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The paper seeks to identify the factors that are responsible for the incursion of non‐professionals, otherwise called quacks, into property management practice in Nigeria.

Primary data were collected with the aid of questionnaires served on 270 estate surveying firms based in the study area. The proportion method was used to determine the factors that are significantly responsible for the daily incursion of non‐professionals whose activities have negatively affected real estate investment in the country.

The result shows that the high income derivable from property management practice is a major factor. Other factors in their perceived order of importance include provision of unsatisfactory and less than standard service by estate surveyors, lack of confidence by clients on the estate surveyor to evict erring tenants and shortage of qualified personnel.

Obtaining the perception of practitioners could subject the findings of the study to bias. Further research targeted at the clients of property management services will provide a balanced view.

The findings from this study will provide professional bodies and policy makers with data to curb the activities of quacks and enhance the practice of real estate management.

This paper aims to explore internationalisation strategies of service firms in sectors where markets become increasingly globalised while resource environments still remain distinctively shaped by national institutions.

A theoretical framework is proposed that suggests that the more firms expand their business activities across borders by building up offices abroad or merging with firms from other countries, the more likely they are to embrace recombinant strategies to blend elements of different societal legacies. Subsequently, a comparative case study of internationalisation strategies, governance modes and organisational forms of European and US law firms is presented to illustrate the value of the framework, followed by the analysis of a novel data set on multi‐jurisdictional qualifications of partners in these international law firms.

By virtue of their integrative organisational model and mobilisation of versatile legal competences, large pan‐European law firms are challenging the dominance of US law firms in international legal markets, while the latter in response are revising their own previous export‐oriented internationalisation strategy.

The present study provides a starting point for further research on internationalisation in service industries.

The framework is useful to expand effect societal analysis to dynamic international environments.

The purpose of this paper is to test and extend a conceptual model of risk assessment in bank lending to SMEs using five German and five UK bank case studies. Derived from research in Germany and the UK, the model postulates that factors in the external, operating and internal environments of individual banks can influence credit-risk assessment decisions.

The empirical data for this paper was collected during face-to-face interviews with five UK lending bankers in June 2006 and five German bankers in February 2007. The timing is important, as these were unaffected by credit-crunch considerations. The sample banks were similar in size and operating in the retail environment in their respective countries. The interviewees comprised lending officers and managers in loan departments. All interviews were conducted using a questionnaire format designed to elicit a commentary on the loan process in a reasonably unstructured way.

Notable differences emerged from these findings compared to the scene painted by existing research. The findings argue that changes in the law and banking regulations have reshaped both German and UK banking institutions. German bank employees are facing ever-increasing pressure as their employers strive to become efficient, streamlined banks with a high orientation towards their shareholders in a highly competitive market. This has a consequence for the emphasis placed on local and community factors. These findings further argue that German banks have moved their value orientations towards the British banking model to simulate the high returns achieved by British banks. German banking culture and state values are deeply embedded into the societal structure (Llewellyn, 2002; Lane and Quack, 2001). The deregulation of German banks has manifested in an adjustment of institutional behaviour, steering towards a shareholder orientation. However, even whilst German banks readjust their strategies, they continue to struggle to “shake off” their original roots and a cultural identity of stakeholder orientation.

This study provides a historical context for the recent developments in public sector reporting and accountability in the financial banking sector in both the United Kingdom and Germany. The paper provided an insight into the determination and interpretation of European regulations.

For several years Education & Training has spear‐headed a drive to secure legislation to outlaw the sale of bogus degrees. We have pressed for this for three major reasons, namely:

The purpose of this paper is to add to the literature on accounting change in explaining a decade-long effort by the FASB and IASB to develop a set of global accounting standards accepted by markets worldwide. This research studies the effort as one of “convergence” in accounting standards and aims to bring theoretical and empirical clarity as to how we can conceptualize the notion of convergence.

Through a longitudinal study of 23 key FASB-IASB projects undertaken between 2002 and 2011, this paper analyzes processes of accounting change using a blend of institutional theory and political economy. A process perspective provides a method to unfold variants of accounting change by identifying patterns that help us to understand the conditions for and characteristics of convergence.

The author highlights specific variants of accounting change observed during the convergence effort – direct emulation, difference reduction and progressive redesign – as analogous to institutional processes. Where direct emulation and difference reduction reflect institutional processes of imitation and editing or translation, respectively, the author shows how progressive redesign of accounting standards goes beyond these classical categorizations to encompass the notion of “institutional co-construction” (Djelic, 2008).

A longer (shorter) period of study and a greater (lesser) number of projects could be argued for a more comprehensive (more detailed) study; however, limiting the period and project to the terms of the formal convergence program allows for forces driving this particular process to be isolated and their effects extrapolated to broader thinking on accounting and global regulation.

This research informs the global standard-setting community of the evolution of convergence and the factors which impact that evolution by revealing the influence of various institutions, actors and events over time. In particular, the author identifies the impact of the competitive and cooperative conditions under which the FASB-IASB convergence effort operated and reveal how these conditions were influenced by the macro-level economic and political developments occurring over the period.

