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NO MAN OF LETTERS has ever more closely identified himself with his country's historical lore and traditions than Sir Walter Scott: as poet and novelist his place in Scottish literature is secure. Abbotsford, the house he transformed into a replica of a medieval Scottish baronial castle, all turrets and gables, weapons and armour, is a national literary shrine. The memoirs of his life and work written by his son‐in‐law, John Gibson Lockhart, are widely acknowledged as a biographical tour de force. All this is well known and needs no emphasizing here. It is therefore all the more strange that the library he built at Abbotsford and the sizeable collection of books he amassed there have received very little attention in recent years. He has rarely been mentioned as one of the great book collectors, yet many of the books and broadsheets to be found in his library are now almost unprocurable elsewhere. A study of an eminent author's library always proves rewarding and the library at Abbotsford is no exception. Indeed, perhaps even more than usual, this particular library reflects the literary interests of its owner. Certainly, Scott's love of books very quickly emerges.

Despite its widespread acceptance and application in the psychology literature, exhaustion, the core dimension of job burnout, has only recently been examined in the domain of public accounting. These studies highlighted the problem of exhaustion within the profession and examined its causes relative to the environment of public accounting. Another factor, not previously addressed in the context of public accounting, is the role personality plays on public accountants’ exhaustion. The current study addressed this void by examining how the personality traits of hardiness, workaholism, neuroticism, and Type-A behavior in public accountants affect exhaustion. The results indicated that public accountants who were high in hardiness experienced significantly less exhaustion. The role stressors of overload and conflict were also significant contributors to public accountants’ exhaustion.

In contrast to common literature that suggests that trade credit is an extremely expensive source of financing with annual interest rates exceeding 40 percent, this paper seeks to argue that the average interest rate of trade credit does not exceed the cost of alternative funds, thereby explaining why trade credit constitutes a substantial part of the optimal financing mix of large, liquid, and capital market listed firms.

Besides providing a formula for estimating a firm's actual trade credit interest rate, this paper is mainly based on a descriptive analysis of trade credit use as well as on survey results of a broad range of prior studies.

The paper finds that highly liquid firms use substantial amounts of trade credit, thus indicating that trade credit use per se cannot be as expensive as literature supposes. In line, estimated average interest rates are about 4 to 6 percent.

By arguing that actual cost of trade credit use is far from being as high as literature supposes, this paper provides important implications for optimal short‐term financing strategies as well as for the assessment of trade credit use in credit worthiness analyses.

In this application brief I share a case study assignment I used in my Leadership in Complex Organizations classes to promote creativity in problem solving. I sorted Ph.D. students into two teams and trained them to use creative writing techniques to encode theory into their own cases. A sense of competition emerged. Later, teams swapped cases for analysis and decoding. The approach became known as “reverse case study.” Summative course evaluations revealed four important instructional themes: (1) students were able to apply and learn leadership and organizational theories, (2) students were able to build rapport and create bonds with fellow students, (3) students explored creativity, and (4) students explored the perspective of “the other.”

Every year thousands of acres are burned and a number of people lose their lives in forest fires that increasingly surpass the wild land limit and lead on to touristic, urban areas. By and large, Mediterranean countries rely highly on offering a tourist product based on sea, sun, culture and nature. While the sea and sun are not affected by fire catastrophes, places of cultural and natural beauty are indeed hit; tourists end up being uninformed with no proper guidance from the firefighting authorities. This paper seeks to address these issues.

This paper attempts to highlight the relation between fire catastrophes and tourism development, to identify if and how state authorities take into account tourists in the planning and management of appropriate measures. A comparative study between Greece and Cyprus is presented. A number of interviews with stakeholders on the policy and operational level were conducted and the results and their implications are presented.

Planning and suppression is complicated with a number of actors involved in various stages; national tourism organizations in both countries do not take part in the information or planning process. There is an emerging need for the provision of useful, comprehensive, practical information aimed at tourists.

The findings of the paper are based in a number of interviews with key policy makers as well as key operational commanders. The participation of the above in the policy making as well as operational phase shows a number of limitations. This paper presents a qualitative approach to the subject. A follow‐up quantitative study is already planned.

Lessons learnt from previous catastrophes, in‐depth analysis of the existing “modus operandi” and “rules of engagement” should provide the necessary background for creating new risk‐based, comprehensive, focused communication campaigns.

Safer societies and lower impact on the environment are the main outcomes of a concerted communication campaign. Tourism represents and multiplies the image of the country as a whole to the world; a solution to the problem would offer added value.

The paper is based on a number of in‐depth interviews with actors that took part in the actual handling of the two major catastrophes in Cyprus and Greece. The outcome of the interviews is presented for the first time.

This paper ranks university faculties, accounting doctoral programs, individual behavioral accounting researchers, and the most influential articles based on Google Scholar citations to publications in Advances in Accounting Behavioral Research (AABR). All articles published in AABR in its first 15 volumes are included and four citation metrics are used. The paper identifies the articles, authors, faculties, and doctoral programs that made the greatest contribution to the development of AABR. Such an analysis provides a useful basis for understanding the direction the journal has taken and how it has contributed to the literature (Meyer & Rigsby, 2001). The h-index and m-index for AABR indicates it compares favorably among its peers. Potential doctoral students with an interest in behavioral accounting research, “new” accounting faculty with an interest in behavioral accounting research, current behavioral accounting research faculty, department chairs, deans, and other administrators will find these results informative.

In the current global economy, the survival of an insurance company depends on its ability to respond to the customer demands. One of the demands of customers is efficient settlement of insurance claims. All insurance companies face the conflicting goals of authenticating claims and settling claims quickly. The use of human adjusters in claim settlement process leaves room for subjective judgment and the use of discretion while finalizing a claim. It has been observed that the opportunity exists for claim adjustors to settle insurance claims in favor of the claimants simply by colluding with the claimant and sacrificing the monetary interest of the insurers. The increasing cost of human experts for authentication (fraud detection) has led many companies to develop technological solutions such as expert systems to assist in the authentication of processed claims.

We have used fuzzy math in combination with the expert systems technology to design this model system.

We develop a fuzzy logic based expert system that can identify and evaluate whether elements of fraud are involved in insurance claims settlement.

We could not obtain real life data from any one of the insurance companies even after various attempts in Canada. Canadian Privacy Legislation does not permit these organizations to share them with any one.

This expert system can help decide if settled claims are genuine or if an element of fraud might exist which needs substantive testing by an auditor. The proposed methodology has been illustrated with an example that tends to model insurance claims in general.

The model designed in this paper is original and carries a substantial value to internal/external auditing professional who has access to these data to train the inference engine.

Managing firms in complex contexts demands high levels of integration. In order to satisfy this increasing need, firms facing competitive environments are extensively investing in IT, namely in ERP systems. As matter of fact, the mere implementation of ERP systems can only support one of the dimensions through which integration is enacted: the information dimension. Other dimensions (cognitive and managerial) have to be reinforced in order to get effective integration. Moving from the proposition of a multidimensional concept of organizational integration, the paper analyses the integrative properties of process based performance measurement systems. It is contended that process based performance measures, on the one hand, make processes visible and relevant to people, so addressing their decisions and actions in an integrative perspective; on the other hand, the same measures drive performance improvement based upon effective integration. The paper is structured in three parts. The first part proposes a multidimensional view of the concept of integration. The second part presents a framework for the design of process based performance measurement systems. The third part discusses the case of a large multinational chemical company that has re‐focused its performance management systems on the process dimension, after the partially successful implementation of a company wide ERP system.