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The purpose of this paper is to discuss how the superhero genre, when couched in a space and project that seek to act as a counter-world and is rooted in the life experiences of youth, can allow Latinx elementary school students the opportunity to create counter-stories. Such stories facilitated the process of creating “critical hope” in relation to oppressive political discourses.

This is a qualitative study conducted at an afterschool club in the Western USA. Using the superhero genre, elementary school students, grades third-fifth, participated in a project in which they created superhero and villain narratives set in their community.

The authors found that the superhero genre supported some Latinx students to develop counter-stories that engaged with and resisted the heightened xenophobic and racist discourse appropriated by then US presidential candidate Donald Trump in the context of the 2016 presidential campaign. These counter-stories allowed youth to engage in critical hope to imagine a better, more just world.

In a time when young Latinx students are continually subjected to racism and xenophobia promoted by political figures and taken up by popular media and the general public, it is necessary to support students in creating counter-stories and critical hope that push back against oppression. Findings suggest that the superhero genre can support Latinx students to discuss, dismantle and counter hateful discourses while striving for hope.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the implementation of a storytelling teaching method in a company law course for accounting students and to evaluate its influence on engagement and effective learning.

The learning activity, known as “corporate villains”, is based on theories of storytelling and engagement. Selected qualitative and quantitative data from university course and teaching evaluation surveys were used to assess the achievement of objectives and identify learning outcomes.

The corporate villains learning activity engaged students at the beginning of the lecture and influenced student learning by demonstrating the relevance, or “real life” application, of company law to accounting students. Corporate villains also stimulated curiosity in learning more about the law which is characteristic of students pursuing a deep approach to learning.

The study extends the research on storytelling in accounting and legal education and supports empirical evidence as to the positive impact of storytelling on student engagement in learning. In particular, the study reveals the potential for corporate villains to address various academic and student concerns about company law by humanising the law and enabling students to connect the legal concepts to the story and to the curriculum.

The paper aims to examine the jeopardy of the bank in performing its varied functions to customers, the public and regulatory authorities. The bank’s overriding mandate is accepting deposits from its customer and to make payments as and when requested. However, banks also perform investment undertakings and other related functions. Banks have been applauded for facilitating the fight against crimes such as money laundering and financing of terrorism but they are times when they have also been vilified for not doing enough to prevent the foregoing crimes. There is evidence that banks have sometimes been exploited to facilitate commission of crimes either wilfully or recklessly. In this regard, banks which do not do enough to prevent commission of crimes have been perceived as either delinquents or villains for allowing themselves to be exploited for those inclined at committing money laundering and its predicate offences. The paper explores the varied situations in which banks have been caught up in both of these foregoing situations. They have done a plausible job in safeguarding the public and prevention of money laundering and terrorism offences. They have also been perceived as villains by allowing themselves to be exploited by criminals in perpetuating the foregoing offences. In both of the foregoing extremes, public opinion has been divided – there are those who support that banks do a good job and those who brand banks as villains. Those empathising with banks argue that by requiring banks to report suspected money laundering activities creates unfriendly business environment and hostilities in a particular bank. Apparently, this school of thought posits that over-regulation of banks potentially generates a hostile business environment and scares off potential business clients not to mention generating an anti-business climate in a particular bank. To them, banks should do just banking without being encumbered to provide overarching oversight responsibilities such as fighting money laundering and terrorism. The work of preventing crimes should be responsibility of oversight institutions and authorities, and banks should not be involved in executing of the foregoing responsibilities. As such, banks have been reduced to act as policemen. However, one wonders whether the foregoing thesis suggests that banks should just sit back and be exploited for criminal purposes or accept to acquiesce wrong doing or lawlessness simply for business expediency? This paper explores the jeopardy of the bank in delivering its mandate and to evaluate where the balance between its competing obligations needs to be drawn. Banks perform duties to the customer (emanating from their contractual relationship) and its responsibility to the regulatory authorities to safeguard the public. The paper provides an exposition of the modern business regulatory landscape within which banks operate in performing their competing duties towards the customer and the public. In the modern elusive global market environment, banks are in a jeopardy because people they would least expect to be involved in money laundering could be chief instigators of money laundering (ML) and predicate crimes. This includes presidents (e.g. Sana Abacha of Nigeria), minsters, judges and other elevated government figures could be the ones instigating the commission of money laundering offences in their countries. The jeopardy of the bank is that some of the foregoing political officials could be untouchable political figures on whose its survival depends. Banks need to remain fully alert bearing in mind that with globalised business environment in which they operate, circumstances can change very rapidly. It would also be overly unnecessary to blame banks for failures in the regulatory system beyond their control such as the global crisis – which they could not have foreseen or prevented. Finally, this paper articulates the fluid environment in which the modern bank operates and its attendant challenges.

The paper was written by the analysis of both primary and secondary data sources focusing on vulnerability of banks in executing their mandate as financial institutions. The paper has also utilised case law on misfeasance of banks where courts have found banks for misfeasance and literally not doing enough in execution of their obligations to prevent financial crimes. This paper has also utilised some of the data utilised by the author in writing his PhD dissertation but done so in a distinctive manner to foster the objective of this paper. The author has harnessed and evaluated the foregoing data sources and adapted them in different contexts to address pertinent issues this paper was written on.

