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‘We are striking at the root of the whole educational system.’ The Young Volunteer Force, which has involved young people all over the country, is now in danger of collapse through lack of funds. Alison Dunn talked to Anthony Steen, the director, about the organization, its work and his part in it.

The Government's economic policy has branded nearly a quarter of a million school‐leavers as unemployed and herded them into a dead‐end. The Government's social philosophy will ensure that they stay there. The situation will deteriorate further since the Government views the rising tide of unemployed school leavers as a short term phenomenon soon to go away. It won't. The evidence shouts aloud: there were 28,000 unemployed school leavers in 1968, 58,000 in 1971, 158,000 in 1975, and now 209,000 in 1976 and rising. Today, 20 per cent of young people under the age of 21 are without work.

With the period of consultation for the Government's document Training for the Future now over, a wide range of comments and criticisms has been collected by the Secretary of State for Employment from employers, trade unionists and educationists alike. The central point of discussion has inevitably been the proposed abolition of the levy/grant system and the transfer of the financing of training to the National Training Agency (NTA). The majority of opinions expressed have been in opposition to this — even a minority at the Confederation of British Industry thought that without the levy/grant training opportunities could well deteriorate.

May 1,1969 Redundancy — “Offer of suitable employment” — Headmaster — Dismissal — Offer of employment at same salary in mobile pool of teachers — Whether “suitable” employment — Whether “unreasonably refused” — Redundancy Payments Act, 1965 (c. 62), ss. l(2)(a), 2(4)

The cardinal point to note here is that the development (and unfortunately the likely potential) of area policy is intimately related to the actual character of British social policy. Whilst area policy has been strongly influenced by Pigou's welfare economics, by the rise of scientific management in the delivery of social services (cf Jaques 1976; Whittington and Bellamy 1979), by the accompanying development of operational analyses and by the creation of social economics (see Pigou 1938; Sandford 1977), social policy continues to be enmeshed with the flavours of Benthamite utilitatianism and Social Darwinism (see, above all, the Beveridge Report 1942; Booth 1889; Rowntree 1922, 1946; Webb 1926). Consequently, for their entire history area policies have been coloured by the principles of a national minimum for the many and giving poorer areas a hand up, rather than a hand out. The preceived need to save money (C.S.E. State Apparatus and Expenditure Group 1979; Klein 1974) and the (supposed) ennobling effects of self help have been the twin marching orders for area policy for decades. Private industry is inadvertently called upon to plug the resulting gaps in public provision. The conjunction of a reluctant state and a meandering private sector has fashioned the decaying urban areas of today. Whilst a large degree of party politics and commitment has characterised the general debate over the removal of poverty (Holman 1973; MacGregor 1981), this has for the most part bypassed the ‘marginal’ poorer areas (cf Green forthcoming). Their inhabitants are not usually numerically significant enough to sway general, party policies (cf Boulding 1967) and the problems of most notably the inner cities has been underplayed.

This paper aims to contribute to the construction of a framework that makes risk management (RM) more effective and visible. This is done by investigating how the concept of “risk” is included in various activities in the management accounting and control (MA&C) system.

A cross-sectional analysis of 72 Danish organisations extracted from an alumni database is conducted together with a factor analysis and a partial least squares structural equation modelling approach.

The authors find four latent variables, namely, expectation, attitude, subjective norms, processes and culture, which all have risk activities in MA&C as the depending variable. Attitude seems to be a powerful antecedent, whereas supporting processes and culture play a crucial partial mediator role for the inclusion of risk.

The findings add to the understanding of the interrelationships between risk and MA&C. An important caveat is that the authors use soft and self-reported data for the dependent variable and for the various independent variables.

The authors propose a dynamic and holistic framework for the analysis of risk. This framework eliminates the limitations found in many prior studies that have neglected the interrelated importance of attitude and supporting processes and culture. The results of this study also provide valuable insights for managers who wish to consider and to explore the interrelations of a number of antecedent risk issues that influence different risk activities in MA&C.

This paper is one of the few papers that assess the impact of different risk issues on firms’ different MA&C activities by including the theory of planned behaviour. The potential key role that supporting processes and culture play as partial mediators for risk inclusion is particularly interesting. The research extends prior research by constructing a framework that makes that implementation of RM processes in the MA&C system more effective. It also proposes a validation process that can lessen the model risk possible.

