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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the management control system, the bank’s control package, influences opinion about the usefulness of risk measurement (RM) in different control contexts before and after a financial crisis, to understand what influences the usefulness of enterprise risk management (ERM) manifested in RM.

The study is based on semi-structured interviews in 2000-2010, with senior bank managers of two international banks (Bank A and Bank B) – both ranking among the top 100 in the world but differing structurally and culturally.

The two banks took opposite trajectories. Bank A went from high to low expectations of usefulness; Bank B went from low to high expectations. The different attitudes toward RM exhibited by Bank A and Bank B are explained by differences in their control packages, manifested by technocratic control and socio-ideology.

This study reveals that there are not merely different degrees of RM usage in the two banks but that they also show two diverting trajectories. Given this finding, the significance of the organization structure and its control packages (especially the alignment between these two factors) is analyzed to find a plausible explanation for the different experiences of senior managers toward the usefulness of RM. This study contributes to ERM research and to the contingency theory of management accounting.

Although granted funding from government agencies, Britain’s Northern Rock (NR) Bank experienced a depositors’ bank run in 2007. The purpose of this paper is to explore bank managers’ and the Triparties’ communications, in their failed attempt to reassure depositors during the crisis.

The paper is based on content analysis of information given to depositors by bank managers and the Triparties via mass media. The theoretical concepts of rituals and masking were utilized.

Results suggest that nonfinancial reporting supersedes financial reporting. Rather than hidden losses, bank regulators’ and politicians’ discussions of emergency funding for NR was the crucial incident signaling “something going on.” Even positive statements by prominent organizational actors may have signaled serious problems that compromised NR’s “business as usual” stance.

Collective action manifested in a bank run is triggered by reasons other than numbers in financial reporting. The research results indicate a need to consider how regulatory authorities act during financial crises.

Previous studies concluded that sensegivers must be consistent in framing communication to sensemakers. Sensemaking requires that the crisis communication is also consistent in the sensemakers’ framing. Because it is difficult for sensegivers to reshape the collective sensemakers’ frame, successful crisis communication requires that sensegivers change their communication to match the sensemakers’ frame, including symbolic actions. Additionally, a bank run is characterized first by loss of trust in financial reporting; second, in nonfinancial reporting; and, finally, in the sensegiving actor: a domino effect.

This paper aims to explore the interplay between risk management and control systems in banks, specifically investigating the managerial intentions underlying the design of management control systems.

This study is based on 31 interviews with personnel of two banks in a European country.

The main finding is that belief systems drive the interplay between risk management and control systems in the studied banks. In several instances, belief systems and boundary systems were operating complementarily. Cross-case analyses of the two banks demonstrate that risk management (i.e. the Basel II Accord) replaced established operating procedures for loan origination and portfolio monitoring at the first bank, whereas senior managers suppressed Basel II to maintain established loan origination and portfolio monitoring procedures at the second one.

This is one of very few studies investigating the interplay between risk management and control systems in banks.

This paper aims to explore uncertainties in the interaction between Basel II and banking practices.

The research setting is a centralized bank’s risk control organization and its commercial lending operations. The bank, despite its early adoption of the Basel II Accord, experienced severe credit losses during the global financial crisis. The data consist of interviews with twelve decision-makers and risk specialists at the bank and interviews with four professionals outside the bank after the global financial crisis.

This paper finds that there are three types of uncertainties in the interaction between Basel II and banking practices. The paper also describes corroborative examples of efforts to reduce such uncertainties. Among such efforts, the decision-makers excluded the risk specialists from decision-making and decentralized decision-making to branch offices.

Although the literature generally portrays bank decision-makers and risk specialists as opposing groups, this research finds that the bank interviewees present complementary and confirmatory accounts on three types of uncertainties.

The findings suggest that increased regulatory pressure have operational implications for banking practices.

The paper has contemporary relevance with its sole focus on credit risk after the transition period provided for Basel II Accord.

This paper aims to examine interbank market practices in a crisis to understand the importance of trust in dealing with control problems and managing risk in inter-organizational relationships (IORs).

A qualitative field study was conducted to collect data from two case-study banks and two key banking industry institutions.

The findings illustrate the use of trust-based partner-selection criteria such as guaranteed banks (i.e., banks granted special status by key banking industry institutions) and “clan-related” banks. In addition, the findings present several trust-based performance-control processes regarding the selected counterparties, such as negative expectations, goodwill and information sharing.

This paper highlights IORs and considers how associated control problems and risks are affected by trust in the context of a large-scale crisis.

The findings provide insights into interbank market practices during the global financial crisis with respect to partner selection and performance control.

The empirical case of the banking industry helps broaden our understanding of inter-IORs.

