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The purpose of this paper is to outline and critique the current model of adult safeguarding in Northern Ireland (NI).

The paper offers a critical analysis of adult safeguarding, legislation, policy and practice. Insights are offered from the Regional Adult Safeguarding Officer for NI, and available research evidence is cited.

Distinct features of Northern Irish society have shaped its adult safeguarding policy and practice in ways which differ from those in England, Scotland and Wales. The strengths and limitations of the legal and policy framework, and practice systems are discussed.

The paper offers the viewpoint of the authors, which may not be representative.

The potential advantages and challenges of the Northern Irish safeguarding systems are presented, and potential future developments are highlighted.

Changes have been highlighted in the way adult safeguarding has been conceptualised. An emphasis on prevention and early intervention activities, with a key role envisaged for community, voluntary and faith sector organisations, have been noted.

This paper provides an accessible overview of adult safeguarding in NI, which to date has been lacking from the literature.

In the literature it is proposed that high adaptive capability is associated with high costs and internal inefficiency, despite the potential benefits to be gained from being adaptive. Investigates a set of adaptability variables that have not been previously researched and, therefore, takes an alternative focus on adaptive capability. Identifies two distinct degrees of high and low adaptive capability in an empirical UK study. Suggests that companies with high adaptive capability seemingly perform better than low adapters, despite the implication of high costs and inefficiency. High adapters also seem to have more comprehensive market orientation and decision‐making style, although they appear to operate in more turbulent external environments. The results extend the current adaptive capability literature, and directions for further research are proposed.

The paper reports an investigation into the marketing and performance consequences of organisations operating in regulated, deregulated and open market environments in Zimbabwe’s developing economy. The findings suggest that organisations do not respond to environmental changes by adapting their marketing effort, hence the environment is a poor predictor of marketing effort. Organisational strategy has a far greater impact on marketing effort than the environment. However, the environment is an important predictor of organisational performance and has significant interaction with business strategy in influencing organisational performance hence it is a quasi‐moderator. Our result suggests that in regulated environments there may be “ideal‐type” strategies for effectiveness and across all environments the concept of equifinality is not supported. There is evidence to suggest that more adaptable strategy types outperform their less adaptive competitors. These results extend a popular typology to developing economies and allow some findings to be generalisable across countries at different stages of economic development.

The relationships among organisational culture, business environment, business strategy and functional strategies are rarely investigated in a holistic perspective. This leads to reductionism in modelling and prevents the full exploration of the potentially complex relationships among cultural orientation, business strategy and functional strategies and their impact on organisational performance. This paper, based on a sample drawn from food manufacturing businesses in Zimbabwe, recognises the pervasive impact of organisational culture on organisational strategy and functional strategies. As a result, it acknowledges the multi‐level impact of cultural orientation – allowing for the building of a conceptual model, linking cultural orientation, business environment, organisational strategy, functional strategies and performance – which is subsequently empirically tested.

Changes in business environments have challenged the competencies (technical knowledge, skills and attitudes) of professional accountants. Accounting professions have responded by developing competency frameworks. In 2008, the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA) issued a draft competency framework encapsulating a broad range of knowledge, skills and attributes. The objective of the study reported on here was to determine training officers’ perceptions of the knowledge and skills requirements of entry‐level trainee accountants. SAICA could consider the findings of this study in the finalisation of its competency framework. The study reveals that nearly three‐quarters of all the topics in the current prescribed SAICA syllabus are considered to make at least an important contribution to the knowledge requirements of entry‐level trainee accountants. Although more than half the management accounting topics prescribed in the SAICA syllabus are perceived as being only reasonably important, further statistical analysis revealed that TOPP (training outside public practice) training officers disagreed significantly with their TIPP (training inside public practice) counterparts on the importance of management accounting topics and perceived them to be at least important. Except for specialised topics, all other topics covering the remaining core subjects (Financial Accounting, Financial Management, Taxation and Auditing) were perceived to be important or even more than important by the respondents. The study demonstrates that there is a movement towards an expanded set of competencies beyond the technical knowledge typically taught to prospective CAs, and that there is evidence of a need for today’s entry‐level trainee accountants to receive training in communication, analytical, interpersonal and computer skills.

This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.