Louis J. Stewart and Carol A. Cox
We reviewed the fiscal 2003 financial statement footnote disclosures of the fifty states and the 100 largest cities in the United States (US) to ascertain the nature and extent of…
Abstract
We reviewed the fiscal 2003 financial statement footnote disclosures of the fifty states and the 100 largest cities in the United States (US) to ascertain the nature and extent of derivative activities among US state and municipal governments. There were 23 state governments and 23 municipal governments that have engaged in such transactions with an aggregate notional value approaching $32 billion. These governments enter into these transactions primarily to hedge the interest rate and cash flow risks associated with their long term variable rate demand obligations and auction rate debt. Our findings also indicate that the widespread implementation of GASB TB 2003 - 1 has improved the quality of state and municipal disclosures with respect to their derivative activities. In June 2008, the GASB issued its Statement 53 which mandates the accounting measurement of these derivative financial instruments at their fair value on the statement of net assets and promises to further improve their footnote disclosure.
Carol Cox, Tony Blockley, Rachel Hagan and Adrian James
This article is timely due to the current high attrition of officers (National Police Chiefs Council, 2023) and will explore the literature surrounding retention and attrition of…
Abstract
Purpose
This article is timely due to the current high attrition of officers (National Police Chiefs Council, 2023) and will explore the literature surrounding retention and attrition of officers, the impact of this on trust and confidence, and the need to understand the reasons why officers join the service coupled with their expectations of the police as a long-term career (>10 years).
Design/methodology/approach
This research will describe a study using a survey that examined views of 120 new recruits from 3 UK police forces on why they joined the service.
Findings
It notes that many still see the police service as a long-term career and indicate little intention of leaving, raising further questions surrounding the reasons for the current high attrition rates. It concludes with where police forces could focus to improve retention, suggesting some reasons for the attrition such as low job satisfaction, poor welfare and organisation culture, and some practical suggestions as to where police forces could focus to improve retention.
Research limitations/implications
Albeit this research was sent to a small sample (n = 127) and did not address shift work issues or welfare support, it will serve as a foundational pilot. The research initial findings can inform future studies with more detailed analyses and targeted strategies to enhance officer retention and public trust in the police force.
Practical implications
The research aims to provide insights into how recruitment motivations and job satisfaction impact long-term retention.
Social implications
This research highlights the significance of examining the reasons for new recruits joining the service, and of implementing retention strategies prioritising stability, officer support, and community engagement to cultivate a trusting relationship between the police and the public.
Originality/value
This study was designed to examine if current new police officers still view the police as a long-term career choice and to identify if their reasons for joining the service have changed with the current political climate of policing in the UK.
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Ian Pepper, Carol Cox, Ruth Fee, Shane Horgan, Rod Jarman, Matthew Jones, Nicoletta Policek, Colin Rogers and Clive Tattum
The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) for Higher Education in the UK focuses on maintaining, enhancing and standardising the quality of higher education. Of significant impact are…
Abstract
Purpose
The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) for Higher Education in the UK focuses on maintaining, enhancing and standardising the quality of higher education. Of significant impact are the development of subject benchmark statements (SBS) by the QAA, which describe the type and content of study along with the academic standards expected of graduates in specific disciplines. Prior to 2022, the QAA did not have a SBS to which higher education policing programmes could be directly aligned.
Design/methodology/approach
Over 12-months, a SBS advisory group with representatives from higher education across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, The College of Policing, QAA, Police Federation of England and Wales and policing, worked in partnership to harness their collective professional experience and knowledge to create the first UK SBS for policing. Post publication of the SBS, permission was sought and granted from both the College of Policing and QAA for members of the advisory group to reflect in an article on their experiences of collaborating and working in partnership to achieve the SBS.
Findings
There is great importance of creating a shared vision and mutual trust, developed through open facilitated discussions, with representatives championing their cause and developing a collaborative and partnership approach to completing the SBS.
Practical implications
A collaborative and partnership approach is essential in developing and recognising the academic discipline of policing. This necessarily requires the joint development of initiatives, one of which is the coming together of higher education institutions, PSRBs and practitioner groups to collaborate and design QAA benchmark statements.
