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Aims to contribute to the understanding of the Australian standard‐setting due process. Analyses submissions made on Exposure Draft 49 Accounting for Identifiable Intangible Assets (ED49) as a case study of the strategies employed by lobbyists in their attempt to influence the accounting standard setters. Previous studies on respondents′ submissions have ignored the possibility that, in responding to exposure drafts, lobbyists are provided with a means of persuasion in excess of casting votes. Employs a form of content analysis to study the political process of standard setting. The results suggest that respondents on ED49 attempted to weight their lobby positions with the use of supporting arguments that utilized conceptual and/or economic consequences rationale and presented positions of differing strengths.

The purpose of this paper is to employ a case study of the Omeka content management system to demonstrate how the adoption and implementation of a metadata standard (in this case, Dublin Core) can result in contrasting rhetorical arguments regarding metadata utility, quality, and reliability. In the Omeka example, the author illustrate a conceptual disconnect in how two metadata stakeholders – standards creators and standards users – operationalize metadata quality. For standards creators such as the Dublin Core community, metadata quality involves implementing a standard properly, according to established usage principles; in contrast, for standards users like Omeka, metadata quality involves mere adoption of the standard, with little consideration of proper usage and accompanying principles.

The paper uses an approach based on rhetorical criticism. The paper aims to establish whether Omeka’s given ends (the position that Omeka claims to take regarding Dublin Core) align with Omeka’s guiding ends (Omeka’s actual argument regarding Dublin Core). To make this assessment, the paper examines both textual evidence (what Omeka says) and material-discursive evidence (what Omeka does).

The evidence shows that, while Omeka appears to argue that adopting the Dublin Core is an integral part of Omeka’s mission, the platform’s lack of support for Dublin Core implementation makes an opposing argument. Ultimately, Omeka argues that the appearance of adopting a standard is more important than its careful implementation.

This study contributes to our understanding of how metadata standards are understood and used in practice. The misalignment between Omeka’s position and the goals of the Dublin Core community suggests that Omeka, and some portion of its users, do not value metadata interoperability and aggregation in the same way that the Dublin Core community does. This indicates that, although certain values regarding standards adoption may be pervasive in the metadata community, these values are not equally shared amongst all stakeholders in a digital library ecosystem. The way that standards creators (Dublin Core) understand what it means to “adopt a standard” is different from the way that standards users (Omeka) understand what it means to “adopt a standard.”

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether there are differences in either the level of support for the mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards or the arguments made by various stakeholder groups within Japan’s Business Accounting Council (BAC) during different time periods from 2009 to 2013.

Using a content analysis of related BAC meetings and referring to Gernon and Wallace’s (1995) accounting ecology framework, this study provides rigorous and holistic insights into the debates concerning the adoption of IFRS in Japan. Time-series analyses are specifically applied to unravel continuous or discontinuous patterns of BAC members’ statements.

The results indicated significantly higher levels of disapproval of mandatory adoption of IFRS by representatives from accounting academics, manufacturing industry, and the Financial Services Agency than by those from the Japanese Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Also, a lower level of disapproval of mandatory adoption of IFRS was found in 2009 than in 2012 and 2013. The results further demonstrated that diversity of opinions and arguments existed in different stakeholder groups as well as in different time periods.

The findings of this study suggest that accounting research will be enhanced by an objective and critical examination of the sociological context of the globalization (convergence) process.

The results of this study will provide answers related to the possible, probable, and desirable aspects of the globalization (convergence) process by unraveling the causes and consequences of certain patterns presented in BAC members’ statements.

The purpose of this paper is to critically review the arguments for and against a social clause as an ethical benchmark for international trade.

The paper takes a social economic approach in analysing the case for and against a social clause in international trade. It considers an economic, jurisprudential, social and human rights case for a social clause.

The consideration of a social clause purely in economic terms, removed from its social context fundamentally flaws the arguments on both sides of the debate. The conclusion of south‐south labour agreements, north‐south bilateral free‐trade agreements and regional integration schemes incorporating labour standards has a positive impact on diffusing tension and helping in consensus building around the issue. Labour standards are human rights and to claim comparative advantage in human rights in trade is unethical. There is a need to keep the debate alive especially within the World Trade Organization.

The paper provides an insight into the utility of a social clause in the trade and development agenda for both developed and developing countries.

Given the strength of emotions surrounding the issue, the proposed approach will assist in detoxing the debate and in providing an avenue for vertical and horizontal consensus building on the issue.

