Stuart Michelson, Jud Stryker and Betty Thorne
The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of the Sarbanes‐Oxley (SOX) Act of 2002 on small corporations when compared to large firms and to investigate differences…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of the Sarbanes‐Oxley (SOX) Act of 2002 on small corporations when compared to large firms and to investigate differences perceived by small and large firms with respect to costs and internal controls.
Design/methodology/approach
A questionnaire containing 20 questions (five demographic and 15 addressing issues related to SOX implementation) was mailed to 5,479 board members, chief executive officers (CEOs) and chief financial officers (CFOs) of 676 separate firms with 117 completed surveys returned.
Findings
The results of the study show significant differences in the responses between small and large firms concerning: the overall impact of SOX on the firm; the amount of time dedicated to SOX; the role of the external auditor; the firm's implementation stage; the most significant challenges due to SOX implementation; the corporate governance reforms instituted; and changes in board compensation.
Research limitations/implications
The basic limitation of this paper is the low‐response rate (slightly more than 2 per cent) which is not surprising since CEOs, CFOs, and board of directors have a low tendency to respond to surveys.
Originality/value
The findings of this paper suggest that: recent actions taken by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) are appropriate in providing much needed relief for smaller public firms; and lend support for further actions of assistance by the SEC. This paper is of value to academicians, practitioners and to an international audience engaged in the harmonization of accounting standards.
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Student speech has and continues to be a contested issue in schools. While the Supreme Court ruled in Tinker that students do not shed their rights at the schoolhouse gate, in the…
Abstract
Student speech has and continues to be a contested issue in schools. While the Supreme Court ruled in Tinker that students do not shed their rights at the schoolhouse gate, in the Kuhlmeier and Fraser decisions the Court gave school officials greater latitude in regulating student speech, especially when it bears the imprimatur of the school. However, in its Frederick decision, the Court established school officials as the arbiters of the meaning of student speech. This chapter will explore the underlying values in schools that rejected the speech of Fraser while accepting the speech act of cheerleaders’ dance routines. It will examine how the interpretation of these speech acts by school officials contributes to gender reproduction, with all the inequalities imposed.
Elaine Enarson and Lourdes Meyreles
This article provides an introduction and assessment of the English and Spanish literatures on gender relations in disaster contexts. We analyze regional patterns of differences…
Abstract
This article provides an introduction and assessment of the English and Spanish literatures on gender relations in disaster contexts. We analyze regional patterns of differences and similarities in women’s disaster experiences and the differing research questions raised by these patterns in the scholarly and practice‐based literature. The analysis supports the claim that how gender is theorized makes a difference in public policy and practical approaches to disaster risk management. We propose new directions in the field of disaster social science and contribute a current bibliography in the emerging gender and disaster field.
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The following is a complete list of World's Records as officially homologated by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale up to June 30, 1929
THE question of display in libraries becomes more important with the days. It is therefore a peculiar pleasure to us to publish a fine article by Mr. Savage on this. From his…
Abstract
THE question of display in libraries becomes more important with the days. It is therefore a peculiar pleasure to us to publish a fine article by Mr. Savage on this. From his earliest days the ex‐President has been deeply and practically interested in book‐display. We believe that nearly forty years ago he and Mr. Jast worked out many experiments in it which are occasionally revived by those who have quite forgotten their origin. He was, we think, the first librarian here to take an ordinary shop as a branch library and dress its window as if it were a bookshop. Before him few English libraries used colour to any extent, or were aware of the aesthetic value of plants, flowers, curtains and well‐shaped furniture.
Viewing the last dying embers of 1984, the Orwel‐lian year of Big Brother and some of its not‐so‐far off the mark predictions, the unemployment which one cannot help feeling is…
Abstract
Viewing the last dying embers of 1984, the Orwel‐lian year of Big Brother and some of its not‐so‐far off the mark predictions, the unemployment which one cannot help feeling is more apparent than real, it is hardly surprising that the subject of Poverty or the so‐called Poverty arise. The real poverty of undernourished children, soup kitchens, children suffering at Christmas, hungry children ravenously consuming free school meals has not, even now, returned.
