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As a tenured associate professor whose career has engaged various social justice issues, this chapter discusses the collaborative and shared decision-making process used to found and maintain basketball teams for seven years. The chapter also focuses on personal reflections of coaching club basketball as part of an auto-ethnography. The chapter explains the experiences that influenced a praxis focused on social justice as an attempt to infuse principles of equality and inclusiveness in opposition to harsh traditional coaching practices. Youth embraced an approach with little yelling, but some parents disapproved. Finally, this work discusses the limitations and successes of utilizing a social justice approach, including professional and health consequences.

Both explicitly and implicitly, the central role of my writing is given to social trust, especially to its role in sustainable social futuring as a form of agile society in the twenty-first century. I consider the characterisation of trust a crucial notion as a theoretical frame of my paper. In the first part of my writing, I plan to introduce trust as social capital opposed to financial capital and other forms of human capital, its role in agile society building, focussing on its function as a social connective tissue. The theoretical part will be followed by a retrospection to the twentieth century Industry 4.0 peculiarities as a way that leads societal actors to the creation of Society 5.0 on a scientific, technological and political level. I intend to prove or confute statements regarding the relationship between social trust and the space for inclusive and sustainable social futuring, and Industry 4.0 peculiarities and inventions as a way of creating Society 5.0 and generating greater trust towards it. Finally, I plan to draw conclusions of the lessons of social futuring activities as a tool of creating agile society. I find this paper an especially important one in addressing the challenges of social trust building, of finding the appropriate steps towards the creation of an agile and responsive society and in describing the characterisations of Society 5.0.

When we try to explain the dynamic relationship between actors and their environment, “unidirectional” paradigms clustered at either end of an agency–determinism continuum, theoretical absolutes, and a focus on final outcomes are of limited value. Comparative research is uniquely positioned to move beyond such limitations and toward accounts of organizing that incorporate variation, interests, and interaction. To guide comparative research toward this more relational approach, we (1) highlight a move toward the middle ground of the agency–determinism continuum, that is, varieties of interaction and mutual influence between actors and their environments across levels of analysis; and (2) propose to conceptualize actor–environment relations as a “negotiation.” We use this metaphorical lens to stimulate a focus on the variety of different “negotiation spaces” and “negotiation moves,” which actors may utilize in an organizational field to affect stability or change. We provide an exemplary application of the framework and conclude with some observation on the implications for future research.

The time period from the mid-1980s through 2002 is described in this series of research as a “pre-SOX” era of rapid deprofessionalization in U.S. pubic accountancy resulting in the loss of professional status. This was a period, however, when all professions were suffering some deprofessionalization. During the pre-SOX period it appears that leadership in public accountancy responded to a nearly perfect storm of changes confronting the profession with a corporate mentality of management by objectives, commercialization, and profit maximization resulting in constant and substantial net deprofessionalization greater than that of other professions. Starting in the late-1970s and continuing through 2001, some critics of public accountancy have asserted that leaders in the profession either lost or forgot what was required for public accountancy to be recognized as a profession. The conclusion stated in this paper is that public accountancy has lost its professional status in or before 2002. The reasons and events leading to this conclusion are presented and discussed. In the United States it appears as though once professional status is lost, regaining the elite status is more difficult. The question is if public accountancy can learn from history going into the substantial changes to be confronted in the post-SOX era of public accountancy and regain or at least make progress toward regaining professional status.

While extant research does mention performance management systems as antecedent to a management accountant’s role, and that there is tension between both, there is little detailed research. Thus, this paper aims to investigate the extent to which a performance management system interacts with the role of a management accountant.

The study is a cross-sectional field study, using interviews with paired management accountants and operative managers in 16 multinational organisations in Germany. The perspectives of both management accountants and operative managers are analysed separately. The role episode model theoretically informs the study.

The findings reveal management accountants distinguish between three roles of scorekeeping, controlling and business support, similar to prior literature. By contrast, operating managers are concerned with the value-adding and non-value-adding character of activities and thus support a dichotomy of management accountants’ roles. Drawing upon the role episode model, this study elucidates the interplay between performance management systems and the roles of management accountants, which encompass both role-taking and role-making dynamics. Additionally, this study contributes to management control literature by operationalising the components of a performance management system framework and linking them to the role of management accountants, as proposed by role antecedents in previous literature. The study also uncovers factors influencing role-taking and role-making, alongside examining the repercussions of role consensus or conflict based on the interaction with the operating manager.

