aid in the pursuit of the public interest. In particular, it shows that the management control system can be designed at the operational level to be enabling. The significance of global transparency for supporting corporate governance practices around public interest is observed. This paper reaffirms that accountability is but one element of public sector corporate governance. Rather, public sector corporate governance also pursues integrity, openness, defining outcomes, determining interventions, leadership and capacity and risk and performance management.

Insights into uses of such enabling practices in public sector corporate governance are relevant for many countries in which public sector funding has been cut, especially since the 2007/2008 global financial crisis.

This paper introduces the concept of enabling control into the public sector corporate governance and control debate by fleshing out the categories of public sector corporate governance and management control suggested recently by IFAC and CIPFA drawing on observed practices of a local government entity.

This chapter addresses a five-year phase of protest activity set in motion by fathers’ rights and shared parenting groups’ resistance to the Federal Child Support Guidelines, which were incorporated into Canada’s Divorce Act in 1997. Drawing upon Department of Justice discourses, parliamentary hearings and debates, and advocacy websites it examines the dynamics and outcomes of the protest cycle. It argues that the government’s legislative response signals a failure of fathers’ rights activism in Canada. This failure is a consequence of the collective identity that advocates and their supporters enact and celebrate in various public arenas, the effectiveness of feminist counteraction, and the contingencies of governance in Canada’s left-of-centre advanced liberal democracy.