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1 – 10 of 258The purpose of this paper is to discuss the roles of accounting for university survival, recovery and revolution from the COVID-19 pandemic. It constructively critiques the use of…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the roles of accounting for university survival, recovery and revolution from the COVID-19 pandemic. It constructively critiques the use of compliance and cost-centric accounting to inform crisis response and proposes roles for accounting to better serve decision-making in a crisis.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper discusses limitations about how accounting information was used in a university’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper describes potential roles for accounting across crisis phases. These proposals recognise requirements arising from the university’s regulatory environment and apply concepts from intellectual capital accounting and service-dominant logic.
Findings
This paper proposes that in the survival phase, accounting can mitigate rash responses by clarifying the crisis’s impact and stakeholder alignment. In the recovery phase, accounting can inform resourcing decisions by balancing signals from accounting about staff expense and capital investment. In the revolution phase, accounting helps develop the business models needed to adapt to changing student needs, hybrid teaching delivery and importance of intellectual capital.
Research limitations/implications
The case study discusses the early stages of a university’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It does not provide a comprehensive analysis of success or failure of accounting in a crisis. The case raises directions for accounting to clarify the ambiguities in objectives and cause-and-effect relationships from the pandemic.
Practical implications
This paper proposes actions for accounting to support the survival, recovery and revolution of the university sector from the pandemic. The actions cover stakeholder engagement, university sector governance and strategic planning.
Originality/value
This paper proposes a lifecycle of accounting roles at different stages of the COVID-19 response that reflects requirements from the university’s regulatory environment and draws on intellectual capital and service-dominant logic literature.
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This paper aims to problematise critiques raised against customer accounting’s numeric focus, which risks controlling and simplifying customers rather than facilitating closer…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to problematise critiques raised against customer accounting’s numeric focus, which risks controlling and simplifying customers rather than facilitating closer engagement. This analysis suggests ways to better account for what it is that customers buy, why they do so and how to better serve them.
Design/methodology/approach
Service-dominant logic (SDL) is a marketing ideology that recognises the active role of customers in value creation. Seven customer accounting techniques are appraised against SDL principles to identify strengths and shortfalls in logic and application.
Findings
Customer accounting techniques align with SDL’s beneficiary-oriented and relational view of customers. Weaker alignment is found regarding a focus on outputs rather than outcomes, silence about the customer’s role in co-creating value and failure to recognise contextual circumstances.
Research limitations/implications
The analysis uses prototypical descriptions of customer accounting techniques. Actual applications could offset weaknesses or raise other shortfalls.
Practical implications
For each area of SDL, the authors suggest avenues for integrating SDL into customer accounting using related literature and building on concepts within customer accounting techniques.
Originality/value
SDL contrasts with the traditional, goods-dominant logic that underscores much of accounting. SDL is used to critically and constructively evaluate customer accounting techniques.
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Julia Yonghua Wu, Chris Akroyd and Frederick Ng
This paper aims to examine the management controls that support (and fail to support) a craft brewery’s servitization journey from start-up, through growth, to maturity. It…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to examine the management controls that support (and fail to support) a craft brewery’s servitization journey from start-up, through growth, to maturity. It enriches our understanding of how management controls can facilitate the discovery of a service-identity that provides the foundation for servitization.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing on in-depth interviews, fieldwork and secondary data analyses, this paper reports on a longitudinal case study of a craft brewery. The authors trace the case company’s servitization journey using a service-dominant logic theoretical perspective. This perspective focuses us on how the value of a product is cocreated with customers, rather than being created by the firm and then distributed.
Findings
The study found that many management controls emerged at the craft brewery from start-up to maturity. Some management controls supported a goods logic, while others supported a service logic. The findings highlight how people and cultural controls in particular enabled the company to move toward a service logic focused on servitization. These management controls informed the evolution of offerings, structure reconfiguration and resources at the craft brewery necessary to support servitization.
Originality/value
Studying a craft brewery contributes an alternative type of manufacturing context and shows how service-identity features such as craftiness, collectiveness, neolocalism and innovation affect a company’s servitization journey.
