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The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) of 1977 and its amendment – the Trade and Competitive Act of 1988 – are unique not only in the history of the accounting and auditing profession, but also in international law. The Acts raised awareness of the need for efficient and adequate internal control systems to prevent illegal acts such as the bribery of foreign officials, political parties and governments to secure or maintain contracts overseas. Its uniqueness is also due to the fact that the USA is the first country to pioneer such a legislation that impacted foreign trade, international law and codes of ethics. The research traces the history of the FCPA before and after its enactment, the role played by the various branches of the United States Government – Congress, Department of Justice, Securities Exchange commission (SEC), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS); the contributions made by professional associations such as the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICFA), the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA), the American Bar Association (ABA); and, finally, the role played by various international organizations such as the United Nations (UN), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC). A cultural, ethical and legalistic background will give a better understanding of the FCPA as wll as the rationale for its controversy.

In a world where more and more emphasis is being put on the importance of teaching leadership skills to work ready undergraduate students, instructors are often met with the challenge of finding current, engaging, real world examples to use in their classrooms. In the case of this application, the instructors propose the use of the characters and video clips from current Fox Network television show Glee to aid in the instruction of Blake & Mouton’s Leadership Grid during a larger discussion of leadership styles.

THE question of the advisability of exercising a censorship over literature has been much before the public of late, and probably many librarians have realised how closely the disputed question affects their own profession.

Accounting standards for goodwill may intensify the agency conflict. Since auditors evaluate intangible asset valuations, this study examines to what extent being an auditor (including Big 4 auditors) and being female as indicators of professional skepticism and conservatism predict accounting professionals' critical views of goodwill accounting under US GAAP.

Statistical analyses of a survey of accounting professionals in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States.

The respondents' views are dispersed from trust in GAAP to views reflecting management opportunism in goodwill accounting. While being an auditor (including Big 4 auditors) does not predict a critical perception, being a female auditor is correlated with critical views to some extent.

The survey was carried out in a limited geographical area and personal contacts were used to maximize the response rate, which may limit generalizability.

Standard setters can use the results to learn how practitioners perceive the current accounting standards for goodwill. The results provide users and preparers knowledge about potential pitfalls of goodwill accounting. Preparers could increase transparency to alleviate user concerns regarding managerial opportunism in goodwill accounting.

This paper extends the IFRS-based literature exploring practitioners' perceptions of accounting standards by focusing on goodwill accounting in the US GAAP environment. This study also contributes to the auditing literature by providing further evidence on how gender moderates an auditor's perception of accounting standards.

IT is curious to note how many more books are written for boys than for girls. Considering the growing number of women writers, it might be expected that girls' books would predominate. It may be that women writers are canny enough to write with their eye on the boy reader knowing that while a totally feminine story will not attract boys, girls often read their brothers' books. Most of the children's classics appeal to both sexes—Peter Pan, Pinocchio, A Christmas Carol, Hans Brinker, The Wind in the Willows, and The Bastable Children, for example. Even the classics of adventure such as Treasure Island, and Robinson Crusoe, have their female devotees and therefore stand a greater chance of survival than books like Little Women, the Katy series, and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. With the development of the “family story” popularised by E. Nesbit, there seems to have been a decline in the school story—at least among boys. Either they prefer natural tales of boys and girls together at home, or on holiday, or realistic adventures. A. S. Tring keeps a foot in all three camps, so to speak, with his tale of out‐of‐school activities, adventures and feuds between two day schools. His story entitled The Old Gang (O.U.P., 7/6) is told by the hero himself, in a racy style, and is amusingly illustrated by John Camp. Of the realistic adventure type is The Missing Legatee, by Wilfrid Robertson (O.U.P., 7/6), and it has its setting in the wilds of the Zambesi where the author himself has made expeditions, exploring and big game hunting. It satisfies the boy's demand for plenty of action and at the same time conforms to a good stylistic standard. Another tale of a search undertaken at great risk is David Gammon's Against the Golden Gods (Lutterworth, 5/‐) in which a seventeen year old boy goes out among the head hunters of Papua to rescue his captive father. Fog in the Channel, by Percy Woodcock (Nelson, 7/6) relates stirring adventures by sea, beginning with a collision in the fog when two schoolboys board a mysterious vessel supposed to be on secret service.

Social, physical and temporal characteristics are known to influence the eating experience and the effectiveness of nutritional policies. As the school meal service features prominently in UK nutritional and health promotion policy, the paper's aim is to investigate the characteristics of the primary school dining context and their implications for eating behaviours.

A case study of one local authority in Wales was conducted involving 11 primary schools stratified into socio‐economic quartiles. Focussed observations were carried out over two to three lunchtimes per school to explore their social, physical and temporal characteristics. These were supplemented by semi‐structured interviews with catering staff and midday supervisors.

The dining halls had numerous generic attributes (e.g. accommodation, equipment, length of lunchtime, social actors). These interacted to have a direct, but not necessarily positive, bearing on food choice and consumption. Overcrowded, multi‐purpose dining halls coupled with time pressures and dynamic social situations detracted from the eating experience and the ability of staff to encourage children to eat.