The findings are not clear cut of whether banks qualify to be branded villains or heroes. The findings have demonstrated that the majority of banks are doing a plausible job to prevent money laundering and prevention of terrorism. There are also discerning situations where banks have been less valiant in prevention of crimes and in doing so they have put themselves in a negative spotlight. The paper has utilised different data sources generated on the role of banks in providing frontline services to the public and their failure to execute the foregoing mandate diligently.

The limitation of the paper is that it would have been better to evaluate the secondary data sources used in writing it by carrying out interviews on some issues it hinges. Due to some practicalities, it was not possible to carry out interviews or to send out questionnaires to banks and other financial institutions. As such, some of the data sources used could have been biased.

This paper is of significant importance for banks, regulatory authorities, governments and those with a stake in the way banks are regulated and governed. I presume the foregoing stakeholder constituencies will find it a worth read and interesting. The paper also demonstrates that some the information written on banks in newspapers is not always true and urges caution in utilising newspapers as a source of generating data. It also underscores the need for banks to be more vigilant in execution of their mandate towards different stakeholder constituencies, so that they are not inadvertently exploited for criminal purposes.

The paper has far reaching implications for banks to be utilised in prevention of crimes in executing their mandate cautiously. It is important that much as financial institutions should be utilised in the foregoing respect, they should not be constrained by over-regulation, as this also means that they would pay dearly in compliance costs.

The originality of the paper is manifested that while it has relied heavily on secondary and primary data sources, it was written in a distinctive way to foster the objectives of writing it. The paper was also evaluated in the context of empirical evidence where banks have used the influence to prevent crimes or where they have been less vigilant in doing so and they have been exposed to criminal exploitation. The foregoing experiences were evaluated carefully using reliable data sources such as case law and recent legislation.

This paper aims to explore how accounting is entwined in the cultural practice of popular music. Particular attention is paid to how the accountant is constricted by artists in art and the role(s) the accountant plays in the artistic narrative. In effect this explores the notion that there is a tension between the notion of the bourgeois world of “the accountant” and the world of “art for art's sake”.

This paper draws on the cultural theory of Pierre Bourdieu to understand how the character of the accountant is constructed and used by the artist. Particular attention is paid in this respect to the biography and lyrics of the Beatles.

Accounting and accountants play both the hero and the villain. By rejecting the “accountant villain”, the artist identifies with and reinforces artistic purity and credibility. However, in order to achieve the economic benefits and maintain the balance between the “art” and the “money”, the economic prudence of the bourgeois accountant is required (although it might be resented).

The analysis focuses on a relatively small range of musicians and is dominated by the biography of the Beatles. A further range of musicians and artists would extend this work. Further research could also be constructed to more fully consider the consumption, rather than just the production, of art and cultural products and performances.

This paper is a novel consideration of how accounting stereotypes are constructed and used in the field of artistic creation

Think about the image of the corporate board of directors Hollywood has given us. The actors playing board members are WASPy, middle‐aged males in well‐cut suits. The set is a mahogany‐paneled conference room containing a very large, highly polished table. Most of the lines belong to another white male actor, who is either the villain or the hero of the story, although one or two of the actors sitting at the table may speak a line or two to break up the main character's monologue. On rare occasion, one of the “directors” is either a hero or a villain intent on taking over the company for good or evil and thus has a lot of lines. But even then, the bulk of actors playing the board have non‐speaking roles.

This research paper aims to examine how organized criminals rescript their identities to engage with entrepreneurship discourse when authoring their biographies. From a sociological perspective, stereotypes and social constructs of the entrepreneur and the criminal are subjects of recurring interest. Yet, despite the prevalence of the stereotype of the entrepreneur as a hero-figure in the entrepreneurship literature and the conflation of the entrepreneur with the stereotype of the businessman, notions of entrepreneurial identity are not fixed with constructions of the entrepreneur as a rascal, rogue or villain being accepted as alternative social constructs.

The qualitative approaches of “biographical analysis” and “close reading” adopted help us draw out discursive strategies.

The main finding is that a particular genre of criminal biographies can be re-read as entrepreneur stories. The theme of nuanced entrepreneurial identities and in particular gangster discourse is under researched. In this study, by conducting a close reading of contemporary biographies of British criminals, the paper encounters self-representations of criminals who seek to author an alternative and more appealing social identity as entrepreneurs. That this re-scripting of personal biographies to make gangster stories conform to the genre of entrepreneur stories is of particular interest.

This study points to similarities and differences between criminal and entrepreneurial biographies. It also presents sociological insights into an alternative version of entrepreneurial identity and sociological constructions of the criminal as entrepreneur.

This research provides an insight into how criminals seek to legitimise their life-stories.