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This paper aims to examine how the customer can be better integrated into case-mix systems for primary healthcare. Case-mix is an established performance management tool in…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to examine how the customer can be better integrated into case-mix systems for primary healthcare. Case-mix is an established performance management tool in hospitals, and there is growing interest in its extensions into out-of-hospital healthcare.
Design/methodology/approach
Interviews with academics and clinicians are used to explore conceptual foundations for this area. A service-dominant logic perspective is used to problematize the roles of accounting in this complex setting.
Findings
The findings identify that a customer focus is embedded in current primary healthcare thinking, contrasting with the goods-dominant focus in hospitals. This paper identifies diverse objectives and coordinating networks of care as challenges for case-mix.
Research limitations/implications
This paper breaks down the complexity of primary healthcare case-mix into two accounting roles: a “dialogue machine” to understand client objectives and a “learning machine” to understand clients’ networks of resources. The infancy of case-mix for primary healthcare means our interview sample is restricted to a small group of pioneers in the area, within a supply perspective.
Practical implications
Primary healthcare management is a priority area in New Zealand. The findings describe opportunities and challenges for the “dialogue” and “learning” roles of accounting. This paper discusses practical and ideological tensions to be resolved when integrating customers into case-mix systems.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to the limited literature on the use of case-mix accounting outside of hospitals, discussing the role of customers and networks of care. Findings contribute by describing the customer as both a source of, and a means to resolving, complexity.
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Frederick Ng and Julie Harrison
The purpose of this paper is to provide a first-hand, critical reflection on the rapid redesign of a New Zealand university accounting course in response to the COVID-19 pandemic…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to provide a first-hand, critical reflection on the rapid redesign of a New Zealand university accounting course in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors reflect on their experience of redesigning a course for online delivery, while preserving its focus on transferable skills.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper presents the authors’ commentary on and self-evaluation of the teaching of a final year accounting paper during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Findings
The authors provide lessons for developing transferable skills when pivoting to digital learning under extreme conditions. The authors found a multi-modal approach to course delivery that helped facilitate the development of transferable skills and self-reflection journals were particularly useful for motivating students in an online teaching environment. The authors also identified the efficacy of designing and evaluating online course delivery using a “transferable skills first” template to identify gaps in learning activities and assessments.
Originality/value
The pressures of rapidly pivoting to digital learning threatened the authors’ ability to maintain a focus on transferable skills. The authors provide a design method for maintaining and developing transferable skills in a digital environment using a “transferable-skills first” teaching philosophy.
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Ramona Zharfpeykan and Frederick Ng
This paper aims to commentate on the roles of sustainability reporting during the COVID-19 pandemic. It evaluates the Global Reporting Initiative’s (GRI) framework, designed as a…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to commentate on the roles of sustainability reporting during the COVID-19 pandemic. It evaluates the Global Reporting Initiative’s (GRI) framework, designed as a guide for best-practice in sustainability reporting, for its applicability to cover COVID-19 issues and, more generally, issues arising in crisis conditions.
Design/methodology/approach
The GRI’s COVID-19 communications and the GRI framework are reviewed using three common theories of reporting, namely, institutional, stakeholder and legitimacy theory. For each theory, the authors contrast expectations under business-as-usual conditions against crisis conditions to identify gaps and avenues to guide COVID-19 responses.
Findings
This commentary opines the GRI framework risks perpetuating incremental change towards the “new normal”, rather than motivating the urgent responses needed in a crisis. The GRI can play a significant normative role to guide immediate and short-term best practice in COVID-19 reporting. Findings motivate the need to report for vulnerable rather than powerful stakeholders and to recognise and celebrate proactive change.
Originality/value
This paper commentates on the suitability of a major sustainability reporting framework and its role in improving responses to the current COVID-19 crisis. Findings propose challenges to the GRI and GRI framework to motivate urgent responses and communication for the pandemic.