Without addressing these underlying issues, school nutritional policy may only play a limited role in influencing what children eat. It is recommended that policy places a greater emphasis on factors such as the eating environment; the time available for eating; and the role of the midday supervisor.

Previous studies of dining halls have generally been part of process evaluations of nutritional interventions. This study adds value by conducting a focussed investigation into the relationship between the dining hall environment and eating behaviours.

This research aims to explore retail managers' views on how food waste (FW) management activities contribute to sustainable value creation and how the customer value proposition (CVP) for a given food retailer interacts with their approaches to FW management.

A three-stage exploratory qualitative approach to data collection and analysis was adopted, involving in-depth interviews with retail managers, documentary analysis of multiple years of relevant corporate reports and email validation by seven major UK grocery retailers. Thematic content analysis supplemented by word similarity cluster analysis, two-step cluster analysis and crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis was undertaken.

FW management practices have been seen by retail managers to contribute to all forms of sustainable value creation, as waste reduction minimises environmental impact, saves costs and/or serves social needs, whilst economic value creation lies at the heart of retail FW management. However, retail operations are also framed by CVP and size of a retailer that enable or inhibit the adoption of certain FW management practices. Low-price retailers were more likely to adopt practices enabling them to save costs. Complicated cost-incurring solutions to FW were more likely to be adopted by retailers associated with larger size, high quality and a range of services.

This study is the first of its kind to empirically explore retail managers' perception of sustainable value creation through FW management activities and to provide empirical evidence of the linkages between retail CVP and sustainable value creation in the context of retail FW management.

The purpose of this paper is to compare Fortune 200 and top startup chief executive officers’ (CEOs) communication strategies on Twitter and the effectiveness of these strategies in influencing public engagement. Specifically, guided by the dialogic communication theory and social presence theory, this study explored CEOs’ use of dialogic communication, social presence strategies and message tactics. Additionally, public engagement on Twitter measured by total number of likes, retweets and comments was associated with communication strategies utilized by CEOs.

This study employed the quantitative content analysis. A total sample of 720 posts from 36 CEOs were selected and analyzed. Drawing from prior studies, a coding scheme was developed and employed during the coding process. Two authors of this study served as coders and reached satisfactory inter-coder reliability. A series of χ² tests and negative binomial regressions were conducted for data analysis.

Neither Fortune 200 CEOs nor top startup CEOs fully utilized dialogic principles for Twitter communication. Although Fortune CEOs seemed to be experts in strategically tailoring messages and therefore present themselves on Twitter in a friendly manner, startup CEOs demonstrated a higher level of authenticity, animation and informality. Findings are mixed regarding the direction of associations between dialogic principles and public engagement.

This study expands the application of dialogic principles in examining online executive communication and its influence in public engagement on Twitter. This study was among the first that examined executive leadership communication in the context of social media setting. In this sense, the study shifted the internal focus of leadership research to investigating leaders’ interaction with a variety of online publics.

VirtuNav is a haptic-, audio-enabled virtual reality simulator that facilitates persons with visual impairment to explore a 3D computer model of a real-life indoor location, such as a room or building. The purpose of this paper is to aid in pre-planning and spatial awareness, for a user to become more familiar with the environment prior to experiencing it in reality.

The system offers two unique interfaces: a free-roam interface where the user can navigate, and an edit mode where the administrator can manage test users, maps and retrieve test data.

System testing reveals that spatial awareness and memory mapping improve with user iterations within VirtuNav.

VirtuNav is a research tool for investigation of user familiarity developed after repeated exposure to the simulator, to determine the extent to which haptic and/or sound cues improve a visually impaired user’s ability to navigate a room or building with or without occlusion.

The application may prove useful for greater real world engagement: to build confidence in real world experiences, enabling persons with sight impairment to more comfortably and readily explore and interact with environments formerly unfamiliar or unattainable to them.

VirtuNav is developed as a practical application offering several unique features including map design, semi-automatic 3D map reconstruction and object classification from 2D map data. Visual and haptic rendering of real-time 3D map navigation are provided as well as automated administrative functions for shortest path determination, actual path comparison, and performance indicator assessment: exploration time taken and collision data.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss what kinds of messages about the risks of polydrug use are mediated in YouTube video blogs and on what kinds of norms and values do the vloggers base these messages.

The data consist of 12 YouTube videos where vloggers share their own experiences of the risks and harms of polydrug use. In the analysis, the actantial model of Greimas’ theory of structural semiotics was applied.

Two main types of videos were identified – sobriety and controlled use – where polydrug use has different meanings. In sobriety videos, polydrug use is presented as the heavy use of multiple substances. In the videos dealing with controlled use, polydrug use is taken as the combining of certain substances. Whereas the sobriety videos emphasized total abstinence from all substances due to their destructiveness, the videos about controlled use emphasized risk awareness when combining substances. Despite modern digital media and a new generation operating in this space, the messages of the risks of polydrug use mainly repeat those of familiar discourses.

This paper offers an analytical insight into the ways in which the risks of polydrug use are conceptualized in a YouTube context that is increasingly gaining a foothold among the youth. Greimas’ actantial model offers a fruitful tool to find semiotic meanings that hide under the surface. The model has not been applied in previous drug research.