Search results

Accounting history has tended to ignore the accounting research enterprise, focusing instead on particular episodes or periods, such as histories of standards setting or histories of the accounting profession. In effect, methodological and theoretical differences within the accounting research discipline have so profoundly divided the discipline that researchers working in one area are relatively unable or unwilling to understand the key issues in other areas. This chapter seeks to shed some light on the greatest divide in accounting research: the divide between positive and critical accounting research. This chapter argues that both positive and critical accounting research can trace their origins to certain key figures who were doctoral students at the University of Chicago in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The chapter employs Foucault’s concept of genealogy to examine the origins of the positivist and critical paradigms in accounting research.

This chapter presents and discusses various steps to ensure empirical reliability and theoretical validity in the construction of competence scales in graduate surveys. The development of a scale to assess demands of the teacher profession and related abilities in graduates for a German tracer study project serves as an example. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), principal component analysis (PCA) and Cronbach’s coefficient alpha are employed to test the reliability of the scale. Differing results illustrate how the method applied influences decisions in the process of developing a scale. Our findings show that multidimensionality can only be tested appropriately by CFA; PCA renders no feasible or similar results to CFA depending on the predetermination of the number of factors; Cronbach’s alpha produces misleading results as the prerequisite assumption of unidimensionality is violated by the data.

This paper explores the relationship between social movement protest, economic sabotage, state capitalism, the “Green Scare,” and public forms of political repression. Through a quantitative analysis of direct action activism highlighting the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front, the discourse surrounding mechanisms of social change and their impact on state power and capitalist accumulation will be examined. The analyses examines the earth and animal liberation movements, utilizing a Marxist-anarchist lens to illustrate how these non-state actors provide powerful critiques of capital and the state. Specifically, the discussion examines how state-sanctioned violence against these movements represents a return to Foucauldian Monarchical power. A quantitative-qualitative history will be used to argue that the movements’ actions fail to qualify as “terrorism,” and to examine the performance of power between the radical left and the state. State repression demonstrates not only the capitalist allegiances between government and industry, but also a sense of capital’s desperation hoping to counter a movement that has produced demonstrable victories by the means of bankrupting and isolating corporations. The government is taking such unconstitutional measures as a “talk back” between the revolutionary potential of these movements’ ideology as well as the challenge they present to state capitalism.

Welfare policies for persons with disabilities have been strongly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and this introductory chapter provides the theoretical background to the book. Definition, data and main European policies about disabilities are outlined. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) is the key pillar of disability policies in European countries. In line with a Disability Studies perspective, COVID-19 health surveillance regime has been a challenge in the implementation process of the UNCRPD, highlighting the role of lay knowledge and community of practices in managing everyday challenges for persons with disabilities and their families, and therefore their potential role in becoming part of epistemic communities to support the policy making and implementation process of the UNCRPD.

In the era of financial capitalism, how to manage and hold global corporations accountable has become too multifarious a topic for a solitary focus of one theme, to sufficiently outline the whole gamut and implications of their activities. Capitalism is characterized by several well-organized antinomies and contrasts, with reflections of critical dualities that bear a resemblance to the primeval paradoxes of Hellenic philosophy. The challenge of governance of capitalism to be effectual entails breaking out of the entrenched precincts of habitual academic silos. Various standpoints while reasonably informative falls short to explain fully the complex interlinkages between the concept of global governance and the state’s capacity to put into effect its will on corporate power.

Spotlighting on assessing the praxis of political economy at global and national level and the corporate reality, this chapter aims to provide a renewed thrust for the focused recalibration of global regulatory regime. In this chapter, the inquiries take the regulation as the main explanandum for elucidation of the shifting governance framework.