The main policy discourses in education in Sweden now emphasise personal flexibility, creativity, responsibility for learning and freedom of choice for learners and the aim to produce creative, motivated, alert, inquiring, self-governing and flexible users and developers as opposed to just recipient reproducers of knowledge. These curriculum ideas are reflected in National Curricula (such as Lpo 94; Lpf 94) in statements relating to such things as “students developing capacities to take personal responsibility for learning…by taking part in planning and evaluation and by choosing courses, subjects, themes and activities” (Lpo 94, p. 85). However they derive from policy writing at the political level of the education system internationally (Zackari, 2001) as exemplified in writing such as OECD (1992) and (1995), which states that individual schools should create their own profiles and help individual pupils to influence the content of their studies’ (OECD, 1995, s. 137) and exhort the “willingness and ability of individual citizens and families to take responsibility for choices and priorities of their own” (OECD, 1995, s. 86). These ideas have filtered through things like official national propositions (Dir. 1991, p. 117; SOU, 1992, p. 94) and reports (e.g. Skolverkets rapport 1999, p. 443) to the arenas of action comprised by schools and colleges, where they are developed into new working aims for our modern schools and are described as contributing toward a new school vision (see also Lundahl, 2001).

This study examines the construct of respect, its manifestations in teacher-student relationships, and it relationship to ethics of care and sustainable development. The study found that students place a high premium on being respected by their teachers and measure expressions of respect chiefly through the attention received through listening. Students’ perspectives on the quality of the schools’ leadership and the teaching and learning environment were found to be shaped by their assessments of the degree to which they feel respected. In a number bivariate correlations, the study found strong, positive correlations between the variable ‘listening’ and other variables that characterize the teacher-student relationship, in particular respect for teachers and principals and comfort with the teaching and learning environment.

The study makes the case that the act of showing respect is a critical component of the ethics of care and sustainable development. The study recommends that one strategy that teachers and educational administrators should adopt in seeking to strengthen teacher-student relationships, exert positive influence on students’ behaviours and academic performance, and thus ensure the sustainability of healthy social environments is to invest in the creation of organizational cultures and administrative systems and processes that create the avenues through which respect for students can be demonstrably seen.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and interpret the CEO letter in the annual reports of three multinational Swedish companies. This study focuses on the CEOs' comments on accounting principles and rules, on company decisions and actions, and on external events. Examination of CEO letters reveals how CEOs make themselves accountable to readers and establish their own and their companies' legitimacy.

A strategic design was used to select the three companies;.the three criteria used in making the selection were company nationality, age, and stock market listing. A fourth criterion was that the company had been a nominee in the Stockholm Stock Exchange “Best Annual Report” contest. Based on a social constructivist approach, with inspiration from the field of discourse psychology, a discursive action model (DAM) is applied in this research.

The analysis shows that the CEO letters at two of the three companies do not emphasize numbers and text. In the third company's CEO letters, the numbers are an important component and are balanced with text. It was found that one explanation of the CEO letter format is the CEO's wish to persuade readers of the company's legitimacy, excellence, and future survival. The CEO letter is intended to strengthen readers' confidence in the company.

This paper provides insight into how CEOs use CEO letters in annual reports to craft a corporate image for readers.

Although leadership evidence highlights the importance of cooperative principal-teacher relationships, research has not looked thoroughly at the content behind principal-teacher interactions. The purpose of this paper is to use self-determination theory and organizational conversation to develop principal support for student psychological needs (PSSPN), a concept that represents principal-teacher interactions based on social and psychological factors contributing to student learning. The empirical part of the study tests the relationship between PSSPN and faculty trust in students and student self-regulated learning.

Hypotheses were tested with a non-experimental, correlational research design using ex post facto data. Data were collected from 3,339 students and 633 teachers in 71 schools located in a metropolitan area of a southwestern city in the USA. Hypotheses were tested with a 2-2-1 multi-level mediation model in HLM 7.0 with restricted maximum likelihood estimation.

Principal support for student psychological needs had a positive and statistically significant relationship with faculty trust in students and self-regulated learning. Additionally faculty trust mediated the relationship between principal support for student psychological needs and self-regulated learning.

This is one of the first studies to examine school leadership by the content that is exchanged during principal-teacher interactions. Principal support for student psychological needs establishes a theoretically-based framework to study leadership conversations and to guide administrative practices. Empirical results offer encouraging evidence that the simple act of framing interactions around the science of wellbeing can be an effective resource for school principals.

Self-determination theory was used to conceptualize a type of school climate that has consequences for the social, emotional and cognitive well-being of students. The purpose of this paper is to argue that a need-supportive climate emerges through a general pattern of interactions that students experience as supporting their psychological needs.

A hypothesized model was tested whereby the latent need-supportive climate variable was predicted to work through identification with school to influence student grit. Ex post facto data were collected during the 2015–2016 school year from a random sample of students in either the 5th, 8th, or 11th grades in 71 schools located in a southwestern city in the USA. A total of 3,233 students received surveys. Of these students, the authors received useable responses from 2,587 students for a response rate of 80 percent.

Findings support the hypothesis that autonomy-support, competence-support and relational-support are integrated and combine to shape experiences that align with student psychological needs. Additionally, students who experienced a need-supportive climate were also more likely to identify with school and expressed higher grit toward academic pursuits.

A need-supportive climate adds meaning to more general characterizations of school life (e.g. healthy, supportive, open, etc.) and it affords a theoretically derived explanation for how the social side of schools nurtures the inner determination of students to excel.