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In an earlier paper in this journal (Peel, Groves and Pendlebury, 1990), we outlined a major research project, being conducted at the Cardiff Business School, into the impact of privatisation/share‐ownership on the ‘financial awareness’ of employees.

After the ratification of the peace treaty and the establishment of diplomatic relations with Israel, Jordan was expected to play a major role in the Middle East financial market. As a result of the peace treaty Jordan may attract overseas investors to invest in the Amman Financial Market (AFM). Consequently, the level of information disclosed by companies listed on the AFM will become an important issue for prospective investors. This study empirically examined the effect of specific financial characteristics on the comprehensiveness of disclosure in the annual reports of a sample of 54 companies listed on the AFM. The variables tested in this study were market related: industry, audit firm size and market capitalisation; performance related: profit margin, return on equity and liquidity, and structure related: assets, sales, leverage and ownership. The empirical evidence revealed that company size (measured by assets and market capitalisation), leverage and return on equity were statistically related to the comprehensiveness of disclosure of the sample companies listed on the AFM. Reporting improved after international standards were adopted. Large companies were more involved in long term borrowing which requires detailed reporting. Size was the main predictor in comprehensive reporting.

When, after NLW/LAR to‐ing and fro‐ing about a successor to Peter Labdon as editor of NLW, I took on the job, Roger Walter suggested that he interview me. He reminded me that I had interviewed him for LAR (November 1975) just before he became its first full‐time journalist editor. Some days later, and trying to see if there was something in it for NLW, I sat in the smoke‐filled LAR editorial office, swung about in the advertising executive's swivel chair, adjusted my green eye‐shade and suggested that RW and I interview each other and each publish the result in the other's journal. This whimsy was not pursued, but we did agree a date for a meeting, one or two topics we would discuss, and that the resultant interviews would be published without further consultation between us.

New educators may feel overwhelmed by the options available for engaging students through classroom participation. However, it may be helpful to recognize that participatory pedagogical systems often have constructivist roots. Adopting a constructivist perspective, our paper considers three meta-practices that encourage student participation: designing activities, leading others, and assessing peers. We explored the consequences of these meta-practices for important student outcomes, including content knowledge, engagement, self-efficacy, sense of community, and self-awareness. We found that different meta-practices were associated with different combinations of outcomes. This discovery demonstrates the benefit of studying meta- practices so as to reveal the nuanced effects that may arise from pedagogical choices. In addition, an understanding of meta-practices can help leadership educators to be more discerning and intentional in their course designs.

This research investigates wine drinkers' engagement with sparkling wine, including why they drink it, how they evaluate it, and certain country‐based preferences they have for it. It used qualitative processes with both professional and non‐professional informants, and was designed to explore in depth what drinkers feel about the product and their appraisal of its quality. The study confirms some existing assumptions about sparkling wine (for instance, its role as a symbol of celebration and country of origin issues) but also offers new suggestions about its function. Specifically, the study suggests that consumption of sparkling wine has more symbolic than experiential significance — and specifically that the role of memory and recollection may be important for some consumers. It also highlights the problems many drinkers have evaluating sparkling wine due to factors inherent in the style of wine (such as delicacy and mousse), as well as extraneous issues such as a paucity of benchmarks. The findings are useful to the marketer of sparkling wine as they offer insights into the motivation of those who drink it.

Gives an in depth view of the strategies pursued by the world’s leading chief executive officers in an attempt to provide guidance to new chief executives of today. Considers the marketing strategies employed, together with the organizational structures used and looks at the universal concepts that can be applied to any product. Uses anecdotal evidence to formulate a number of theories which can be used to compare your company with the best in the world. Presents initial survival strategies and then looks at ways companies can broaden their boundaries through manipulation and choice. Covers a huge variety of case studies and examples together with a substantial question and answer section.

As Gonedes and Dopuch point out, there are many alternative approaches to the allocation of financial accounting information which might be viewed as competitors to ASC, FASB and other extant processes. Even if one begins with the ethical premise that “individual preferences are to count” and it is assumed that some sort of regulatory approach is needed, there are still at least three basic types of standards‐setting processes worthy of consideration: (1) “representative or expert body” processes; (2) “voting” processes; and (3) “demand‐based” (i.e. “willingness‐to‐pay”) processes. While the first type relies on the delegation of decision making authority to a body of “representative” or “expert” parties, the latter two types base their respective decisions on ordinal preference and demand information elicited directly from the affected parties themselves.

This paper examines the 2012–2013 Starbucks tax crisis in the United Kingdom (UK) as an anatomy of tragedy. The tragedy in relation to Starbucks is the displacement of an opportunity to examine the relationship between financial capital and national capitalisms. The paper illustrates how the crisis displaced opportunities for substantive critique concerning financial capital, national capitalisms, multinationals, taxation and society.

As a critical, discursive intervention, the paper examines how rhetoric was employed in 157 media articles published in six UK newspapers and on two news portals (both in print and online). The paper employs rhetorical redescription to the document archive, presenting the finding and analysis as a play in the style of an Aristotelian tragedy.

Analysis of the Starbucks approach to transfer pricing identifies misunderstandings of accounting, taxation transfer pricing, and ‘‘resolution” and how the media's construction of Starbucks as immoral, anti-British, potentially illegal operated to confuse the politics. The effect of these misunderstandings and confusion was to take attention away from a politics concerning financial capital valorisation and national capitalisms (jurisdictions raising tax revenue for government spending and social services).

First, the paper explores the politics of displacement to illustrate the metonymic concealment of the primary identity of the political. Second, Aristotelian tragedy is employed to study and present methods of displacement. Third, the empirics are depicted in a dramatic format to illustrate how rhetorical interventions by the media and actors displaced the political focus away from financial capital and national capitalisms.

There was a time in Britain when even senior representatives of the financial services industry were prepared to be quoted in the press as expressing doubts as to whether there was anything intrinsically wrong with directors and other corporate insiders taking advantage of their better knowledge about their companies in their own investment dealings. Indeed, some even went so far as to say that this was both proper and natural. True it is that, in Britain or for that much in continental Europe, there are few, even among the groves of academia, that would have advanced the theories justifying insider dealing that Professor Henry Manne so clearly articulated in ‘Insider Trading and the Stock Market’. Nonetheless, in what was then the leading book on the law and practice of the stock market, the authors, a leading Queen's Counsel and an eminent stockbroker, expressed the view in 1972 that a stockbroker who learnt even privileged information should not allow this to operate to the detriment of his client. Having said this, Sir Winston Churchill complained that it was defamatory to assert that advantage had been taken of ‘inside information’ during the so‐called Marconi scandal in 1911, and there are comments in a report to the House of Commons by special commissioners as early as November 1696 roundly criticising promoters of over‐valued stock selling out, in the entrepreneurial fashion eloquently advocated by Professor Manne, on the basis of their privileged knowledge and position. Thus, discussion of the pros and cons of insider dealing, at least in Britain, has tended to be emotional rather than based on economic or even pseudo‐economic analysis of empirical data. Even the surveys that have been conducted on attitudes to the practice would hardly impress a statistician.

Provides a response to Puxty et al.′s call for academics to become involved in public policy debate. Addresses the issue of the effect on British university accounting research of the promotion and undertaking of continual research selectivity exercises. This should be of direct concern to accounting and other academics. The key message is that greater co‐operation, not competition, is needed both to secure a healthy future for academic accounting across the broad range of institutions in which the subject is researched and taught, and to provide a worthwhile educational experience for all students, not just the favoured few.