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This study investigates the effect of honesty reminders on budgetary slack. Based on self-concept maintenance theory, the authors posit that honesty reminders can reduce budgetary slack by making people more aware of their own standards of honesty, resulting in more honest behavior. Using an experimental research design, the authors find evidence that honesty reminders reduce budgetary slack. The authors also find that although penalties can similarly reduce budgetary slack, they tend to cause distrust and resentment from subordinates. Therefore, honesty reminders may be a less costly method than penalties for reducing budgetary slack.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of the modern information society on attitudes and approaches to the prevention of plagiarism and to examine a less punitive, more educative model.

The approach taken is a literature review of plagiarism in contemporary society followed by a case study of the education department of a tertiary‐level college in the United Arab Emirates.

The authors advocate a move towards a less punitive, more educative approach which takes into account all the relevant contextual factors. A call is made for a truly institutional response to a shared concern, with comprehensive and appropriate policies and guidelines which focus on prevention, the development of student skills, and the proactive involvement of all relevant stakeholders.

This approach could inform the policies and practices of institutions who wish to systematically deal with plagiarism in other contemporary contexts.

This paper could be of value to policy makers and administrators in tertiary institutions, particularly in English as a second language contexts, who recognise the limitations of traditional approaches to plagiarism and wish to establish more effective practices.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the concept of honesty can shed light on misreporting issues in projects. Research on honesty can be useful for practitioners and researchers in project management, in order to understand and counter the withholding and distortion of relevant information from projects. In moral psychology, dishonesty is often explained as a result of moral neutralization. The paper provides an account of how neutralization can lead to dishonesty in projects.

The current study is based on a literature review of research on misreporting and dishonesty in projects, and of relevant generic studies of honesty.

The author concludes that the phenomenon of moral neutralization can explain dishonesty and misreporting in projects. Honesty can be encouraged by identifying attempts at moral neutralization, and rendering them unacceptable. At the core of this position is the view that the level of honesty amongst project members is most adequately understood and explained from a circumstance rather than a character approach.

The paper is based on a literature review, and needs to be supported by further empirical studies within project management.

The suggested primacy of a circumstance approach to honesty implies that project practitioners should be aware of the phenomenon of moral neutralization. Even people of good moral character can become involved in neutralization, in order to render misreporting acceptable. The central practical challenge can thus be to recognize tendencies of neutralization in one's own and other people's moral reasoning.

The main contribution of this paper is to introduce the concept of honesty in general, and the concept of moral neutralization in particular, to project management research and practice. The paper also suggests concrete ways to redirect attention from character to circumstances, based on more general research findings in social and moral psychology.

This article aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.

The briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Many people coming across the term organizational storytelling will say: “Isn't that what we've always done?” Ultimately, Kopp et al.'s piece, with its emphasis on analysis, is a reminder of the power of language. But it never does any harm to analyze how and why words work. Taking control, collaboration, transparency, honesty … these are textbook examples of good crisis (or any) management practice, and the story of the Chilean miners makes for a lively illustration of these points. Fayol‐Song offers insights into an interesting aspect of China's new economic freedom – the use of their own people by multinationals. She also questions the validity of some corporate judgments.

The article provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to‐digest format.

The purpose of this research is to show the evaluation of food hygiene knowledge and self‐reported behaviours of school children, assessment of children's attitudes towards food hygiene and evaluation of barriers to the adoption of appropriate food hygiene behaviours.

The food hygiene knowledge and self‐reported behaviours of pupils (4 and 14 years; Key Stages 1‐3 in the English system – or Scottish equivalent) were determined using age‐appropriate knowledge quizzes completed by 2,259 pupils across England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. Attitudes towards food hygiene and barriers to performing desirable hygiene‐related behaviours were established through semi‐structured interviews with 82 pupils who completed knowledge tasks in South East England.

Children generally had good knowledge of food hygiene. However, there were misconceptions about the nature of micro‐organisms and how they affect food. In addition, a lack of reminders and practical food activities, especially at Key Stage 2 (7‐11 years), coupled with poor hand‐washing facilities, meant that children did not always adopt desirable behaviours. Children gave suggestions for ways to help others to remember good practice.

