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The purpose of this study is to explore the effect of industry specialization on the absorption and competitive pricing (or lack thereof) of audits of large Andersen clients (S&P 1500 companies) who switched to the remaining Big 4 international accounting firms in 2002 due to the demise of Arthur Andersen LLP (Andersen). Did the audit clients pay a premium or discount in audit fees to their new auditor who specialized in their industry?

Ordinary least squares regression is used to test hypothesis of a positive association between industry specialization and audit fees charged to former Andersen's audit clients in 2002 following Andersen's demise. This study provides more control over size effects by design. Test variables are constructed based on national market share of audit fees within an industry. Logistic regression is used to examine the likelihood of choosing new auditor that is an industry specialist.

Results support hypothesis, consistent with auditor differentiation explanation. Proportion of clients that had engaged an industry specialist in 2001 increased from 38 percent (84 clients) to 48 percent (105 clients) in 2002. No evidence of price‐gouging in 2002 although clients who aligned with industry specialist paid a 23.2 percent premium in audit fees. Large clients lost bargaining power to negotiate lower fees. Findings are robust to the inclusion of additional alternative measures of company size.

Results of logistic regression analysis imply that large audit clients with former auditor of tarnished reputation, long auditor tenure and high leverage are more likely to switch to an industry specialist to possibly signal audit/financial reporting quality. Large sample companies may limit the ability to generalize findings to smaller companies.

Mandatory audit firm rotation (currently being debated in the profession) will have costly effect on the pricing of Big 4 audits for companies wanting to signal audit and financial reporting quality to affect market perception, and large companies would likely lose their ability to bargain for lower audit fees.

The paper focus on the alignment of Andersen clients and impact on audit fees with Big 4 industry specialists resulting from the sudden increase in audit market concentration. Prior to Andersen's collapse, evidence on the association of audit fees premium and industry specialists was mixed, and little attention has been given to the influence of auditor industry specialization on both audit fees and alignment of former Andersen clients with a Big 4 specialist. This paper fills that void.

Given their history of preparing African Americans, ethnic minorities, and first-generation college students for careers in education, the culture and traditions of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) can provide insight into the preparation of diverse physical educators for the cultural, linguistic, and ethnic diversity in today’s American K-12 schools. As such, this chapter will present practical findings from an ethnographic study of a historically Black urban Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) program with a large native Spanish-speaking population. Specifically, we focus on the concepts of cultural sustainment and code-switching as strategies used by teacher educators to promote bilingualism and biculturalism. To achieve this, we highlight the relationship among institutional, programmatic, and classroom cultures for the cultural ­sustainment and development of preservice physical educators. According to Paris (2012), culturally sustaining pedagogy seeks to perpetuate and foster linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling. We conclude with strategies on how to successfully work with culturally diverse college students, promoting bilingual and biculturalism through cultural sustainment and code-switching.

Members of the Original Equipment Manufacturer Group (OMEG) at National Semiconductor Corporation (NSC) were used to help answer the question of whether empowerment programs, independent of quality improvement programs such as total quality management (TQM), create customer satisfaction. Results of a customer satisfaction survey, administered to a sample of NSC customers prior to implementing an empowerment program and then again one year into the program, provided affirmative support for our research question. Finally, a conceptual model suggesting a process by which empowerment programs create customer satisfaction is proposed to provide direction for future research.

THE improvement in the British standard of living is generally desired. Politicians have not only subscribed to that ideal but some of them have indicated the rate at which we should advance. There are, however, certain trends in the country's economic life which must be reversed if we are to make any progress in that direction.

For firms entering a foreign market for the first time, institutional distance can be thought of as being insufficient in the sense that knowledge gap issues associated with large distances are not easily resolved. The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of knowledge sufficiency and the implications that this concept holds for assuaging these issues.

The concept of knowledge sufficiency is developed into a practical framework. The framework is comprised of the knowledge that firms accumulate about potential host countries. This accumulated knowledge is disaggregated into components that provide the basic structure of the knowledge sufficiency framework and facilitate a systematic assessment of accumulated knowledge.

Accumulated knowledge about foreign market risk factors that exist in potential host countries is disaggregated into three components. The breadth of knowledge component is designed to help answer the question: what do firms know about foreign market risk factors in potential host countries? The depth of knowledge component is designed to help answer the question: how much do firms know about foreign market risk factors in potential host countries. The quality of knowledge component is designed to answer the question: are firms confident in what they know about foreign market risk factors in potential host countries?

There is a tendency for strategic decision makers in firms to feel that they have “deep” knowledge of foreign market risk factors when they may actually have only “surface” knowledge of these factors. The result is likely to be an unwarranted lowering of the risk they perceive to exist in potential host countries. Consequently, the host country selected for entry may not be optimal and the mode of entry may be inappropriate. The issue to be resolved is how to ascertain how much knowledge firms actually possess about these foreign market risk factors.

