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This paper aims to use a data-driven approach to identify the factors and metrics that provide the best indicators of academic attrition in the Korean language program at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center.

This research develops logistic regression models to aid in the identification of at-risk students in the Defense Language Institute’s Korean language school.

The results from this research demonstrates that this methodology can detect significant factors and metrics that identify students at-risk. Additionally, this research shows that school policy changes can be detected using logistic regression models and stepwise regression.

This research represents a real-world application of logistic regression modeling methods applied to the problem of identifying at-risk students for the purpose of academic intervention or other negative outcomes. By using logistic regression, the authors are able to gain a greater understanding of the problem and identify statistically significant predictors of student attrition that they believe can be converted into meaningful policy change.

The visualization of ranking information in global public policy is moving away from traditional “league table” formats and toward dashboards and interactive data displays. This paper explores the rhetoric underpinning the visualization of ranking information in such interactive formats, the purpose of which is to encourage country participation in reporting on the Sustainable Development Goals. The paper unpacks the strategies that the visualization experts adopt in the measurement of global poverty and wellbeing, focusing on a variety of interactive ranking visualizations produced by the OECD, the World Bank, the Gates Foundation and the ‘Our World in Data’ group at the University of Oxford. Building on visual and discourse analysis, the study details how the politically and ethically sensitive nature of global public policy, coupled with the pressures for “decolonizing” development, influence how rankings are visualized. The study makes two contributions to the literature on rankings. First, it details the move away from league table formats toward multivocal interactive layouts that seek to mitigate the competitive and potentially dysfunctional pressures of the display of “winners and losers.” Second, it theorizes ranking visualizations in global public policy as “alignment devices” that entice country buy-in and seek to align actors around common global agendas.

This paper aims at exploring the historical roots of ideals-based accountability (IBA) in a family business of the past. It examines the narrative accounts of the history of an Italian long-lived family business written by one of its latest business owners to determine how and to what extent it was used to discharge a more ethical form of accountability.

An extensive thematic analysis informed on the conceptual framework of IBA is conducted on the unpublished manuscript by Angelo Barovier, the oldest leader of the Barovier’s family business.

The retrospective narrative served the family owner as a means for IBA, unveiling to the present and future generations of family owners the values and ideals that had motivated the ancestors to sustain the family business throughout the centuries despite the financial performance or the adversities.

This paper reveals the historical roots of IBA as grounded in family business historical narratives. It contributes to management and family business history by showing the historical relevance of ideals and values for the development and sustainment of a family business.

This study opens to a larger application of IBA also in contemporary businesses, as a tool to foster and disseminate a more ethical form of accountability and to a further extent support the construction of a more ethical society.

This paper connects the newly developed IBA framework, conceived for family businesses, to a management history perspective showing its potential for the intergenerational transmission of business culture.

In academia, assessment is often narrow in its focus on research productivity, its application of a limited number of standardised metrics and its summative approach aimed at selection. This approach, corresponding to an exclusive, subject-oriented concept of talent management, can be thought of as at odds with a broader view of the role of academic institutions as accelerating and improving science and scholarship and its societal impact. In recent years, open science practices as well as research integrity issues have increased awareness of the need for a more inclusive approach to assessment and talent management in academia, broadening assessment to reward the full spectrum of academic activities and, within that spectrum, deepening assessment by critically reflecting on the processes and indicators involved (both qualitative and quantitative). In terms of talent management, this would mean a move from research-focused assessment to assessment including all academic activities (including education, professional performance and leadership), a shift from focus on the individual to a focus on collaboration in teams (recognising contributions of both academic and support staff), increased attention for formative assessment and greater agency for those being evaluated, as well as around the data, tools and platforms used in assessment. Together, this represents a more inclusive, subject-oriented approach to talent management. Implementation of such changes requires involvement from university management, human resource management and academic and support staff at all career levels, and universities would benefit from participation in mutual learning initiatives currently taking shape in various regions of the world.

This paper aims to better understand how accountability for sustainability takes shape within organisations and specifically, what makes employees act in a Swedish local authority. This aim moves beyond the prevalent external face of accountability in social and environmental accounting research by observing how employees understand and act upon their multiple accountability demands.

This paper adopts a single case study approach within a Swedish local authority, drawing from qualitative data including semi-structured interviews, site visits and governing documents.

Sustainable action is not only the product of hierarchically enforced structural accountabilities and procedures but often must be reconciled with the personal perspectives of the public sector employees involved as part of an accountability dynamic. Additionally, the findings reveal that hierarchical accountability, rather than serving to individualise and isolate employees, acts as a prompt for the more practical and personal reconciliations of accountability with the ethics and experiences of the individual involved.

Greater consideration to employee socialisation processes in public sector organisations should be given to reinforce organisational governance systems and controls, and thus help ensure sustainable behaviour in practice.

Employee socialisation processes are important for the development of sustainable practices both within and beyond organisational boundaries.

This study considers the interrelatedness of hierarchical and socialising accountability measures and contributes towards the understanding of the relationship between these two accountability forms, contrary to previous understandings that emphasise their contrasting nature and incompatibility.

Motivated to know more about the internal means through which accountability for sustainability takes shape within organisations (in what ways and by whom), this paper aims to explore how accountability for sustainability is constructed within an organisation during a process of establishing a control system for sustainability.

This paper adopts a qualitative case study approach of a decentralised industrial group, operating mainly in Scandinavia, between 2017 and 2020. Both primary and secondary data are used (e.g. document analyses, semi-structured interviews, informal conversations and site visits) to inform the findings and analysis.

The findings reveal a multi-faceted path towards accountability for sustainability that involves several concerns and priorities at organisational and individual levels, resulting in a separate sustainability control systems within each subsidiary company. Although hierarchical structures for accountability exist, socialising accountability activities are needed to (further) mobilise sustainable accounts.

Successful sustainable control systems require employees making sense of formalised accountability instruments (e.g. policies and procedures) to establish their roles and responsibilities in organisations.

This paper proposes socialisation processes as important for driving forward sustainability solutions.

This study elaborates on the internal accountability dynamic for the construction of sustainable accounts. Its novelty is built upon the interaction of hierarchical and socialising accountability forms as necessary for establishing a control system for sustainability. It furthermore illustrates the relationship between the external and internal pathways of accountability.