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The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the hostility many young women who are also mothers experience within their everyday lives.

The paper will draw on qualitative research, incorporating a narrative approach, to illustrate the hostility many young mothers experience on a daily basis. The research design included a focus group, semi-structure interviews and participant observations.

The paper reports the findings of a study that explored the experiences of young women who are also mothers. The author presents the findings that indicate that many young women, who are also young mothers, experience hostile reactions and interactions as part of their everyday lives.

The small sample size means that this study cannot be generalised, but it does contribute to the growing body of qualitative evidence in relation to young mothers.

The findings suggest that there needs to be more recognition and acknowledgement of the hostility young women experience. Such hostility could have deleterious consequences on the young women, their parenting ability and also on the children.

This paper documents the experiences of young women who are also mothers and how they experience hostility as a daily occurrence. The hostility ranged from verbal to non-verbal and how they felt they were being treated, inferences about their sexuality to stereotyping.

When Theodore Levitt discussed how firms respond to the question “what business are we in?”, he highlighted the myopic perceptions of some because they viewed their business as “running a railroad” or “making films” — rather than being “in the transport or entertainment market”.

This study examines whether a regulation on mandatory disclosure of financial forecasts since June 1991 and further sanction imposition since March 1998 contribute to lower IPO firms’ initial and aftermarket returns, and shorten honeymoon periods. The study is based on 423 IPO firms after the regulation required them to disclose their forecasts and 53 IPO firms prior to the regulation. The findings report that initial and aftermarket returns are lower, and honeymoon periods are shorter in the post‐regulation period than those in the pre‐regulation. The findings also report that initial and aftermarket returns are relatively smaller, and the honeymoon periods are shorter after the March 1998 regulatory sanction was imposed after controlling other variables. These results document that the financial forecasts disclosure regulation evidently contributes to mitigating information asymmetry.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether Shared Reading (SR), a specific literature-based intervention, is transposable to a prison context and whether mental health benefits identified in other custodial and non-custodial settings were reported by women prisoners.

In all, 35 participants were recruited within an all-female maximum security prison and attended one of two weekly reading groups. Qualitative data were collected through researcher observation of the reading groups; interviews and focus group discussions with participants and prison staff; interviews with the project worker leading the reading groups; and a review of records kept by the latter during group sessions.

Attendance rates were good, with nearly half of the participants voluntarily present at =60 per cent of sessions. Two intrinsic psychological processes associated with the SR experience were provisionally identified, “memory and continuities” and “mentalisation”, both of which have therapeutic implications for the treatment of conditions like depression and personality disorder.

Limitations included the small sample, lack of control for confounding variables, and constraints imposed on data collection by the custodial setting.

Although more controlled research is required, the findings indicate that women prisoners will voluntarily engage with SR if given appropriate support, and that the intervention has potential to augment psychological processes that are associated with increased well-being.

From the mid‐nineteenth to the early twentieth century universities and colleges were founded throughout Australia and New Zealand in the context of the expanding British Empire. This article provides an analytical framework to understand the engagement between changing ideas of higher education at the centre of Empire and within the settler societies in the Antipodes. Imperial influences remained significant, but so was locality in association with the role of the emerging state, while the idea of the public purpose of higher education helped to widen social access forming and sustaining the basis of middle class professions.

This paper explores the way in which industrial pollution has been expressed in the narrative accounts of nature, landscape and industry by William Gilpin in his 18th-century picturesque travel writings. A positive description of pollution is generally outdated and unacceptable in the current society. The authors contrast his “picturesque” view with the contemporary perception of industrial pollution, reflect on these early accounts of industrial impacts as representing the roots of impression management and use the analysis to inform current accounting.

The research uses an interpretive content analysis of the text to draw out themes and features of impression management. Goffman's impression management is the theoretical lens through which Gilpin's travel accounts are interpreted, considering this microhistory through a thematic research approach. The picturesque accounts are explored with reference to the context of impression management.

Gilpin's travel writings and the “Picturesque” aesthetic movement, it appears, constructed a social reality around negative industrial externalities such as air pollution and indeed around humans' impact on nature, through a lens which described pollution as adding aesthetically to the natural landscape. The lens through which the picturesque tourist viewed and expressed negative externalities involved quite literally the tourists' tricks of the trade, Claude glass, called also Gray's glass, a tinted lens to frame the view.

The paper adds to the wealth of literature in accounting and business pertaining to the ways in which companies socially construct reality through their accounts and links closely to the impression management literature in accounting. There is also a body of literature relating to the use of images and photographs in published corporate reports, which again is linked to impression management as well as to a growing literature exploring the potential for the aesthetic influence in accounting and corporate communication. Further, this paper contributes to the growing body of research into the historical roots of environmental reporting.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a possible framework for extinction accounting which builds on but also extends significantly the existing GRI guidelines relating to species identified by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red List as under threat of extinction.