Selecting the “right” foreign market and entering that market in the “right” way is unquestionably one of the most important topics in the international literature and has been extensively studied. However, there is no central repository of finding from these studies that will help firms going international for the first time to systematically assess whether their choice of market and entry mode is optimal. Utilization of the knowledge sufficiency framework will significantly improve firms’ chances of entering the “right” foreign markets in the “right” way, which holds practical implications for their initial and long-term performance in these markets.

For firms entering a foreign market for the first time, answers to two questions are essential: what foreign market should we enter? How should we enter that foreign market? The extant literature does not provide a framework that allows firms to systematically search for answers to these questions such that, when satisfactorily found, will boost confidence that answers to these two questions are optimized. In addition to filling an important gap in the extant literature, the framework's usefulness as an aid for making internationalization decisions also makes an important contribution to practice.

One can easily see that there is abundant opportunity for the introduction of harmful impurities unless every care is taken to avoid contamination due to impure ingredients or by metals, if used, in the plant. The Departmental Committee already referred to considered that the maximum permissible quantity of arsenic in any colouring substance used for food purposes should be 1/100th of a grain a pound, and that the total amount of lead, copper, tin and zinc should not exceed 20 parts per million. Thus a dyestuff should be of a high degree of purity in spite of the fact that it is only added in very small proportions to food. In America the Food and Drug Authorities issue certificates for each batch of dyestuff after it has passed thorough physiological and chemical tests. There is no doubt that if such tests were carried out in this country by officially appointed chemists and physiologists the health of the community would be more securely safeguarded from the possible ill effects of ingested dyestuffs. Under the present system it is apparently no one's business to detect the presence of harmful colours in food other than those actually prohibited, for obviously such work does not come within the scope of the Public Analyst. My last point is concerning the labelling of food containing added colouring matter. It has already been seen that colours are very frequently added to conceal inferior quality, or to simulate a valuable ingredient which is not actually present in the food. Therefore, in my opinion, the presence of added colouring matter should definitely be declared to the purchaser either by a label attached to the article or by a notice displayed in the shop. Such a declaration would help to counteract unfair competition. It is true that the Departmental Committee reported that “If a list of permitted colours is prepared in the way we have suggested, we do not think that, as far as health considerations are concerned, a declaration of their use need be required.” It is obvious that the Committee made that recommendation from health reasons alone and did not take into account cases where colour was added to conceal inferior quality. The food laws of this country lag far behind those of some others, and the tightening up of legislation in this respect is overdue. It is interesting to note that the following countries make the declaration of added colours to some or all types of food compulsory: The United States of America, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Italy and France. Argentina takes a bold stand and prohibits absolutely the use of artificial colours in food, only harmless natural colours in certain instances are allowed. In America a food is not covered by a declaration of the addition of colouring if it is added to make the food appear of better quality or of greater value than it is. Also in America the labels of compound food such as confectionery must have a list of the quantities of the separate ingredients, exemption being allowed where there is of necessity insufficient space on the label to accommodate all the statements and information required. Unpacked confectionery, owing to the difficulty of labelling satisfactorily, is exempt. It has been remarked that a certain proposed label for use in America looked like a newspaper, and even the Readers' Digest could not condense it! Still, I feel sure that the intelligent purchaser would far rather have too much information, if that is possible, regarding the quality of the food he eats rather than too little, and those who, owing to lack of knowledge, are less discriminating in their choice of food, need to be protected. In conclusion, then, in my view, there is no objection to the artificial colouring of food provided that the colouring agent employed has no adverse effect upon the human organism, that it is not added to imply superior quality or to otherwise deceive, and that its presence, where practicable, is declared to the purchaser.

Retirement is a phenomenon unique to modern industrial societies. It is only within the last century, through technological and scientific advances, that industrial nations have been able to produce significant surpluses of food and goods, while simultaneously diminishing the effects of disease and raising the overall standard of living. These advances, combined with the demographic shift which accompanies a declining birth rate (a proportional increase in number of old people to total population), the development of large national bureaucracies, and sudden shifts in the industrial market, have left significant numbers of older workers with obsolete skills and have led to the evolution of a major “retired” segment of the population.

The ecological decline of ancient Near Eastern civilizations and the violent and explosive characteristics of post‐Columbian colonial ecologies might well remain comfortably remote from us in our twentieth century world were it not for the disturbing parallels that such case histories seem to evoke as we consider our contemporary global circumstance. Just as in ancient times and in the age of colonial expansion, it is in the “remote environments,” usually quite distant from the centers of power, that the crucial indicators of environmental catastrophe first become apparent within the system as a whole. These regions are frequently characterized by weak economies and highly vulnerable ecosystems in our time, just as they were in the past. Accordingly, the environmental circumstances in these regions constitute for the modern world a kind of monitoring device that can provide early warnings of ecological instabilities in the global ecosystem.

The author suggests that executive search practitioners would be naïve to believe that the revolution being enacted within their clients’ businesses will not ultimately embrace them. More pointedly, it is argued that supporting the client’s quest to create value for its customer base will, of necessity, be the primary driving force of ongoing competitiveness. Finally, it is suggested that migrating up the value ladder has the effect of devaluing many of the characteristics of perceived differentiation that have been the wellspring of success for those in the search community.