Hans ten Rouwelaar, Jan Bots and Ivo De Loo
The purpose of this paper is to investigate which factors stimulate or hinder the influence management accountants operating at the business unit (BU) level have on the decisions…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate which factors stimulate or hinder the influence management accountants operating at the business unit (BU) level have on the decisions taken by their BU manager(s).
Design/methodology/approach
The authors collected data from 119 management accountants in 77 Dutch, multi-divisional organizations, using surveys.
Findings
The study shows that influence on managerial decisions can have two forms: influence on strategic decisions, and influence on operating decisions. Influence on strategic decisions is positively related to the degree of decentralization of an organization. It also depends on whether a management accountant is more extravert and emotionally stable. There is a negative relationship between influence on operational decisions and management accountants’ agreeableness. Not being sufficiently critical may well diminish their influence on operational affairs.
Research limitations/implications
The authors put the view that management accountants at the BU level can partially affect their own role. This may also be expected by their managers. There are more opportunities for management accountants to influence strategic decisions than operational decisions. This study, however, is limited to Dutch, multi-divisional organizations. The management accountants who completed the survey also belong to the personal networks of master degree students who assisted in the data collection process, so that the sample used is not random. Data collected in another country, or in smaller companies could yield different results.
Practical implications
Knowing more about the complex relationship between BU management accountants’ personality traits and their degree of influence on managerial decisions allows organizations to make better-informed choices about who to appoint in such a role.
Originality/value
This study distinguishes between management accountants’ influence on strategic decisions and influence on operational decisions. At the BU level, these are two distinct concepts. This reinforces findings from earlier studies conducted at the corporate level. In addition, it turns out that specific personality traits of management accountants, at the BU level, affect the influence they can exert on both strategic and operational decisions taken by their manager(s).
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Gives an in depth view of the strategies pursued by the world’s leading chief executive officers in an attempt to provide guidance to new chief executives of today. Considers the…
Abstract
Gives an in depth view of the strategies pursued by the world’s leading chief executive officers in an attempt to provide guidance to new chief executives of today. Considers the marketing strategies employed, together with the organizational structures used and looks at the universal concepts that can be applied to any product. Uses anecdotal evidence to formulate a number of theories which can be used to compare your company with the best in the world. Presents initial survival strategies and then looks at ways companies can broaden their boundaries through manipulation and choice. Covers a huge variety of case studies and examples together with a substantial question and answer section.
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Electronic‐retailing is the buzzword of 2000. Every other press release I receive relates to electronic commerce or Internet shopping. Therefore, it seems appropriate to focus…
Abstract
Electronic‐retailing is the buzzword of 2000. Every other press release I receive relates to electronic commerce or Internet shopping. Therefore, it seems appropriate to focus this summer issue of Retail Insights on the subject. The first article by Rowley discusses the phenomenon of shopping bots, the intelligent agents designed to support comparison shopping across a number of Internet sites. She reviews the functions and evaluates the coverage of different shopping bots. In the second article, Wee and Ramachandra assess the level of cyberbuying activities in China, Hong Kong and Singapore by concentrating on the who, why and what of online retailing.
Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American…
Abstract
Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.
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W.R. ZHANG, S.Q. WANG, R.L.K. TIONG, S.K. TING and D. ASHLEY
The build‐operate‐transfer (BOT) arrangement is becoming one of the prevailing ways for infrastructure development in China to meet the needs of China's future economic growth and…
Abstract
The build‐operate‐transfer (BOT) arrangement is becoming one of the prevailing ways for infrastructure development in China to meet the needs of China's future economic growth and development. Despite tremendous opportunities, the undertaking of infrastructure business in China involves many risks and problems which are mainly caused by China's embryonic legal structure and immature economic market. Further strategies in risk allocation and management are especially important for successful investments in China. Choosing the right path for a BOT project investment is crucial since each project involves different legal rights, different obligations and different risk implications. The present paper describes the structuring and risk allocation, as well as the Government guarantees in a China BOT transport project, the Shanghai Yan'an Donglu Second Tunnel (YD2nd Tunnel). It is also the first BOT project implemented in Shanghai. The project features and the guarantees provided by the Government are described in the present paper.
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Lauren I. Labrecque, Priscilla Y. Peña, Hillary Leonard and Rosemary Leger
The surge of artificial intelligence (AI) applications and subsequent adoption by consumers and marketers has ignited substantial research exploring the benefits and opportunities…
Abstract
Purpose
The surge of artificial intelligence (AI) applications and subsequent adoption by consumers and marketers has ignited substantial research exploring the benefits and opportunities of AI. Despite this, little attention has been given to its unintended negative consequences. In this paper, the authors examine both the practitioner and academic sides of ethical AI. In doing so, the authors conduct an extensive review of the AI literature to identify potential issues pertaining to three areas: individual consumers, societal and legal. The authors identify gaps and offer questions to drive future research.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors review recent academic literature on AI in marketing journals, and top ethical principles from three top technology developers (Google, IBM and Meta) in conjunction with media reports of negative AI incents. They also identify gaps and opportunities for future research based on this review.