The plethora of changes in the corporate governance landscape over the past two decades has the potential to tighten governance regimes and influence the preference of supervisory board members vis-à-vis the involved decision-making role of business unit (BU) controllers and their independent fiduciary role. Stricter financial reporting and compliance requirements may lead organizations to prioritize the latter role. However, recent studies support the need to balance these roles, inducing the potential for role conflict. The purpose of this study is to shed light on the influence of a tight and loose governance regime on this balance as preferred by supervisory board members.

This study uses a unique data set from an experiment among 73 supervisory board members. The authors take their perspective because compliance with governance codes and corporate policies are relevant topics for their function.

The authors find evidence for the preference of supervisory board members for “all-round” BU controllers who, irrespective of the governance regime, demonstrate substantial levels of fiduciary and decision-making qualities and deal with the resulting role conflict.

The outcomes of the experiment among supervisory board members provide evidence for their preferences concerning the balance of the two primary controller roles and for the potential of role conflict. The authors have not found studies that provide such empirical evidence.

The confusion over what counts as “strategic” is widely acknowledged to be a problem for both research and practice. The paper aims to develop a robust definition of “strategic decisions” and a classifying tool that distinguishes them from grand tactical, tactical, and other organizational decisions.

An extensive literature review focused on the leading journals is carried out. Articles having “strategic decision” in the abstract are retrieved from EBSCO Host and ProQuest One Academic databases. Definitions of “strategic decisions” are critically assessed and classified to form the trigger and basis of the development of new definition.

The literature review identifies five approaches by which strategic decisions are defined, and their limitations are exposed. The proposed definitions of “strategic,” grand tactical, and tactical decisions, and the novel classification tree, used to distinguish those decisions, are shown to be more accurate and robust than those previously offered in the literature.

New definitions of “strategic,” grand tactical, and tactical decisions are offered; and a new classifying tool is developed.

Electric mobility as a service (eMaaS) is suggested as a possible solution to ease transportation and lessen environmental issues by providing a collaborative transport sharing infrastructure that is based on electric vehicles (EVs) such as electric cars, electric bicycles and so on. Accordingly, this study aims to propose a multi-tier architecture to support the collection, processing, analytics and usage of mobility data in providing eMaaS within smart cities. The architecture uses application programming interfaces to enable interoperability between different infrastructures required for eMaaS and allow multiple partners to exchange and share data for making decision regarding electric mobility services.

Design science methodology based on a case study by interview was used to collect data from an infrastructure company in Norway to verify the applicability of the proposed multi-tier architecture.

Findings suggest that the architecture offers an approach for collecting, aggregating, processing and provisioning of data originating from sources to improve electric mobility in smart cities. More importantly, findings from this study provide guidance for municipalities and policymakers in improving electric mobility services. Moreover, the author’s findings provide a practical data-driven mobility use case that can be used by transport companies in deploying eMaaS in smart cities.

Data was collected from a single company in Norway, hence, it is required to further verify the architecture with data collected from other companies.

eMaaS operates on heterogeneous data, which are generated from EVs and used by citizens and stakeholders such as city administration, municipality transport providers, charging station providers and so on. Therefore, the proposed architecture enables the sharing and usage of generated data as openly available data to be used in creating value-added services to improve citizen’s quality of life and viability of businesses.

This study proposes the deployment of electric mobility to address increased usage of vehicles, which contributes to pollution of the environment that has a serious effect on citizen’s quality of life.

This study proposes a multi-tier architecture that stores, processes, analyze and provides data and related services to improve electric mobility within smart cities. The multi-tier architecture aims to support and increase eMaaS operation of EVs toward improving transportation services for city transport operators and citizens for sustainable transport and mobility system.

This paper contributes to the literature by discussing the impact of machine learning (ML) on management accounting (MA) and the management accountant based on three sources: academic articles, papers and reports from accounting bodies and consulting companies. The purpose of this paper is to identify, discuss and provide suggestions for how ML could be included in research and education in the future for the management accountant.

This paper identifies three types of studies on the influence of ML on MA issued between 2015 and 2021 in mainstream accounting journals, by professional accounting bodies and by large consulting companies.

First, only very few academic articles actually show examples of using ML or using different algorithms related to MA issues. This is in contrast to other research fields such as finance and logistics. Second, the literature review also indicates that if the management accountants want to keep up with the demand of their qualifications, they must take action now and begin to discuss how big data and other concepts from artificial intelligence and ML can benefit MA and the management accountant in specific ways.

Even though the paper may be classified as inspirational in nature, the paper documents and discusses the revised environment that surrounds the accountant today. The paper concludes by highlighting specifically the necessity of including exploratory data analysis and unsupervised ML in the field of MA to close the existing gaps in both education and research and thus making the MA profession future-proof.