This paper is subject to the normal limitations of case study research and generalisation. The findings may also be influenced by the cultural context of the study.

An updated role episode model is presented, highlighting further performance management systems’ components. The study also reveals factors enabling and/or inhibiting the management accountants’ business support role and the impact of role consensus/conflict.

In the context of the financial crash and the commercial property market downturn, the purpose of this paper is to examine the basis of valuation used in the UK commercial property lending process. Post‐crisis there is discussion of countercyclical measures, including the monitoring of asset prices; however there is no consideration of a different approach to property valuation. This paper questions this omission, given the role that valuations play in the bank regulatory process.

The different bases of valuation available to lenders within international valuation standards are identified as market value (MV), mortgage lending value (MLV) and investment value (IV), with MV being the most used in the UK. Using the different bases in the period before the financial crisis, the UK property market is modelled at a national office, retail and industrial/warehouse sector level to determine the performance of each alternative valuation basis within the context of countercyclical pressures on lending.

Both MLV and IV would have produced lower valuations than MV, although there are some practical issues involved in adopting the different bases for the bank lending.

The use of a different valuation basis could provide lenders with tools for more informed and prudent lending.

Prior accounting education literature documents that stereotypical images abound of the accountant as introverted, systematic, antisocial and boring. Although these stereotypes clash with the skills required of modern professional accountants to be problem solvers who regularly interact with people, the question is whether students wishing to become accountants still have these stereotyped perceptions. The purpose of this article is to investigate the preconceived notions of students in South Africa about accountants and whether these perceptions differ because of gender, home language or ethnical differences. A comparison is also made of the perceptions of school‐leavers and final‐year students to determine whether these perceptions change during students’ formal period of study at universities. This research, which is currently highly relevant, given the shortage of students pursuing careers as accountants, could contribute to the debate surrounding the concerns of the future of the accounting profession and the implications for contemporary accounting education. It was found that students perceive accountants as structured, precise and solitary individuals. However, students considered it to be an interesting profession. Significant differences were found between the perceptions of different ethnic groups. No significant differences were found between the perceptions of male and female students, or between Afrikaans‐ and English‐speaking students.

Much new work has been undertaken in the field of strategic management in recent years. Corporate planning, especially popular in the 1980s, has given way to new and dynamic management models. Similarly, various techniques for making organisations more effective such as ‘management by objectives’ (MBO) and ‘total quality management’ (TQM) have been employed. Business process re‐engineering (BPR) as proposed by Hammer and Champny was regarded as a radical leap forward in business organisation, but that is being challenged by the newer business transformation as propounded by Gouillart and Kelly and by the concept of the supply chain. Whatever management techniques are used, slimmer, flatter organisations are emerging as ‘right‐size’ and re‐organised organisations. The role of public relations in strategic management and organisation is crucial. Management theorists agree that good communication is vital to successful organisations. Despite the problems associated with it, BPR and its successors are expected to be major infuences on the way in which enterprises are organised. What is now required is a re‐thinking of the structure and role of public relations within process‐oriented organisations. This paper offers some initial thinking on how this could be done and the inherent difficulties. Some of the ideas are borrowed from BPR, but no judgement is made as to whether BPR is a ‘right’ approach. The paper then goes on to look at the implications for the way in which public relations can effectively contribute to ‘new’ organisations and the critical role of information technology.

This paper investigates the challenges and opportunities for the deployment of whistleblowing as an accountability mechanism to curb corruption and fraud in a developing country. Nigeria is the institutional setting for the study.

Adopting an institutional theory perspective and a survey protocol of urban residents in the country, the study presents evidence on the whistleblowing program introduced in 2016. Nigeria’s whistleblowing initiative targets all types of corruption, including corporate fraud.

This study finds that, even in the context of a developing country, whistleblowing is supported as an accountability mechanism, but the intervention lacks awareness, presents a high risk to whistleblowers and regulators, including the risk of physical elimination, and is fraught with institutional and operational challenges. In effect, awareness of whistleblowing laws, operational challenges and an institutional environment conducive to venality undermine the efficacy of whistleblowing in Nigeria.

The study presents a model of challenges and opportunities for whistleblowing in a developing democracy. The authors argue that the existence of a weak and complex institutional environment and the failure of program institutionalization explain those challenges and opportunities. The authors also argue that a culturally anchored and institutionalized whistleblowing program encourages positive civic behavior by incentivizing citizens to act as custodians of their resources, and it gives voice to the voiceless who have endured decades of severe hardship and loss of dignity due to corruption.