No one estimated the number of ‘medicine men’ who posed as doctors of medicine during the frontier era of 1870 to 1910. Nor could one even hazard a guess at the number of deaths caused by quack physicians during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Meanwhile, we face a return of the snake oil men with all its attendant threats to life and limb. That this is possible stems from the mushrooming of bogus degree mill operators.

This paper critically examines the state of tribal health in India by analyzing the accessibility and availability of traditional medicine and modern healthcare.

This essay is the product of an extensive review of the literature and authors' personal experience in working with the tribal communities.

The traditional medicinal practices once very prevalent among the tribal communities are diminishing due to various socio-economic, environmental and political factors. Modern healthcare in India's tribal region is characterized by a lack of availability, accessibility and affordability. As a result of the diminishing traditional practices and inaccessible modern healthcare provisions, tribal communities depend on quacks and magico-religious practices.

This essay advocates for urgent policy interventions to integrate traditional medicine and modern healthcare practices to address critical tribal health issues. Preservation of traditional medicinal knowledge-base and improving research in the field have the potential to address the health of tribal communities and of others. The accessibility and availability of modern healthcare facilities in tribal regions should be improved to ensure better health outcomes.

This paper examines the effects of non-professionals' involvements in real estate service provision on real estate agency practice in Ibadan Nigeria, in order to provide information that could enhance real estate agency practice in the country.

Data were gathered through questionnaire administration on a total sample of 232 respondents comprising 82 estate surveyors and valuers, 100 non-professional estate agents and 25 real estate agency service consumers each from the respective clients of the two groups. A respondent-driven sampling (RDS) technique was adopted for data collection and was particularly useful in accessing non-professionals with characteristically less identifiable organizational structure. Data were analysed using mean scores on a Likert type scale while Spearman rank correlation was used to compare and establish if significant differences exist between the perceptions of clients of professionals and non-professionals on the services provided.

This study revealed that while the involvement of non-professionals in real estate agency practice deprives professionals of opportunities for legitimate earnings and is attributed to incidences of fraudulent transactions in the market, non-professionals often also serve as facilitators of transactions for the professionals. Hence, there seems to be a symbiotic relationship between the two groups and also a tacit validation of the involvement of the former by the latter.

This work contributes to and extends the body of knowledge on non-professionals' involvement in real estate professional practice by providing insights into the effects of activities of individuals who are not members of the real estate profession on real estate agency professional practice, particularly in the context of an emergent and less transparent market.

It is difficult in these days of proliferating training and consultancy systems to decide what are the distinguishing features of the respective practitioners. Coverdale ‘training’ has been coming in for its share of interpretation and evaluation, some complimentary, some snide—the former, we like to think, from those who use it, the detractors from amongst would‐be competitors. We are doers rather than writers and seldom go into print on our own behalf, so it might be useful for a member of the organisation to outline what he sees as the dominant characteristics that give Coverdale its particular quality. I will not claim uniqueness in such an active field, and there are a flattering number of imitators to contest any such claim. We sometimes come across people who think we dispense some kind of black magic! Perhaps I may go some way to dispelling the two extreme reactions to our approach—that it is some magical star‐dust, a miraculous laying‐on of hands for ailing enterprises, or that it is a cart‐load of quack remedies hawked by some mountebank circus.

At a recent meeting of the Manchester section of the Society of Chemical Industry, Professor F. Gowland Hopkins, in an interesting paper entitled “Some Chemical Qualities of the Living Cell,” referred to the important part which vitamins play in foods, and to the dangers arising from the continual ingestion of chemical preservatives in foods. Professor Gowland Hopkins observed that the conception of a vitamin had certain encrustations about it which prevented everybody accepting what were really said to be very important scientific facts. He had not attempted to define a vitamin. In an adult community, under good economic conditions, the need for something other than a supply of energy did not seem to assert itself, because the vitamins were always present in all natural foods. Special circumstances were required to make their importance obvious, or they would have been discovered many years ago instead of in the past ten years or so. Being connected with the subject of diet they naturally attracted the attention of quacks, and therefore a good deal of nonsense had been written about them; while, on the other hand, it was equally true what was written about vitamins gave a great opportunity for trade stunts. Vitamins had not yet been isolated, so that their chemical composition was unknown. What he wished to urge was that the facts known about vitamins were important. You may feed an animal upon a diet consisting of the most excellent protein and really superior fat and best carbohydrate in the market, and supply it with the necessary salts in the right ratio. So long as those materials were pure and not mixed with traces of any other ingredients the dietary would be eaten, enjoyed, fully digested, thoroughly broken down in the body and its energy extracted, and yet any animal continuing to eat it would inevitably die. In order to convert that dietary into a perfect one for the maintenance of life materials must be added which acted in almost infinitesimal concentration within the cellular structure of the living organism. The only present definition of a vitamin of a definite constitution was that it was a substance of extreme nutritive importance which acted in infinitesimal concentration. In the case of Fat Soluble Vitamin A. 0·004 mgms added to a synthetic dietary made just the dilference between certain death and excellent life in the case of a rat weighing 100 grms. They must not despise the rat; it was, in all essentials, of the same physical constitution as human beings. In the case of a 70 kgm man 2½ mgs would be required to bridge the difference between health and death. Only under exceptional circumstances, such as a state of war, did the lack of vitamins intrude itself in respect of adults, but the feeding of infants must be placed in a different category.