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In recent years, many corporations have initiated downsizing programs to eliminate jobs, close facilities and withdraw from major lines of business. These initiatives have been justified in the name of creating “lean and efficient” organizations. In many cases, top management is rewarded with large bonus compensation packages. Such rewards are considered to be consistent with the goal of maximizing shareholder value. We compare stakeholder and shareholder value models of management accountability to gain insights into the broader economic and societal consequences of the current financial reporting model. Specifically, we examine downsizing at United Technologies Corporation to demonstrate how current financial reporting practices privilege shareholder/management interests over other stakeholders and favor actions that may result in detrimental effects to corporate stakeholders and society at large. This paper extends extant research by providing a concrete example of how “generally‐accepted” financial reports may be used to analyze economic events (like corporate downsizing) through multiple perspectives.

Considers the implications for budgeting and performance measurement of the emphasis on strategic management of human and information resources to obtain global competitive advantage. Summarizes relevant research, noting increasing use of economic value added, non‐financial measures and the balanced scorecard; and explaining Simons’ (1995) “levers of control” framework. Illustrates how this can be applied to the budgeting process, stressing the importance of interactive control systems which capture an integrated set of critical performance measures, and uses Skandia (insurance, Sweden) as an example. Lists the ten non‐financial performance metrics identified by Ernst & Young (1997) as important to investors and discusses the ten differences between budgeting in a traditional as opposed to a balanced scorecard environment put forward by Govindarajan and Shank (1992). Concludes that the need for multinationals to be flexible means that control and measurement systems must be aligned with strategic goals, taking account of national cultures, investors’ expectations and demands for employee empowerment.

This paper aims to assess the relationship between oil price and inflation in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. This paper contributes to knowledge in a number of ways.

First, we carry out a comparative analysis between the developed and developing countries of the OECD. Second, we check if the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2008 altered the oil price–inflation relationship. We further extend our analysis to capture asymmetries using the non-linear autoregressive distributed lag model. Lastly, we use the Campbell and Thompson (2008) forecast evaluation test to comparatively assess the predictive ability of the symmetric (restricted) and asymmetric (unrestricted) models.

Our results show that asymmetries matter in the oil price–inflation nexus. Also, the effect of the GFC of 2008 is stronger for the developed countries in the short run, and the developing countries in the long run. Lastly, accounting for asymmetries in oil price yields a better forecast for inflation in both groups.

The paper adds some interesting innovations to the oil price–inflation relationship in the OECD countries. It is the study with the widest scope for such country group under two classifications of developed and developing countries. It also inculcates the role of asymmetries, financial crisis, as well as the predictive ability of oil price on inflation.

The purpose of this paper is to present a language-agnostic approach to facilitate the discovery of “parallel passages” stored in historic and cultural heritage digital archives.

The authors explore a novel, and relatively simple approach, using a character-based statistical language model combined with a tailored version of the Basic Local Alignment Tool to extract exact and approximate string patterns shared between groups of documents.

The approach is applicable to a wide range of languages, and compensates for variability in the text of the documents as a result of differences in dialect, authorship, language change over time and errors due to inaccurate transcriptions and optical character recognition errors as a result of the digitisation process.

A number of case studies demonstrate that the approach is practical and generalisable to a wide range of archives with documents in different languages, domains and of varying quality.

The approach described can be applied to any digital archive of modern and contemporary texts. This makes the approach applicable to digital archives recording historic texts, but also those composed of more recent news articles, for example.

The analysis of “parallel passages” enables researchers to quantify the presence and extent of text-reuse in a collection of documents, which can provide useful data on author style, text genres and cultural contexts.

The approach is novel and addresses a need by humanities researchers for tools that can identify similar documents and local similarities represented by shared text sequences in a potentially vast large archive of documents. As far as the authors are aware, there are no tools currently exist that provide the same level of tolerance to the language of the documents.

The purpose of this paper is to asses the role of social networking sites (SNSs) in the 25 January 2011 Egyptian Revolution, also known as the “Arab Spring”.

The research methods used were an adaptive form of snowball sampling of a heterogeneous demographic group of participants in the Revolution, used to select focus groups to explore a range of relevant issues.

SNSs are shown to have played a central and pivotal role in the events known collectively as the Arab Spring. Their importance as a source of non‐governmental information and as a means of informing the external and internal community of internal events is highlighted by all participants.

The paper outlines research into contemporary events of global significance.