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“After creating a market for his “new to the world” product and a significant partnership with the German-based SAP, Sridhar Tayur had an opportunity to take the partnership with SAP to another level by establishing a reseller arrangement, available to only a dozen or so of SAP's elite partners—widely considered in the enterprise software industry as a dream come true for technology entrepreneurs.

Suitable for use in MBA, EMBA, and GEMBA programs, this case offers the opportunity to focus decision making on several key marketing and sales issues. Should Tayur sign a deal with SAP, thereby handing significant control of the messaging and positioning of SmartOps to a global giant? How reliant on SAP did he really want to get? Would signing the deal make losing control of his company more likely and alienate prospects who were not fans of SAP? What would not doing the deal mean for the relationship with SAP? Would SAP go down the reseller route with a competitor? What exactly was a good reseller contract, and was it possible for a company as small as SmartOps to make the agreement a win-win?”

This paper employs a qualitative approach to assess the impact which the “liberalisation” of the Greek auditing profession in 1992 may have had on auditor behaviour. The “liberalisation” was introduced by legislation and was the result of a long and intense intra‐professional conflict between a group of indigenous auditors and international accounting firms. Overall, the paper illuminates the deeply political and self‐interested nature of the Greek auditing profession and its socially constructed and contextually dependent character. The results also indicate that following the “liberalisation”, auditors gave significantly less emphasis to functions relating to: being independent; publicly communicating audit findings; protecting the interests of external stakeholders, and presenting “true and fair” financial statements. In contrast, auditors placed significantly more emphasis on providing management advisory services to audit clients. The significant changes in auditor behaviour are linked to the economic dependence of auditors on audited companies which resulted from the audit reform. These findings appear to question the received wisdom underpinning the internationally prevalent move towards privatisation and deregulation of statutory audit services. Finally, the paper has important methodological implications as it demonstrates the limitations of quantitative techniques vis‐à‐vis qualitative approaches to accounting research in politically charged contexts.

This paper aims to examine the design and use of scenarios in planning and management control processes.

The study is based on an exploratory case-study approach. Qualitative data have been collected between 2008 and 2011 from three energy companies operating in Italy.

The paper sheds light on three styles of designing and using scenarios. In the first (called “reactive”), scenarios provide a means for corporate actors to analyse past performance in the light of future expected performance. In the second (“proactive”), scenarios contribute to envision different future states of the world. In the third (“disciplined”), scenarios contribute to develop plausible, if not accurate, narratives about future outcomes.

The study is comparative and exploratory. Possible areas for further work based on in-depth studies of scenarios within planning and control processes are identified.

The comparative analysis of the case-study material has implications for the ways in which flexible forms of management control can be mobilised by managers as a resource of action. It is shown that choices around the design and use of scenarios can mitigate some concerns with traditional planning and management control processes focused on the achievement of a single set of targets, but also raise new ones.

The paper sheds light on a scenario-based approach – called “disciplined flexibility” – that avoids the restrictive nature of budgetary controls without losing the benefits of setting a plan and a target for the future. The paper outlines elements that may support the use of “disciplined flexibility”, but also its potential limitations.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the efficacy of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Xplore digital library search engine to return relevant materials on information visualization pedagogy literature and to recommend search strategies to assist the digital library academic readership improve the efficacy of their search tasks. Furthermore, the results are of interest to general readers using similar digital repositories.

An initial scoping review using EBSCO Discovery services returned the number and accessibility of sources and publications-based various Boolean searches. A revised search strategy focused the search to IEEE publications as the primary source of visualization research. A corpus of keywords were extracted from the 44 relevant articles and analyzed for relevance, keyword trends and contexts of use.

Keyword analysis results show visualization education research is confounded by several information retrieval issues: relevancy, incomplete taxonomy, non-standard lexicon, diverse disciplines and under-representation. Recommendations include: search strategies, alternative digital collections, a potential opportunity for research in information visualization pedagogy to address this gap in an emerging field and the need for more effective interactive tools to assist with keyword selection.

The study focused on the IEEE publications as the primary source of visualization research.

A repository of visualization education research that is easily findable and relevant benefits both faculty using information visualization in their teaching and academics whose work must be disseminated to the broadest audience. Strategic keyword selection, interactive keyword tools or more robust thesaurus will enable IEEE Xplore digital library users to optimize their interaction with the system. Furthermore, results suggest a need for more research in information visualization pedagogy.

This is the only study to uniquely assess the efficacy of the IEEE Xplore digital library database system to retrieve relevant visualization education literature based on keyword search.