In the process of harmonizing International Accounting Standards (IAS/IFRS), scholars and standard setters still need to overcome unresolved issues related to both goodwill duration and accounting recognition. This paper aims to compare the academic background on goodwill with current IAS. Specifically, the goal is to criticize existing practices and advance a revision of accounting for goodwill.

The paper is based on a review of the relevant literature on notions, theories and accounting approaches on goodwill and on an investigation of IAS/IFRS on accounting for goodwill. By critically integrating literature and practices, the authors provide implications for a revision of IAS.

The findings show the two main internally coherent theoretical approaches and the incoherence in current goodwill accounting standards. The paper contributes to the debate on accounting for goodwill by suggesting new conceptual arguments in relation to the controversies related to its accounting treatment.

The findings offer insights and guidelines that can help standard setters revise current accounting standards. Inter alia, standards setters should revisit issues related to goodwill evaluation and record limitations in future debates to find better solutions.

This study shows the incoherence of current accounting standards. Furthermore, the findings contradict the general opinion that, in current IAS, goodwill can be recognized only if acquired in business combinations and not if internally generated. Thereby, the authors suggest to shift the international accounting standards board focus from the preference between amortization and impairment to the coherence of goodwill accounting approaches.

Since the arrival of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 a number of side agreements have also been negotiated that seek further rationalization of the emerging global economy. Prominent among these is the agreement on trade‐related intellectual property rights (TRIPS). Enforcement of the TRIPS agreement would involve the multilateral trade sanctions mechanism of the WTO. By contrast, proponents advocating a parallel international agreement guaranteeing adequate protections for workers – trade‐related international labor standards (TRILS) – have not met with success. This paper examines how traditional justificatory arguments for the property rights might apply to the question of workers’ rights in the international economy. It is found that such arguments apply quite well to the right of access to a “decent living”. It is then investigated how a TRILS agreement administered and enforced by the WTO's disputes settlements mechanism might advance these rights.

This introductory chapter introduces standards and standardisation as concepts of outmost relevance to current educational practice and policy across the world, and frames them historically, empirically, as well as theoretically. Furthermore, it gives an overview of how the book is structured and how it can be seen to contribute to the wider field of research in education. The chapter starts by introducing the concepts before it provides the reader with a background description of the broad discursive landscape of policy developments, as painted by educational policy research. Subsequently it describes how standards and standardisation have been theorised within educational research, and concludes with a presentation of the different contributions.

The purpose of this article is to chronicle the publication events in the 1980s and 1990s that framed the development of the series of controversies in marketing that are known as the “philosophy debates”.

The article uses a participant’s retrospective approach.

The article finds that seven publication events are key to understanding marketing’s philosophy debates. The seven are the publication of the “little green book” by Grid, Inc. in 1976; the philosophy of science panel discussion held at the Winter American Marketing Association Educators’ Conference in 1982; the special issue of the Journal of Marketing on marketing theory in 1983; three articles on the “critical relativist perspective” by the Journal of Consumer Research in 1986 and 1988; the “blue book” by South-Western in 1991; a trilogy of articles on truth, positivism and objectivity in the Journal of Marketing and the Journal of Consumer Research in 1990-1993; and an article on “rethinking marketing” in the European Journal of Marketing in 1994.

Chronicling the key publication events enables readers to understand what the debates were about and provides readers a starting point for further investigating the issues in the debates.

Despite the existence of a variety of approaches to the understanding of behavioral and managerial ethics in organizations and business relationships generally, knowledge of organizing systems for fidelity remains in its infancy. We use halakha, or Jewish law, as a model, together with the literature in sociology, economic anthropology, and economics on what it termed “middleman minorities,” and on what we have termed the Landa Problem, the problem of identifying a trustworthy economic exchange partner, to explore this issue.

The article contrasts the differing explanations for trustworthy behavior in these literatures, focusing on the widely referenced work of Avner Greif on the Jewish Maghribi merchants of the eleventh century. We challenge Greif’s argument that cheating among the Magribi was managed chiefly via a rational, self-interested reputational sanctioning system in the closed group of traders. Greif largely ignores a more compelling if potentially complementary argument, which we believe also finds support among the documentary evidence of the Cairo Geniza as reported by Goitein: that the behavior of the Maghribi reflected their deep beliefs and commitment to Jewish law, halakha.

Applying insights from this analysis, we present an explicit theory of heroic marginality, the production of extreme precautionary behaviors to ensure service to the principal.

Generalizing from the case of halakha, the article proposes the construct of a deep code, identifying five defining characteristics of such a code, and suggests that deep codes may act as facilitators of compliance. We also offer speculation on design features employing deep codes that may increase the likelihood of production of behaviors consistent with terminal values of the community.