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Susan Whatman and Juliana McLaughlin
This chapter focusses on the research methodology of the completed project, drawing on what Martin (2008) described as ‘Indigenist’ research traditions or practices. The project…
Abstract
This chapter focusses on the research methodology of the completed project, drawing on what Martin (2008) described as ‘Indigenist’ research traditions or practices. The project drew upon tenets of critical race theory which developed over the life of a university teaching and learning project to support the praxis of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, or Indigenous,1 pre-service teachers on their final internships prior to graduating.
The broader project was conceptualised and framed within our prioritisation of Indigenist standpoint and critical race theory. Our project was designed to amplify the perspectives and voices of Indigenous students in situations where White, hegemonic relations appeared to constrain their potential achievement on practicum in socially unjust and often racist ways. Research into the achievement and success of Indigenous education graduates in Australia is dominated by non-Indigenous reporting, framed in deficit language of Indigenous ‘underachievement’, ‘barriers’, ‘lack’, and ‘disengagement’, rather than from their experience of injustice in their professional preparation as teachers.
The research design troubled how researchers like us ‘come to know’ Indigenous achievement in the higher education sector through the pre-service teachers’ words, impelling us to listen to stories of discrimination, rather than to official accounts of how they ‘failed’ to measure up to teacher standards. The attention to detail in the multi-site, micro-level practices in teacher education and the ways these unfold in situ for Indigenous students would not be possible without the Indigenist research methodology developed in partnership with Indigenous research colleagues and student co-researchers.
This chapter then serves to remind educational researchers that research is a practice and has practice architectures with particular hegemonic arrangements which have not transpired to serve the interests of Indigenous peoples. Honouring Indigenist standpoint and employing critical race theory in research design thus means paying particular and careful attention to the work that research practices do, on, to, and with communities, not normative (colonial) crafting of the praxis research problem.
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Frederick Ng, Julie A. Harrison and Chris Akroyd
The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework for the systematic examination of management accounting practices in small businesses using a revenue management perspective…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework for the systematic examination of management accounting practices in small businesses using a revenue management perspective. This highlights the multi-faceted nature of size as a contextual factor and emphasises the role of management accounting in supporting profit-oriented decision-making, rather than its traditional role of co-ordination, control, and accountability.
Design/methodology/approach
The framework is theoretically derived from the management accounting, revenue management, and small business literature. An illustrative case study of a small fast-food business is presented to demonstrate the applicability of this framework to practice.
Findings
The paper identifies that various dimensions of business size have different and sometimes opposing effects on management accounting practices. Given heterogeneity is a common feature of small businesses, the framework considers alternative specifications of the size contingency variable.
Research limitations/implications
The synthesis of small business characteristics and revenue management perspective offers a more incisive understanding of what has traditionally been considered a simple practice. The case study illustrates some of the influences of small business characteristics identified in the framework. Given its narrow scope, the findings are used for theorisation rather than offering generalisable results. Further cross-sectional comparisons of small businesses are needed to confirm size influences.
Practical implications
The framework can assist practitioners to gauge the strengths and weaknesses of their management accounting practices and can help assess the value of adopting more sophisticated management accounting practices, given their particular business environment. A synthesis of these small business attributes can help practitioners identify key barriers to implementation.
Originality/value
The revenue management perspective and the inclusion of key characteristics of small businesses provide a new approach to evaluating management accounting practices in small businesses.
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Islamic finance and Halal product sectors are thriving successfully. This chapter is a general review of the perception of Asian consumers on Islamic finance and Halal sectors in…
Abstract
Purpose
Islamic finance and Halal product sectors are thriving successfully. This chapter is a general review of the perception of Asian consumers on Islamic finance and Halal sectors in the global Halal economy.
Methodology/approach
The first section will briefly describe the Halal concept in both Islamic finance and Halal industries, and the growth of both sectors in Asian countries. The second part highlights the review of Asian consumers’ perception towards Islamic finance products and Halal products.
Findings
The review found that the consumers’ perception towards the Islamic finance products and Halal products is distinctive. This is due to the diversity of Asian countries in terms of geography, religion, culture, ethnic, school of thoughts (madzahib), income per capita and government’s involvement.
Originality/value
The third part of the chapter concentrates on planning towards Halal marketing, which involves the move and future challenges in different layers of industries to gear up and strengthen the Halal economy.
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