Social implications
The SBS advisory group has further driven forward the emergence of policing as a recognised academic discipline to benefit multiple stakeholders.
Originality/value
The SBS for policing is the first across the UK. The authors experiences can be used to assist others in their developments of similar subject specific benchmarking or academic quality standards.
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There is considerable evidence to illustrate police occupational culture can negatively influence service delivery and organizational reform. To counteract this, and to improve…
Abstract
Purpose
There is considerable evidence to illustrate police occupational culture can negatively influence service delivery and organizational reform. To counteract this, and to improve professionalism, the police services of England and Wales will become a graduate profession from 2020, although little empirical evidence exists as to what impact this will have. The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications of a police degree course on its students.
Design/methodology/approach
Initially, a survey was conducted with 383 university students studying for criminal justice-related undergraduate degrees in a UK university. This indicated Police Foundation degree students (n=84), identified themselves as being different, and behaving differently, to other university students. To explore the reasons for this, four focus groups were conducted with this cohort, during their two-year degree programme.
Findings
The study found that the Police Foundation degree students quickly assimilated a police identity, which affected their attitudes and behavior. The process led to a strengthening of ties within their own student group, at the expense of wider student socialization.
Originality/value
The study provides new findings in relation to undergraduate students who undertake a university-based degree programme, tailored to a future police career. The results have implications for both police policy makers and those in higher education as it highlights the strength of police occupational culture and the implications for the design of future police-related degree programmes.
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The purpose of this paper is to explore Airbnb’s inherent network structure emerging from transactions between hosts and guests and provide comprehensive background information on…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore Airbnb’s inherent network structure emerging from transactions between hosts and guests and provide comprehensive background information on the underlying data basis.
Design/methodology/approach
The analysis is based on actual Airbnb data from 16 major US cities (Asheville, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Nashville, New Orleans, New York City, Oakland, Portland, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Seattle and Washington DC), available at InsideAirbnb.com, comprising a total of 135 thousand listings and 2.7 million transactions. The data are transformed into a graph and analyzed from a network perspective.
Findings
The web of host–guest connections on Airbnb represents a omniferous graph, that is, connecting virtually all users via relatively short distances. Hosts and guests differ markedly with regard to degree distribution. Overall, 98 per cent of all transactions represent first-time encounters.
Research limitations/implications
This paper provides first insights into the very fabric of host–guest interactions on Airbnb from a macroscopic perspective. The platform’s network topology may be leveraged as a resource for trust-building between users. Moreover, platform operators may use network analyses to gain deeper insights into their user base. These may in turn be used to identify determinants of side-switching, deter users from platform circumvention or for churn prevention.
Originality/value
Platform ecosystems continue to expand and gain increasing economic, social and societal importance. For C2C platforms with two compartmentalized and decentral market sides (i.e. many individual providers and many individual consumers), the emerging transactional network structure has, thus, far experience almost no research attention. This analysis of Airbnb’s web of host–guest connections reveals a topology some archetypical social network properties (e.g. short distances). This structure and the knowledge about users’ positions therein yields viable cues for trust-building as well as a valuable resource for (platform) business analytics.
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Carol Finnegan, Seng-Su Tsang, George Woodward and Jean Chang
The purpose of this paper is to provide a robust examination of the factors that accelerate/decelerate the divestment timing of retail banners in international markets.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to provide a robust examination of the factors that accelerate/decelerate the divestment timing of retail banners in international markets.
Design/methodology/approach
The sample represents 3,235 foreign market banner operations of 132 international retailers across 144 countries using an accelerated failure time (AFT) parametric survival modelling technique.
Findings
Banner divestment is accelerated by both weak financial performance and smaller size. Furthermore, there is a synergistic negative detriment to the combination of both factors on divestment. Banner divestment is decelerated by deploying the corporation’s dominant format in the home country. Moreover, inadequately performing dominant banners are allowed more time to turn around their operations than subpar non-dominant banners. Concurrently, when host country markets are growing, poorly performing dominant banners are given more time to improve performance. When home market performance weakens, smaller, poorly performing banner divestment is accelerated.