This research paper is of value in that it is the first to consider contemporary biographies of British criminals as entrepreneurship discourse. Understanding how criminal biographies and entrepreneur stories share similar socially constructed themes, storylines and epistemologies contribute to the development of entrepreneurship and sociological research by examining entrepreneurship in an unusual social setting.

At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic the United Kingdom Government implemented a policy to rapid discharge hospital patients into care homes. This study aimed to examine how the media in the United Kingdom portrayed hospital discharge to care homes during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study was a qualitative document analysis. Four sources (Daily Mail, The Independent, The Guardian and BBC News) were selected to represent political orientations encompassing right-wing, centrist and left-wing perspectives, and were searched for mention of hospital discharge, care homes and Covid-19 pandemic between 1st January 2020 and 24th February 2022. Article text was copied verbatim into Microsoft Word documents prior to analysis. Data were thematically analysed, followed by coding the sentiment in the included articles as well as coding the sentiment of themes and sub-themes.

Of 722 identified articles, 133 were eligible for inclusion as the final corpus. Data represented a moralistic narrative consisting of four themes: (1) Government as villain, (2) care homes as antiheroes, (3) patients as ideal victims and (4) moral outcomes. Most of the corpus had a negative sentiment (78.1%). One theme, moral outcomes, had considerably more positive sentiment (32.4%) than others (range 15.1%–21.9%).

A moralistic argument for improving cross-boundary interactions between health and social care services is provided, and the media can play a role pushing cross-boundary working higher up the policy agenda. Future work should examine how direct stakeholders, including those working in healthcare and care home settings, perceived the discharge policy.

This paper develops a model of social vulnerability. Specifically, it aims to (1) determine the factors of social vulnerability to flood risks and (2) interrogate the discursive structure and framing of vulnerability within the local domain of disaster governance.

This is a descriptive-survey research design mobilized through sequential exploratory mixed method.

For ordinary people, vulnerability is due to five factors: (1) government inaction, (2) age-based frailty, (3) disability-based social exclusion, (4) weak social capital and (5) material susceptibility. Moreover, there are two patterns of discursive structure surrounding the risk of flooding in Davao del Norte: (1) where Cavendish banana is a favored export commodity of those who are in power, the Pressure-and-Release Model fits within the narrative of land-use changes in the province, and (2) where the local domain of disaster governance frames the DRR as a “hero-villain” normative duality.

At the policy level, the findings should inform the current government practices in development planning to mitigate flood risks, specifically the proposed Philippine National Land-use Act and the pending Bill to create the Philippine Disaster Risk Reduction and Management (DRRM) Department. Operationally, the “hero-villain” finding challenges the self-awareness of disaster managers and functionaries whose technical trainings inculcated a one-size-fits-all approach to disaster response.

The findings support the theory that disaster and disaster risks are socially constructed realities.

This paper teased out the gap between the people's risks perceptions in Davao del Norte and the government's DRR episteme, and it points to power relations that impede its closing.

This paper explores the stereotype of the accountant in Florentine medieval popular culture based on literary works and from a historical perspective. It aims to highlight how stereotypes change with time and represent the cultural and historical evolution of a society. This research challenges Miley and Read (2012), who stated that the foundation of the stereotype was in Commedia dell'arte, an Italian form of improvisational theatre commenced in the 15th century.

The authors applied a qualitative research method to examine the accountant from a medieval popular culture perspective. The analysis consists of two phases: (1) categorisation of the accountant stereotype based on accounting history literature and (2) thematic analysis of The Divine Comedy (1307–1313) and The Decameron (1348–1351). The authors explored a synchronic perspective of historical investigation through a “cross-author” comparison, identifying Dante Alighieri as the first key author of medieval popular culture. During his imaginary journey through The Divine Comedy, Dante describes the social, political and economic context of the Florentine people of the 14th century. Then, with its various folkloristic elements, The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio becomes the “manifesto” of the popular culture in the Florentine medieval times.

This study shows the change of the accountant stereotype from the medieval age to the Renaissance. The Divine Comedy mainly connotes a negative accountant stereotype. The 14th century's Florentine gentlemen (“i galantuomini”) are apparently positive characters, with an ordered and clean aspect, but they are accused of being usurers. Dante Alighieri pictures the accountant as a “servant of capitalism”, “dishonest person, excessively fixated with money”, “villain and evil” and “excessively rational”. Giovanni Boccaccio mainly portrays a positive accountant stereotype. The accountant is increasingly more reliable, and this “commercial man” takes a more prestigious role in the society. In The Decameron, the accountant is depicted as a “hero”, “gentleman”, “family-oriented person with a high level of work commitment” and “colourful persona, warm, and emotional”. Overall, the authors provided new evidence on the existence of the accountant stereotype in the Florentine medieval popular.

This study engages with accounting history literature accountants' stereotypes in an unexplored context and time period, providing a base for comparative international research on accounting stereotypes and popular culture. Additionally, it addresses the need for further research on the accountant stereotype based on literary works and from a historical perspective. Therefore, this research also expands the New Accounting History (NAH) literature, focussing on the investigation of the accountant stereotype connotations in the 14th century.