Findings
The bibliographic review reveals a small number of academic papers in marketing that focus on ethical considerations for AI adoption. The authors highlight concerns for academic researchers, marketing practitioners and AI developers across three main areas and highlight important issues relating to interactive marketing.
Originality/value
This paper highlights the under-researched negative outcomes of AI adoption. Through an extensive literature review, coupled with current responsible AI principles adopted by major technology companies, this research provides a framework for examining the dark side of AI.
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James Ewert Duah and Paul McGivern
This study examines the impact of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), particularly ChatGPT, on higher education (HE). The ease with which content can be generated using…
Abstract
Purpose
This study examines the impact of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), particularly ChatGPT, on higher education (HE). The ease with which content can be generated using GenAI has raised concerns across academia regarding its role in academic contexts, particularly regarding summative assessments. This research makes a unique contribution to the literature by examining university student and staff perceptions of current and future issues pertaining to the role of GenAI in universities.
Design/methodology/approach
A qualitative method involving five one-to-one semi-structured interviews with four students and a lecturer explored the ethical and practical issues of GenAI text generation in academia. An inductive thematic analysis was chosen as it provided nuanced insights aligned with the study’s goals.
Findings
Use of GenAI was discussed within the context of a range of topics, including perceptions of academic misconduct, authorial integrity and issues pertaining to university policies. Participants universally defined traditional classifications of academic misconduct but were unable to provide clear definitions where the use of GenAI was included for writing summative assessments. Students showed a more open engagement with GenAI, considering it a tool for overcoming obstacles rather than a means to plagiarise. Educators were generally more cautious and less optimistic about the academic role of GenAI. Lack of clear institutional policies surrounding such tools also contributed to ethical ambiguities.
Originality/value
The study highlights diverging perspectives between students and academics, which necessitate a forum for dialogue, ensuring the need to develop clear policies to steer the integration of GenAI in a manner that is beneficial for students and academics.
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Estee van der Walt and Jan Eloff
This paper aims to describe requirements for a model that can assist in identity deception detection (IDD) on social media platforms (SMPs). The model that was discovered…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to describe requirements for a model that can assist in identity deception detection (IDD) on social media platforms (SMPs). The model that was discovered demonstrates the usefulness of the requirements. The aim of the model is to identify humans lying about their identity on SMPs.
Design/methodology/approach
The requirements of a model for IDD will be determined through a literature study combined with a study that identifies currently available identity related metadata on SMPs. This metadata refers to the attributes that describe a user account on an SMP. The aim is to restrict IDD to be only based on these types of attributes, as opposed to or combined with the contents of a single or multiple communications.
Findings
Data science experiments were conducted and in particular supervised machine learning models were discovered that indeed detects identity deception on SMPs with an area under the receiver operator characteristics curve (ROC-AUC) of 75.5 per cent.
Originality/value
SMPs allow any user to easily communicate with their friends or the general public at large. People can now be targeted at great scale, most often for malicious purposes. The reality is that many of these cyber-attacks involve some form of identity deception, where the attackers lie about who they are. Much focus to date has been on the identification of non-human deceptive accounts. This paper focuses on deceptive human accounts that target vulnerable individuals on SMPs.
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Karolina Doulougeri, Antoine van den Beemt, Jan D. Vermunt, Michael Bots and Gunter Bombaerts
Challenge-based learning (CBL) is a trending educational concept in engineering education. The literature suggests that there is a growing variety in CBL implementations, stemming…
Abstract
Challenge-based learning (CBL) is a trending educational concept in engineering education. The literature suggests that there is a growing variety in CBL implementations, stemming from the flexible and abstract definition of CBL that is shaped by teachers' perceptions. The chapter discusses how the CBL concept has been developed at Eindhoven University of Technology and describes the development and use of two educational resources aimed to facilitate conceptualization, design, and research of CBL for curriculum designers and teachers. The first resource is a set of CBL design principles for framing the variety of CBL and providing teachers with advice about how to develop CBL courses within an overall CBL curriculum. The second resource is a curriculum-mapping instrument called the CBL compass, which aims at mapping CBL initiatives and identifying gaps, overlaps, and misalignments in CBL implementation at a curriculum level. Both CBL design principles and the CBL compass have been developed by combining insights from theory and practical examples of CBL at TU/e into a higher order model of vision, teaching and learning, and support. We discuss the two educational instruments and showcase their application in the Eindhoven Engineering Education (E3) program, and we discuss preliminary findings and insights. The chapter concludes with recommendations for future practice and research.
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Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American…
Abstract
Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.