Keith Newton, Norman Leckie and Barrie O. Pettman
The body of literature in the field now commonly known as the “quality of working life” (QWL) has grown steadily over a period in which the industrialised nations have…
Abstract
The body of literature in the field now commonly known as the “quality of working life” (QWL) has grown steadily over a period in which the industrialised nations have increasingly come to question the role and status of human beings in the modern technological environment. In recent years concern with the nature of work, its impact upon people, and their attitudes towards it, seem to have sharpened. Investigation of, and experimentation with, the qualitative aspects of working life—its ability to confer self‐fulfilment directly, for example, as opposed to being a means of acquiring goods—has gained momentum under the influence of a unique set of economic, social, political and technological factors. The outpouring of books, reports and articles from a wide variety of sources has, not surprisingly, grown apace.
WE begin a new year, in which we wish good things for all who work in libraries and care for them, in circumstances which are not unpropitious. At times raven voices prophesy the…
Abstract
WE begin a new year, in which we wish good things for all who work in libraries and care for them, in circumstances which are not unpropitious. At times raven voices prophesy the doom of a profession glued to things so transitory as books are now imagined to be, by some. Indeed, so much is this a dominant fear that some librarians, to judge by their utterances, rest their hopes upon other recorded forms of knowledge‐transmission; forms which are not necessarily inimical to books but which they think in the increasing hurry of contemporary life may supersede them. These fears have not been harmful in any radical way so far, because they may have increased the librarian's interest in the ways of bringing books to people and people to books by any means which successful business firms use (for example) to advertise what they have to sell. The modern librarian becomes more and more the man of business; some feel he becomes less and less the scholar; but we suggest that this is theory with small basis in fact. Scholars are not necessarily, indeed they can rarely be, bookish recluses; nor need business men be uncultured. For men of plain commonsense there need be few ways of life that are so confined that they exclude their followers from other ways and other men's ideas and activities. And, as for the transitoriness of books and the decline of reading, we ourselves decline to acknowledge or believe in either process. Books do disappear, as individuals. It is well that they do for the primary purpose of any book is to serve this generation in which it is published; and, if there survive books that we, the posterity of our fathers, would not willingly let die, it is because the life they had when they were contemporary books is still in them. Nothing else can preserve a book as a readable influence. If this were not so every library would grow beyond the capacity of the individual or even towns to support; there would, in the world of readers, be no room for new writers and their books, and the tragedy that suggests is fantastically unimaginable. A careful study, recently made of scores of library reports for 1951–52, which it is part of our editorial duty to make, has produced the following deductions. Nearly every public library, and indeed other library, reports quite substantial increases in the use made of it; relatively few have yet installed the collections of records as alternatives to books of which so much is written; further still, where “readers” and other aids to the reading of records, films, etc., have been installed, the use of them is most modest; few librarians have a book‐fund that is adequate to present demands; fewer have staffs adequate to the demands made upon them for guidance by the advanced type of readers or for doing thoroughly the most ordinary form of book‐explanation. It is, in one sense a little depressing, but there is the challenging fact that these islands contain a greater reading population than they ever had. One has to reflect that of our fifty millions every one, including infants who have not cut their teeth, the inhabitants of asylums, the illiterate—and, alas, there are still thousands of these—and the drifters and those whose vain boast is that “they never have time to read a book”—every one of them reads six volumes a year. A further reflection is that public libraries may be the largest distributors, but there are many others and in the average town there may be a half‐dozen commercial, institutional and shop‐libraries, all distributing, for every public library. This fact is stressed by our public library spending on books last year at some two million pounds, a large sum, but only one‐tenth of the money the country spent on books. There are literally millions of book‐readers who may or may not use the public library, some of them who do not use any library but buy what they read. The real figure of the total reading of our people would probably be astronomical or, at anyrate, astonishing.
Maria Lorentzon and Karen Bryan
Respect for people with dementia and their involvement in service planning is explored, based on selected research publications and policy papers, mainly from the Department of…
Abstract
Respect for people with dementia and their involvement in service planning is explored, based on selected research publications and policy papers, mainly from the Department of Health and the Alzheimer's Society. This article supports the inclusion of people with dementia care in service planning as part of person‐centred care. Necessary adjustments to research methods and ethics committee procedures for gaining informed consent are discussed, as is the importance of ethical policy formation and implementation, in order to achieve person‐centred care. This will ensure a high degree of active involvement by people with dementia, enhancing self‐respect and responding to the needs of this often marginalised population.