Search results for "account"
showing 10 items of 2183 documents
A comparative analysis of primary teacher professionalism in England and Finland
2004
Policy‐makers' conceptions of teacher professionalism currently differ markedly in England and Finland. In England they are shaped by agendas associated with the drive to raise standards and ‘commercialized professionalism’ whilst in Finland they are influenced by notions of ‘teacher empowerment’. This article analyses findings on the theme of teacher professionalism derived from re‐interviewing a sample of English and Finnish teachers in 2001 as a follow‐up to earlier ethnographic research in six schools in each country during 1994–1996. Issues of professionalism are addressed through three broad themes: the impact of curriculum and pedagogical reforms; working together to implement these …
Non-financial reporting in the public sector: alternatives, trends and opportunities
2019
In recent years, different non-financial information models have arisen, both in the private and public sectors, trying to complete the traditional financial reports prepared by companies and public administrations. The fundamental objective of these models has been to satisfy the interest of the stakeholders, which goes beyond the numbers included in the balance sheet and the income statement. In the case of the public sector, this is coupled with the discontent and distrust of citizens towards politicians and administrators of institutions, which makes it necessary to emphasize tools and strategies that can improve the transparency and accountability of administrations and restore citiz…
Leadership and spirituality in business and public administration: a cross-cultural empirical study comparing the USA and France
2013
National audience; In this discussion we build on previous work on the role of ethics in shaping the behaviour of leaders in business and public administration to investigate the relationship between leadership spirituality, the environment springing from such leadership, and the resulting followers’ attributions of leader effectiveness in the USA and France. Survey data collected from the USA and France were used to test a composite construct of spiritual leadership including (a) accountability, (b) rationality, and (c) honesty. The results of hypothesis tested suggest followers’ attributions of leaders’ positive outcomes increase in proportion with increases in leader’s spirituality. Thes…
Strategy implementation as fantasising – becoming the leading bank
2015
In this empirical case study we explore the fantasy nature of strategy work and propose fantasising as a framework contributing to the nascent literature dealing with the previously overlooked fantasy nature of strategy. More specifically, our interest is on examining how the meaning of official strategy gets constructed as it is being implemented, as well as and how and why the perceptions may evolve during implementation. Our data consists of official strategy documents and interviews from Finland's largest financial services group and its largest unit. The interviews cover all organisational levels, enabling us to reveal the variations of perceptions of strategy as it is being implemente…
An institutional view on access to finance by Tanzanian women-owned enterprises
2017
We investigate the limited use of bank and microfinance loans by Tanzanian female entrepreneurs. Using survey data, we observe that female entrepreneurs mainly use informal sources to finance their businesses. We analyze how “perceptions” of gendered cognitive and normative institutions determine whether a female entrepreneur applies for a formal loan. Following results stand out: first, we find that high collateral requirements, interest rates and personal guarantee requirements make formal loans unattractive. Second, female entrepreneurs only apply when they expect to be successful. Since they “perceive” access to finance to be more problematic for women,female entrepreneurs are discourag…
Expectation Damages and Bilateral Cooperative Investments
2012
We examine the efficiency of the standard breach remedy expectation damages in a setting where the buyer invests cooperatively and the seller invests both cooperatively and selfishly. Contracts may specify a required quality level and an upper bound to the seller's coordination costs. We find that it is optimal to write an augmented Cadillac contract in which quality is stipulated such that it cannot be met with positive probability together with a very low price. Thus, the seller becomes a residual claimant and the coordination-cost threshold can be used to balance the incentives of the buyer.
The high five: Associations of the five positive factors with the big five and well-being
2017
The study of individual differences in positive characteristics has mainly focused on moral traits. The objectives of this research were to study individual differences in positive characteristics from the point of view of the layperson, including non-moral individual characteristics, and to generate a replicable model of positive factors. Three studies based on a lexical approach were conducted. The first study generated a corpus of words which resulted in a refined list of socially shared positive characteristics. The second study produced a five-factor model of positive characteristics: erudition, peace, cheerfulness, honesty, and tenacity. The third study confirmed the model with a diff…
Do key audit matters (KAMs) matter? : Auditors’ perceptions of KAMs and audit quality in Finland
2021
Purpose Key audit matters (KAMs) in International Standard for Auditing, 701 seek to enhance the value of the auditor’s report by increasing the transparency of how the audit was performed. The purpose of this study is to investigate how professional auditors themselves perceive the impact of KAMs on audit quality and audit effectiveness. Design/methodology/approach Statistical analyses of an electronic survey of certified public auditors (CPAs) in Finland. Findings Regarding the perceptions of KAMs, the authors found two dominant views on auditing: quality and efficiency. In general, the respondents did not consider that KAMs improve audit quality. However, auditors focusing on efficiency…
Blame game or dialogue? Financial, professional and democratic accountabilities in a complex health care setting
2018
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the complexity of the network governance setting affects accountability practices. The authors pay particular attention to the organizational characteristics that may enable a common understanding of multiple accountability relationships, or lead to problems in reconciling competing forms of accountability, thereby appearing as blame game-type behavior. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted a case study with 31 semi-structured interviews in a Finnish health care organization (FHC) that offers basic public health care services. The organization represents a co-operative arrangement with the main city and three smaller munic…
Single-trial-based Temporal Principal Component Analysis on Extracting Event-related Potentials of Interest for an Individual Subject
2021
Abstract Temporal principal component analysis (t-PCA) has been widely used to extract event-related potentials (ERPs) at the group level of multiple subjects’ ERP data. The key assumption of group t-PCA analysis is that desired ERPs of all subjects share the same waveforms (i.e., temporal components), whereas waveforms of different subjects’ ERPs can be variant in phases, peak latencies and so on, to some extent. Additionally, several PCA-extracted components coming from the same ERP dataset failed to be statistically analysed simultaneously because their polarities and amplitudes were indeterminate. To fill these gaps, a novel technique was proposed and employed to extract desired ERP fro…