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The purpose of this paper is to examine the disempowering and/or empowering role of accounting in the context of Indigenous Australians.

A total of 31 interviewees participated in this study, which included 18 self-identified Indigenous Australians and 13 non-Indigenous Australians. A qualitative research methodology, and in particular an oral history method, was chosen because of its ability to support a deeper and richer form of inquiry. Bourdieu’s concepts provide the framework for mobilizing and analyzing the findings of this study.

The damaging role of accounting in the context of Indigenous peoples has largely stemmed from non-Indigenous peoples providing accounting services for Indigenous peoples. The evidence and analysis provided by this study postulates a constructive way forward of accounting’s role in contributing to the empowerment of Indigenous Australians.

Limitations include being a non-Indigenous researcher conducting research in an Indigenous context, which may have prevented some interviewees from feeling comfortable to openly share their experiences and insights.

As this study’s findings have supported the theory that accounting skills can be used in an empowering way when used “by” Indigenous peoples, Indigenous Australians should be actively supported by the accounting bodies to gain the qualifications needed for membership of the accounting profession.

This study contributes to the expanding accounting literature that locates the role of accounting in the context of Indigenous peoples by proposing accounting as a tool of empowerment.

There is a large literature advocating the importance of a greater proportion of women directors on boards of publicly listed firms. The purpose of this paper is to examine the numbers and proportions of women directors, including women executive directors, on listed Australian Real Estate Management and Development (REMD) companies to identify how prevalent women directors are on such boards.

The study examines the numbers and proportions of women directors for 35 REMDs in 2011 and compares this to the broad board composition data on 1,715 Australian Stock Exchange listed entities. Statistically significant findings are evident due to the identified low proportions.

The study finds that of all the Financials Sub Industry sector groups, REMDs have the lowest proportion of female directors on theirs boards – eight women on each of 35 company boards compared to 159 men on these 35 boards at 2011. Of the eight, there were only two women executive directors on boards compared to 50 men. Statistically, it appears that having women directors on REMD boards is not considered important. Even at December 2014, there are only ten women on seven company boards and only one remaining executive director of an REMD company.

Given that female board representation is positively related to accounting returns and that there is a growing voice for legislation to impose mandatory proportions of women directors on boards around the world, it may be in the interests of REMD boards to consider appointing more women more quickly.

The study is the first to examine the numbers and proportions of women directors amongst REMD companies to identify the paucity of such women directors.

This is the first paper which aims to investigate factors that might influence the gender composition of boards of directors of Australian Real Estate Investment Trusts (A‐REITs).

This study follows Mateos de Cabo, Gimeno and Nieto and the gender diversity literature and investigates the existence and number of women directors on the boards of directors of 37 A‐REITs from 2006 to 2011.

There is evidence that larger (by market capitalization) A‐REITs are more likely to employ a woman director and that A‐REITs with larger boards are more likely to employ a woman director and indeed more women directors. It also appears that A‐REITs whose head office is in Sydney are more likely to employ a woman director and also more women directors.

Women seeking to be engaged as directors of A‐REITs are more likely to be employed by larger A‐REITs (by market capitalization), those with larger boards and those located in Sydney.

This paper adds to the existing literature on gender diversity by examining the factors that appear to influence the employment of women on A‐REIT Boards.

This study forms part of a larger project funded by Cariplo Foundation. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the scope to exploit the full potential and upgrade the functions of abandoned or under-utilized typical highland Alpine pasture systems (made by a complex of grazing fields, buildings for temporal animal and human recovery and dairy production, identified as Malga system or Alpeggio), by adopting the property investor’s point of view.

This study has adapted the traditional property development processes to rural buildings, thus generating an analysis model that proves able to define a new destination of use whenever the project considers the reuse of existing facilities.

The proposed model analyzes the technological, functional and territory features of the building to be upgraded, to assess the technical feasibility of the changeover project and identify the highest and best use of Malga-systems. The model has been applied to all the Malga-systems in the Orobie Bergamasche Park; it performed a comprehensive assessment of the development potential of the Malga-systems in the same Park.

The design of the model took into consideration the specificities of the Orobie Bergamasche Park; nevertheless, the method can be taken as an example to be applied to any grazing land in the Alps.

This research provides the real estate market with a new analysis tool that is specific for the rural buildings, and suitable to streamline the procedures designed to upgrade these properties and to infuse new life into the territories that are experiencing a period of hardship and/or decay.

This chapter provides a list and a brief description of files and documents where the name of Piero Sraffa is mentioned and are currently kept at the Archivio Centrale dello Stato and at the Archivio Storico Diplomatico. For each file or document we provide indication of the reference number where it is conserved and a transcription of one or two of the relevant documents out of more than 500 which have been located. The purpose of the chapter is to illustrate the results of archival research of the last decade, including more recent findings, and furnish a groundwork for further research, which may throw further light on documents already known to us, and lead to the discovery of new documents or information, so as to provide a better basis for the reconstruction of the biography of Piero Sraffa and of people whose lives entwined with his – Antonio Gramsci certainly ranking high among them.

This article seeks to explain why the public provision of early childhood education and care (ECEC) services in Reggio di Calabria – the largest city of the Calabria region in Southern Italy – has remained among the lowest in the country, failing to respond to the growing local demand for such services. Most of the limited formal supply of ECEC services currently available in the city is almost exclusively provided, for a fee, by private – until recently unregulated – day care centres, whereas households who cannot afford them must still rely on family care.

Based on original research findings, the article explains how such a supply configuration is the result of several concurrent factors – structural, institutional and cultural, on both the demand and the supply side of the service relation – and has been conditioned by both national and local specificities.

The complex interplay of these factors accounts not only for the enduring absence of an adequate public provision of ECEC services in the city and its region but also for the reproduction of an “unsupported” familistic model of care, while a loosely regulated private supply answers the growing demand coming from the working women who can afford it.

The lack of public ECEC, which was significantly aggravated by the 2008 financial crisis, represents a major constraint for women's emancipation and social justice in an already difficult socio-economic context.

The article provides in-depth knowledge on the enduring deficit of public ECEC services in a region and city that are little studied, together with a contextualized interpretation of its causes and implications.