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McDonald′s employs over 32,000 people in the UK. Every member of management receives training at one of the regional training centres and at the national centre, Hamburger University in East Finchley. Describes training methods used for all employees – from counter staff, through restaurant managers to board members.

The impact that workplace aggression has on organizations and its members has become a focal point for organizational research. To date, studies have primarily examined the perpetrator of workplace aggression, specifically their personality traits. In this chapter, we draw on Institutional Theory to better understand a specific form of workplace aggression, indirect (covert) aggression. We specifically present a model that shows how the normative pressures and social roles within an institution influence the aggressive actions by employees as well as the scripts employees utilize in response to indirect aggression. We assert that an examination of how scripts are used to respond to indirect aggression will be especially helpful in understanding how institutional pressures influence this type of workplace aggression within organizations.

Since the beginning of the 1980s, a growing number of cities around the world have been looking to invest in extensive city-reimaging and place-marketing initiatives in efforts to announce themselves or to raise their profiles on the tourism market. In either case, the objective is to facilitate economic growth in times of rising importance of the service sector, of which tourism is widely seen as one of the most lucrative areas since it helps attract new investors, generate more revenue, and create additional jobs. It is in pursuit of such economic benefits that government officials, policy-makers, urban-planning agencies, land developers, and other private stakeholders have been coming together to identify potential urban precincts within cities, before transforming these precincts into art and cultural districts, often home to at least one visually striking art museum or a performing arts center – almost always designed by an elite band of celebrity architects. Fully or partially funded by taxpayer money, these signature art museums and performing arts centers are conceptualized and built as icons of the city, and as objects of the tourist gaze, with little or no interest in the physical and environmental peculiarities of place and with little or no regard for local residents including local artists and cultural producers. Traveling from Bilbao in Spain to Bhopal in India, this chapter expands on some of the events that led to an outburst of formally overstated and spatially exclusive venues of art and culture in the last two decades, before sharing some thoughts and restarting conversations on reclaiming and reimagining these venues as open, inclusive, and pulsating public spaces embedded in the actual fabrics of cities, at once accessible to locals and tourists.

This chapter offers a dynamic model of authentic leadership that links authentic leadership to situational leadership theory and shows how dynamics in the academic environment, one of the most difficult settings that leaders face, can be addressed. Kindsiko and Vadi detail the concept of situational authenticity, which reveals how authentic leadership takes place via forms of sensing – sense-giving, sense-making, sense-breaking and sense-keeping – in work-related situations. The authors highlight questions for future research: Is sensing the key to success? Are situational ethics valid if they adapt to evolving circumstances? Are situational ethics, in effect, just another way of expressing relativism? If so, can that be reconciled with authentic leadership theory?

This chapter offers a comprehensive review the literature on authentic leadership (AL). The authors employ a bibliometric approach to identify, classify, visualise and synthesise relevant scholarly publications and the work of a core group of interdisciplinary scholars who are key contributors to the research on AL. They review 264 journal articles, adopting a clustering technique to assess the central themes of AL scholarship. They identify five distinct thematic clusters: authenticity in the context of leadership; structure of AL; social perspectives on AL; dynamism of AL; and value perceptions of AL. Velt and Sinkovics assert that these clusters will help scholars of AL to understand the dominant streams in the literature and provide a foundation for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the origins and development of the “Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal (AAAJ) Community”, a flourishing international interdisciplinary accounting research community. This scholarly community has emerged over some 30 years from the publication in 1988 of the inaugural issue of AAAJ under the joint editorship of James Guthrie and Lee Parker. This historical account discusses the motivation for establishing the journal and the important publishing initiatives, developments and trends across this period. The study positions the journal as a key thought leader, the catalyst for other Community activities such as the Asia-Pacific Interdisciplinary Research in Accounting conference.

The investigation involved a selective review of the contents of AAAJ, particularly the annual editorials published since inception, and other relevant literature, analysis of the main research themes and the most cited papers, and oral history interviews with the joint editors. The future prospects for the AAAJ Community are addressed.

The AAAJ Community has shaped and led developments in interdisciplinary accounting research. Recognised for innovation and with a reputation for nurturing scholars, AAAJ continues to grow in stature as one of the world’s leading accounting journals, challenging the status quo and fostering inclusive scholarship.

The study does not examine the journal’s publication patterns nor assess in detail the research studies that have been published in the journal.

The study recognises AAAJ as central to the development of an interdisciplinary accounting research community, firmly located in the sociological, critical and interpretative tradition also associated with some other leading accounting journals.

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how a grounded theory method applied to a case study within a particular industrial context can be used to derive a substantive model of the practice of capital budgeting and contribute to an understanding of contextual elements that affect investment decisions. This study aims to examine how the investment decision to acquire aircraft, strategic core assets, is made by small players within an industry that is small by world standards, Australian regional aviation.

This research adopts a grounded theory approach to the case study. Primary data were collected using questionnaires, semi‐structured and open‐ended interviews. Secondary data comprised pro‐forma aircraft lease contracts and information from a law firm. Consistent with grounded theory, qualitative research mining software (Leximancer) was used to facilitate initial analyses of data and understanding of decision factors and their relationships. The model was derived, refined and confirmed using data from follow‐up unstructured interviews.

This research within a specific industrial context finds that a substantive model derived through a grounded theory approach provides an understanding of the richness of the investment scenario and the decision factors considered in the capital budgeting decision. Reflection on such narrow industrial findings in terms of existing theories provides insight into the reasons for the gap between practice and theory.

This research is original in that it employs a grounded theory approach, which has received little attention within prior literature, to derive a substantive model based on industrial practice of managers who are instrumental in and responsible for a capital budgeting decision. Such an alternative approach to modelling is of value in bridging the gap between practice and theory. Substantive models produced for different industries or contexts can be compared and similarities refined into a theory that is grounded in practice. Dissimilarities may provide valuable insights into variables and processes that are unique to particular contexts.

More frequent re‐forecasting is becoming an important topic on corporate agendas and is seen by many to be the only way to keep financial performance on track at a time when revenues are becoming less predictable. The paper aims to investigate this topic.

For the past four years ALG Software has commissioned a study of the re‐forecasting practices in a sample of the top organisations in the UK by revenue. The objective of the study is to benchmark how frequently the UK's leading organisations currently re‐forecast and what their goals are for the future.

The results show that the majority of organisations remain dissatisfied with the frequency with which they re‐forecast and wish to re‐forecast more frequently. However, the findings also show that many organisations feel that they cannot re‐forecast as often or as quickly as they would like. In fact, evidence suggests that little, if any, progress has been made during the last four years since this survey was first commissioned. This is due to either the amount of time it takes operational line managers to re‐forecast their resource requirements, or the amount of time it takes the finance function to complete a round of re‐forecasting. The type of application used for budgeting and re‐forecasting appears to make little difference to the time it takes organisations to produce an annual budget or complete a re‐forecast. Central to this issue is the use of non‐financial or “operational” data that predicts future resource requirements, and the limitations of the budgeting systems that organisations currently employ. Regardless of the type of application used for budgeting or re‐forecasting, much of this modelling is still done off‐line on spreadsheets.

The paper is of value to finance managers considering choosing a new budgeting application who will need to ensure that the type of operational modelling of non‐financial driver data, currently done offline on spreadsheets by line managers, can be seamlessly integrated into the central budgeting model.