Search results

The purpose of this article is to examine the proposal adopted by the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) that employers undertaking an equal pay review should be permitted a “protected period” during which its employees would be prohibited from taking equal pay claims to law. This proposal is considered against recent collective agreements in local government and National Health Service, and where equal pay claims have been made by employees either with the support of the unions that are party to the collective agreement or more critically with external legal support.

Information is drawn from the EOC, from employer and trade union sources, and decisions of the employment tribunals and courts.

The outcome of the unstructured mix of collective bargaining and litigation shows a pattern of delay, uncertainty, added conflict between involved parties and pressure, making resource adjustments that initially were to be avoided.

The research has been undertaken as the collective agreements are being implemented. As the initial hearings of claims are not complete and there are opportunities for appeals against initial judgments, the descriptions here are unlikely to provide a settled account.

The EOC proposal is given support but shown to need further institutional support. In that regard the opportunity is taken to consider a possible alternative form of adjudication of “collective” equal pay issues. It is proposed to facilitate an extended version of a former jurisdiction of the Central Arbitration Committee.

Corporate reporting infrastructure and communication are being transformed by the emergence of digital technologies. A key element of the digital accounting infrastructure underpinning international corporate reporting is the IFRS Taxonomy, a digital representation of international accounting standards that is required by firms to produce digital corporate reports. The purpose of this paper is to trace the development, governance and adoption of the IFRS Taxonomy to highlight the implications for accounting practice and standard-setting.

The authors mobilise Actor Network Theory and a model of transnational standardisation to analyse the process surrounding the formation and diffusion of the IFRS Taxonomy as a legitimate “reference” of the IFRS Standards. The authors trace the process using interview, observation and documentary evidence.

The analysis shows that while the taxonomy enables IFRS-based reporting in the digital age, tensions and detours result in the need for a realignment of the perspectives of both accounting standard-setters and taxonomy developers that have transformative implications for accounting practice and standard-setting.

The study explains how and why existing accounting standards are transformed by technology inscriptions with reflexive effects on the formation and diffusion of accounting standards. In doing so, the paper highlights the implications that arise as accounting practice adapts to the digitalisation of corporate reporting.

The following bibliography focuses mainly on programs which can run on IBM microcomputers and compatibles under the operating system PC DOS/MS DOS, and which can be used in online information and documentation work. They fall into the following categories:

In 1899 the medical practitioners of Dublin were confronted with an outbreak of a peculiar and obscure illness, characterised by symptoms which were very unusual. For want of a better explanation, the disorder, which seemed to be epidemic, was explained by the simple expedient of finding a name for it. It was labelled as “beri‐beri,” a tropical disease with very much the same clinical and pathological features as those observed at Dublin. Papers were read before certain societies, and then as the cases gradually diminished in number, the subject lost interest and was dropped.

The initial rationale for developing integrated reporting included addressing the failures of traditional reporting to address sustainability issues. Subsequently, the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) modified its stated objectives to emphasise integrated thinking and value creation. There has been debate on whether the IIRC’s process for developing its integrated reporting framework was subject to regulatory capture by the accounting profession (Flower, 2015; Adams, 2015; Thomson, 2015). This paper aims to provide additional evidence on the extent to which this regulatory capture occurred, with an update on current developments.

Data from interviews with key participants in the integrated reporting framework’s development and the IIRC’s Council and Working Group meeting minutes were analysed to identify to what extent the change in the IIRC’s focus can be explained by regulatory capture theory.

The findings show that the integrated reporting framework’s development was subject to regulatory capture by accountants. However, the extent of capture was mitigated to some extent by processes adopted in its development. This is consistent with regulatory capture theory.

This paper critically examines the debate on the extent to which the sustainability message has been lost as a result of regulatory capture. It provides an in-depth analysis of the IIRC’s treatment of sustainability which explores the application of regulatory capture theory and examines evidence not considered in previous studies.

Over the past few years I have been involved with various research teams looking at organisational communication and at the impact that libraries and other information services have on certain kinds of organisations. When we examined information services in various local government settings (including social services departments, local education authorities, planning departments and more general local government services) we found what appears to be an automatic tendency to serve a relatively narrow band of middle management staff at headquarters.

The first paper, entitled “Crime and the design of residential property: exploring the theoretical background” (Property Management, Vol. 19 No. 2), has argued that “perceptions” and the “image” of housing designs remain a largely untested avenue of investigation in the design‐effects‐crime debate. Presents and discusses exploratory research into the perception of crime/deviancy, fear of crime and “defensible space”, in relation to a range of characteristic UK housing designs. This investigation concerns the perceptions of planning professionals, convicted burglars and other users and provides both qualitative and quantitative analysis of results from a series of interviews which presented slide representations of terraced, semi‐detached and detached housing designs in addition to low‐rise/walk‐up flats and high‐rise flats. Where possible, two contrasting versions of the same design were presented to probe the influence of “image” in the perception of crime and “defensible space”. The results from this exploratory investigation underpin Newman’s theory of “defensible space” in that a “hierarchy of place” appears to exist with regard to housing designs. However, the “image” of each design is perceived to be a significant contributing factor in relation to the criminogenic capacity of each design presented. Wilson and Kelling’s “Broken Windows” theory is also supported by these research findings.

A major challenge facing a business manager is to achieve a sustainable level of success, which in turn means being able to sustainably master the complexity with which s/he must deal. Information technology providers must understand the relationships between the levels of complexity with which managers deal, the importance of support for cooperation and coordination, and the resulting information system requirements. In this paper we describe a theoretical framework which sheds some light on these relationships, and describe a real‐life experiment in using prototype advanced information technology to support strategic business unit management within a large corporation.