Research limitations/implications
The large data set covers more than half of the world so the authors are limited to observing corporate divestments without the benefit of the managerial decision-making process. The authors only have access to divestment data in annual units, which limits the ability to provide precise timing information. Though the authors have a wide variation in country conditions, data on smaller, poorer countries and domestic competitors is limited.
Practical implications
Small, poorly performing retail chains in foreign markets are divested faster than their counterparts. When retailers internationalize with their dominant chains, management tends to give these banners more time to succeed than non-dominant counterparts. Evidence also suggests that managers hesitate to withdrawal from a foreign market when the dominant banner is involved, regardless of a chain’s stunted growth and subpar performance.
Originality/value
This study provides the first examination of factors driving the divestment times of international retail chains using rigorous empirical survival time methodologies.
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Beverly D. Metcalfe and Carol Woodhams
This paper aims to draw conceptual links between the papers in this special issue, arguing that diversity and equality research is located within varying socio‐political…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to draw conceptual links between the papers in this special issue, arguing that diversity and equality research is located within varying socio‐political, socio‐demographic and geo‐political contexts and should therefore be seen as fluid and subject to ongoing reformation.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper provides a thematic and analytical review of six papers from the Gender, Diversity and Management track of the European Academy of Management Conference, held at HEC, Paris in May 2007.
Findings
The paper draws out themes that transcend organisation and nation boundaries, showing how socio‐cultural and political location has an important bearing on gender and diversity work identities, constructions and ultimately, organisation development priorities.
Practical implications
The paper seeks to encapsulate contemporary thinking in the discipline of equality and diversity management with specific focus on its interaction with the externalities of region, power, politics and society.
Originality/value
The paper contributes to the developing discourse of employment‐based diversity research in the international arena. It highlights the limitations of a fixed perspective of identity and difference, stressing the need to account for positionality in scholarly research.
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Contemporary literature reveals that, to date, the poultry livestock sector has not received sufficient research attention. This particular industry suffers from unstructured…
Abstract
Contemporary literature reveals that, to date, the poultry livestock sector has not received sufficient research attention. This particular industry suffers from unstructured supply chain practices, lack of awareness of the implications of the sustainability concept and failure to recycle poultry wastes. The current research thus attempts to develop an integrated supply chain model in the context of poultry industry in Bangladesh. The study considers both sustainability and supply chain issues in order to incorporate them in the poultry supply chain. By placing the forward and reverse supply chains in a single framework, existing problems can be resolved to gain economic, social and environmental benefits, which will be more sustainable than the present practices.
The theoretical underpinning of this research is ‘sustainability’ and the ‘supply chain processes’ in order to examine possible improvements in the poultry production process along with waste management. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and ‘design science’ methods with the support of system dynamics (SD) and the case study methods. Initially, a mental model is developed followed by the causal loop diagram based on in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and observation techniques. The causal model helps to understand the linkages between the associated variables for each issue. Finally, the causal loop diagram is transformed into a stock and flow (quantitative) model, which is a prerequisite for SD-based simulation modelling. A decision support system (DSS) is then developed to analyse the complex decision-making process along the supply chains.
The findings reveal that integration of the supply chain can bring economic, social and environmental sustainability along with a structured production process. It is also observed that the poultry industry can apply the model outcomes in the real-life practices with minor adjustments. This present research has both theoretical and practical implications. The proposed model’s unique characteristics in mitigating the existing problems are supported by the sustainability and supply chain theories. As for practical implications, the poultry industry in Bangladesh can follow the proposed supply chain structure (as par the research model) and test various policies via simulation prior to its application. Positive outcomes of the simulation study may provide enough confidence to implement the desired changes within the industry and their supply chain networks.
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In this paper, the main objective will be to discuss the factors which can influence the usage of risk reducing strategies found in the literature over the past 30 years. Some of…
Abstract
In this paper, the main objective will be to discuss the factors which can influence the usage of risk reducing strategies found in the literature over the past 30 years. Some of the factors which have relatively consistent effects include age, socio‐economic group, education while other factors show complex effect e.g. self‐confidence, loss‐type and product risk. On the whole, the literature on risk reduction and how it is affected is unable to provide would‐be researchers with clear guidance for questionnaire construction and research design.