Search results

The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the discussion surrounding the definition of accounting proposed by Carnegie et al. (2021a, 2021b) and further elaborated by Carnegie et al. (2023) from/under an institutionalist political-economy (IPE) based foundation and to specifically extend this approach to the arena of social and environmental accounting (SEA).

By adopting an IPE approach to SEA, this study offers a critique of the use of the notion of capital to refer to nature and people in SEA frameworks and standards.

A SEA framework based on the capabilities approach is proposed based on the concepts of human capabilities and global commons for the purpose of preserving the commons and enabling the flourishing of present and future generations.

The proposed framework allows the engagement of accounting community, in particular SEA researchers, with and contribution to such well-established initiatives as the Planetary Boundaries framework and the human development reports initiative of the United Nations Development Programme.

Based on the capability approach, this study applies Carnegie et al.’s (2023) framework to SEA. This new approach more attuned to the pursuit of sustainable human development and the sustainable development goals, may contribute to turning accounting into a major positive force through its impacts on the world, expressly upon organisations, people and nature.

Background: Hyperglycemia in pregnancy (HIP) is a common medical complication during pregnancy and is associated with several short and long-term maternal-fetal consequences. We aimed to determine the prevalence and factors associated with HIP among Ugandan women.

Methods: We consecutively enrolled eligible pregnant women attending antenatal care at Kawempe National Referral Hospital, Kampala, Uganda in September 2020. Mothers known to be living with diabetes mellitus or haemoglobinopathies and those with anemia (hemoglobin <11g/dl) were excluded. Random blood sugar (RBS) and glycated hemoglobin A1c (HbA_1c) were measured on peripheral venous blood samples. HIP was defined as an HbA1c ≥5.7% with its subsets of diabetes in pregnancy (DIP) and prediabetes defined as HbA1c_1c of ≥6.5% and 5.7–6.4% respectively. ROC curve analysis was performed to determine the optimum cutoff of RBS to screen for HIP.

Results: A total of 224 mothers with a mean (±SD) age 26±5 years were enrolled, most of whom were in the 2^nd or 3^rd trimester (94.6%, n=212) with a mean gestation age of 26.6±7.3 weeks. Prevalence of HIP was 11.2% (n=25) (95% CI: 7.7–16.0). Among the mothers with HIP, 2.2% (n=5) had DIP and 8.9% (n=20) prediabetes. Patients with HIP were older (28 years vs. 26 years, p=0.027), had previous tuberculosis (TB) contact (24% vs. 6.5%, p=0.003) and had a bigger hip circumference (107.8 (±10.4) vs. 103.3 (±9.7) cm, p=0.032). However only previous TB contact was predictive of HIP (odds ratio: 4.4, 95% CI: 1.2–14.0; p=0.022). Using HbA_1c as a reference variable, we derived an optimum RBS cutoff of 4.75 mmol/L as predictive of HIP with a sensitivity and specificity of 90.7% and 56.4% (area under the curve=0.75 (95% CI: 0.70–0.80, p<0.001)), respectively.

Conclusions: HIP is common among young Ugandan women, the majority of whom are without identifiable risk factors.

This study answers the call for research and theorising exploring ethical communication and brand risk from the African continent. The study's purpose was to identify the challenges that strategic communication practitioners face in enacting ethical crisis communication in South Africa.

The researchers conducted ten in-depth interviews with South African strategic communication professionals.

The dominant theme emerging from the study is the marginalisation and exclusion of the communication function in decision-making during crisis situations. Communicators were viewed as implementers, technicians and not strategic counsel. The protection of organisational reputation was done at the expense of the ethics and moral conscience of practitioners. Practitioners were viewed and deployed as spin doctors and tools to face unwanted media interactions.

The article sheds light on the concepts of ethical communication and decision-making in a multicultural African context using the moral theory of Ubuntu and strategic communication. It demonstrates the tension professionals experience as they toggle between unethical capitalist approaches and African values. The practitioner's role as organisational moral conscience is hindered, suppressed and undermined by organisational leadership's directives to use opaque, complex communication, selective transparency and misrepresentation of facts.

The goal of this study is to explore the role leadership play by Singapore’s government in the handling of the Covid-19 crisis and to suggest recommendations around the leadership dynamics in solving similar challenges experienced by businesses, organizations and societies.

This review was conducted using a case study and a desk review, a systematic review as well as a narrative method where physical books, web searches, online platforms, patterns in related occurrences and related literature were used to support the study. The review was anchored on the contingency approach and the stakeholder theory. Two hypotheses were developed and tested using qualitative comparative analysis. The study finding showed that the Singapore government used an all-inclusive functional leadership approach in curtailing the effect of the pandemic on Singaporeans. The study recommends that in decision-making, being proactive and timely is critical, and developing more conceivable and holistic crisis response plans through an integrated orientation is paramount to the successful achievement of a goal.

Despite some flaws, it was found that the Singaporean government had conveniently used a contingency leadership approach through an all-inclusive functional leadership to mitigate the effect of Covid-19 through the use of social media, messaging apps and effective communication, effective pandemic control techniques, albeit in a proactive manner. As a result, Singapore's mortality rate was relatively lower than that of other nations that were adversely affected by the epidemic, earning them a prime position in the crisis response. The study, therefore, contends that their proactive response to containing the pandemic can be used as a model for people, businesses, the political system and society to lessen incidents of a similar nature in the future.

Policymakers, scholars and frontline workers may have sufficient reason to devote time to developing a more viable, comprehensive crisis response plan by pursuing an integrated learning strategy, through the use of contingency approaches and drawing on past experiences in dealing with global health emergencies. Apart from this, Singapore’s experience will serve as a lesson for the management of businesses and leaders of societies to take proactive steps in dealing with challenges as soon as they arise.

This review showed that contingency is a reality faced by every society and organization and people’s collective responsibility is a necessity during such time. Therefore, when an organization/institution is in a familiar situation, policymakers, academics and business management/leaders need to be proactive and also reflect on past experiences to deal with current and future mistakes in the course of daily operations in an organization/society.