The study identified areas of weakness in pupils' hygiene knowledge and understanding and has determined barriers to adoption of desirable behaviours at all times. It has also suggested ways in which food hygiene education could be made more engaging for pupils, and other methods to encourage good practice.

Research investigating the association between religiosity and earnings management has concentrated on accruals-based earnings management, relying heavily on society’s religiosity, but it has neglected the interaction between religiosity and formal monitoring mechanisms. This study aims to examine how the religiosity and accounting expertise traits of top leaders are associated with real earnings management (REM) and how they interact to eliminate these practices.

Using a sample of 943 year-observations from more religious settings, this paper collects data for four measures of REM, and for religiosity and accounting expertise of audit committee (AC) chair and chief executive officer (CEO). Multivariate regression is used to test the study hypotheses.

The findings are consistent with the predictions that religious top leaders are not associated with lower REM, while top leaders with accounting expertise, in some cases, are associated with lower REM. This paper also finds that a leader with religious belief and accounting expertise dramatically lowers REM. These findings are robust under a battery of sensitive analyzes. In an additional analysis, this paper observes the interaction effect between these two traits is strengthened if the board chair is religious, and persists even for larger firms or those with a highly concentrated ownership structure.

The paper provides evidence that may serve a variety of decision-makers. It is the first to show that the interaction between religiosity and expertise is crucial in curbing REM. It also provides the first evidence for the role of the AC chair in relation to REM.

This paper reports the results of a three-year-long research on business relationships, relying on qualitative data gathered through multiple-case study research of four focal companies operating in Australia. The industry settings are as follows: steel construction, vegetable oils trading, aluminum and steel can manufacture, and imaging solutions. The research analyzes two main aspects of relationships: structure and process. This paper deals with structure describing it by the most desired features of intercompany relationships for each focal company. The primary research data have been coded drawing on extant research into business relationships. The main outcome of this part of the research is a five construct model composed by trust, commitment, bonds, distance, and information sharing that accounts for all informants’ utterances about relationship structure.

There is an unintended irony in the US Securities and Exchange Commission's view that “the world of investing is fascinating, complex and can be very fruitful”. For, with the benefit of hindsight, we all know just how fruitful that world was for the likes of Enron, Worldcom, Arthur Andersen and others. Just how fascinating and complex the world of investing is, has been brought into the public spotlight as the complexities of the wrongdoings, and the fascination with the enormity of the betrayal of trust has been witnessed.

This paper aims to offer a new history of management by tracing a religious dimension of scientific management. The thesis is that the good was foundational for bringing scientific management to success in Taylor’s native Quaker Philadelphia in the 1880s. The paper’s main contribution is to contrast the philosophical origins of Taylor’s ideas in scientific management to his native Quaker roots, and how Taylor, over time, into the 1910s, wrestled with this issue.

The paper is situated in historical interpretivism and subjectivism, leaning on contextual and narrative research on religious morality.

Quaker morality prevented managerial opportunism at Taylor’s Midvale Steel in the 1880s. Conversely, by the 1900s and 1910s, interest conflicts between workers and managers escalated when scientific management moved out of its traditional cultural contexts of Quaker Philadelphia and spread across the USA. The historical implication is, already for Taylor’s time, that scientific management never was the “one-best way” of management.

Future research needs to deepen and broaden research on scientific management when tracing the significance of religion and culture in management thought.

The paper has implications for modern studies of business morality by uncovering the practical relevance of religious business ethics at the outset of management studies.

The historic emergence of scientific management points to a theory of institutional evolution and economic growth, when religiously grounded governance of the firm deinstitutionalized, and institutional economic governance, with different but superior economic advantages, progressed by the 1900s.

The paper suggests an alternative version of the intellectual heritage of management studies by tracing the legacy of Taylor’s Quakerism and how religious and cultural ideas contributed to the formation of science in management.