The paper analyses disclosures relating to rhinoceros conservation and protection produced by top South African-listed companies in order to assess the current state of “extinction accounting”. Following this analysis, the authors explore and discuss a potential framework for extinction accounting which may be used by companies to demonstrate their accountability for species and disclose the ways in which they are working alone, and in partnerships, to prevent species extinction.

Corporate disclosures relating to rhinoceros may be interpreted as emancipatory. The authors identify several disclosure themes dealing with rhinoceros in integrated and sustainability reports of large South African companies and on their websites. Contrary to initial expectations, there is evidence to suggest corporate awareness of the importance of addressing the risk of this species becoming extinct.

The authors have relied on public corporate disclosures and would like to extend the work further to include interview data for a further paper.

An extinction accounting framework may be applied to corporate accounting and accountability for any species under threat of extinction. The framework may also be considered for use as a tool for institutional investors as well as NGO engagement and dialogue with stakeholder companies.

The rhinoceros has, from the analysis, significant cultural, heritage, eco-tourism and intrinsic value. Developing and implementing an emancipatory extinction accounting framework to prevent extinction will have a substantial social and environmental impact.

This is the first attempt to the knowledge to explore accounting for extinction and a possible extinction accounting framework. It is also the first attempt to investigate accounting and accountability for the rhinoceros.

The purpose of this paper is to examine external auditors' perceptions of the impact of audit committee financial expertise and industry expertise on the mediating role played by the committee in resolving auditor‐client disagreements.

The study is a 2×2 between subjects experimental design, using 61 Malaysian auditors as participants. The authors manipulate audit committee financial expertise and industry expertise at high and low levels.

It is found that external auditors perceive that audit committees play a greater mediating role and use mediating techniques to a greater extent when committee members' financial and industry expertise is high compared to when expertise is lower.

This is the first paper to examine the importance of audit committee expertise on the mediating role of the audit committee. The major contribution of the paper is the finding that auditors believe the audit committee's role as a mediator is strengthened not only by the committee members' accounting and auditing expertise but also by their industry expertise. The paper's findings have implications for practitioners and regulators who are concerned with the role of the audit committee in enhancing the integrity of the financial reporting and audit process.

The purpose of this paper is to update and re‐examine the role of corporate narrative reporting in improving investors' ability to better forecast future earnings change. The paper also aims to construct a risk factor for disclosure quality (DQ) and test whether such a factor is useful in explaining the time‐series variation of UK stock returns.

The paper uses the return‐future earnings regression model to update and re‐examine the value relevance of DQ for investors. It also constructs a DQ factor and adds it to Fama‐French three‐factor model. This is undertaken in order to investigate the usefulness of such a factor in explaining the time‐series variation of UK portfolio returns over and above the role of the original Fama‐French factors.

The paper contributes to the market‐based accounting research in three crucial ways. First, it offers updated evidence on the usefulness of corporate narrative reporting to investors. Second, it offers evidence that the DQ factor is a significant risk factor in the UK. Third, and finally, it finds that the Fama‐French factors might contain DQ‐related information.

The results suggest that narrative reporting contains value‐relevant information for the stock market. Therefore, regulators should think about asking companies to produce compulsory narrative sections (i.e. operating and financial reviews) in their annual reports.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this paper is the first to construct and add the DQ factor in the original Fama‐French factors.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between remuneration for the achievement of objectives and sustainability, and – more specifically – the amount of attention that listed companies in Italy devote to defining, and consequently to communicating externally, sustainability as a criterion in establishing the wage levels of managers and directors.

It was decided to ascertain whether the quality of information regarding sustainability provided in connection with the remuneration policies of listed companies tallies with the general quality of information regarding sustainability provided through companies’ main (obligatory and voluntary) reporting procedures.

The results of this research show that the inconsistency between the information provided in voluntary and obligatory reports (between reports on sustainability and remuneration reports) extends to the levels of information provided in the two types of obligatory report (the reports on remuneration and on management); there is also a discrepancy between the levels of information provided in these reports and the evaluation of that information by an external assessor.

One of the limitations of this research is that as the data examined were gleaned from public documents, it is not necessarily an accurate reflection of all the information that firms have at their disposal on questions of sustainability and remuneration policies. The existence of internal documents containing other information, and therefore leading to different results, cannot be ruled out.

This study is the first in Italy to examine the question of how limited companies report issues relating to management by objectives-corporate social responsibility. It does this through the introduction of a mixed system for ESG information, which counteracts the subjective limitations of the internal evaluation provided by the research group by adding in the authoritative evaluations of an external assessor.