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Earmarks have long been the subject of controversy, touted by pundits and politicians on one hand as the means for bringing home the bacon and on the other as pork-barrel spending. In relation to federal spending, the amount of annual earmarked dollars is insignificant; at its zenith in FY 2005 earmarked spending comprised only 6 percent of the year’s total appropriations. Yet preliminary research indicates that earmarks are an increasingly important source of funding for essential state services, such as infrastructure, social services, and economic development. Especially in times of fiscal stress, earmarks save state governments hundreds of millions of dollars in agency program funds and intergovernmental transfers. This study examines the congressional earmarks contained in appropriations legislation for FY 2000 through 2009 to assess trends in categorical distributions across and within the states during the period. The data illustrate a shift in allocations over the decade, from infrastructure, community development and environmental priorities to social and emergency services, higher education and energy needs.

This study aims to offer a bibliometric and coding analysis of blockchain articles published in the accounting, auditing and accountability fields.

The data were collected using the Scopus database and a bibliometric and qualitative coding analysis with the keywords “blockchain” and “accounting” or “auditing” or “accountability.” Of the 514 initial sources, 93 peer-reviewed papers, book chapters and conference proceedings in the areas of business, management and accounting were finally selected. Nonscientific sources such as nonpeer-reviewed books and white papers were excluded.

This study reveals a promising and multidisciplinary field of research dominated by scholars and less by practitioners. Qualitative research, especially discourse analysis, is the most used method among authors. This study gives some useful insights about blockchain's definition and characteristics, business models, processes involved, connection with other technologies and relationships with accounting theories. Among the most interesting insights, the results confirm that technology as an external force can create an intersection among several research areas: accounting, auditing, accountability, business, management, computer science and engineering fields. Finally, in terms of research themes, although blockchain has a clear effect on auditing accounting, the links with the area of accountability are less clear and validated.

This study highlights the current state of the field, combining methodological approaches and providing valuable future research insights. Additionally, it is also a starting point for professionals to fully understand blockchain's characteristics and potential with a constructive and systemic approach.

The purpose of this study is to explore the role of professional and leader identity and the maintenance of identity, through identity work as IT professionals transitioned to a permanent hybrid role. This study therefore contributes to the under-researched area of permanent transition to a hybrid role in the context of IT, where there is a requirement to enact both the professional and leader roles together.

The study utilised a longitudinal design and two qualitative methods (interviews and reflective diaries) to gather data from 17 IT professionals transitioning to hybrid roles.

The study findings reveal that IT professionals engage in an ongoing process of reconciliation of professional and leader identity as they transition to a permanent hybrid role, and they construct hybrid professional–leader identities while continuing to value their professional identity. They experience professional–leader identity conflict resulting from reluctance to reconcile both professional and leader identities. They used both integration and differentiation identity work tactics to ameliorate these tensions.

The longitudinal study design, the qualitative approaches used and the unique context of the participants provide a dynamic and deep understanding of the challenges involved in performing hybrid roles in the context of IT.

The growth of research into whistle-blowing has produced some compelling insights into this important organizational phenomenon, but a number of areas remain under-explored, particularly the role of emotion and our understanding of the far more common response to wrongdoing, namely inaction. In this chapter we seek to problematize current conceptualizations of whistle-blowing and wrongdoing, as a basis for examining employee silence in the face of wrongdoing. We suggest that quiescent silence can be viewed as an emotion episode, and draw upon the feedback theory and the sensemaking paradigm to develop this proposition, illustrated through an analysis of accounts of quiescent silence in a clinical setting. We propose a new concept of “cues for inaction” which offers insights into the way quiescent silence arises and persists.

This paper aims to demystify the creative experiences of an extraordinary group of pastry chefs – The Malaysian World Pastry Team, champions of the 2019 World Pastry Cup. The authors adopted an expressionist theoretical lens informed by two aesthetic philosophers – John Dewey and Wassily Kandinsky.

A two-year portraiture was conducted – a qualitative methodology that draws features from phenomenology and narrative inquiry, rendering artistically and empirically written “portraits” that reflect themes and patterns of participants’ experiences. In-depth interviews, observations and material artifacts were collected amid a journey alongside nine extraordinary Malaysian pastry chefs.

Presented in story structures, the authors offer three “portraits” of culinary creativity, each representing a core essence of the creative phenomenon: creative harmony in the form of sensorial and symbolic poetry; imaginative episodes as a hypnotic state of inspiration and incubation; and the creative duality of scientific rationalism and artistic fashion. The authors delineated the intricacies of each theme by presenting them as individual narratives.

The portraits indicated that culinary creativity reflects an organic and emancipating aesthetic experience that is unbounded by formative structures or sequential processes. This provides a novel theoretical view that moves beyond conventional studies’ capitalistic frameworks, and toward the intimate viewpoints of the chef-creators. Specific contributions are discussed.

Through a unique qualitative approach and an aesthetic theoretical framework, this study provided a novel perspective on the culinary creative process. The aesthetic view captures culinary creativity through the eyes of the creator, a viewpoint less considered, yet imperative to the culinary profession.

The purpose of this study is to segment the market of first‐time visitors based on the activities travelers engage in while at a destination using demographics, socio‐economic variables, and trip‐related characteristics.

The research analyzes 1,104 exit surveys completed by first‐time visitors to the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island. Clustering analysis identifies three segments that are refined and tested by multivariate and bivariate analyses.

The results indicate that there are three distinct segments of first‐time visitors based on travel activities: culture‐oriented (26 percent of the market), active (37 percent), and casual (37 percent). The key differences among the three segments are demographic, socio‐economic, trip‐related characteristics, and spending patterns. These results confirm the sustainability and profitability of the market segments.

Segmenting markets for products or services, in any industry, is vital to gain a better understanding of the customer, and to better allocate scarce tourism resources to product development, marketing, service, and delivery. Therefore, all tourism industry stakeholders must be aware of the market segments that are currently visiting the destination.

Tourist segments based on activities are not absolutes, but a continuum. The majority of first‐time visitors to a destination engage in a variety of travel activities across the segments, running from more to less involved. Successful tourism destinations are those that meet the various activity needs of their segments in both their marketing and on the ground.

Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.

This article examines how a profit-centered restructuring of labor relations in an academic medical center undermined team-based care practices in its intensive care unit. The Institute of Medicine has promoted team-based care to improve patient outcomes, and the staff in the intensive care unit researched for this paper had established a set of practices they defined as teamwork. After hospital executives rolled out a public relations campaign to promote its culture of teamwork, they restructured its workforce to enhance numerical and functional flexibility in three key ways: implementing a “service line” managerial structure; cutting a range of staff positions while combining others; and doubling the capacity of its profitable and highly regarded intensive care unit. Hospital executives said the restructuring was necessitated by changes to payment models brought forth by the Affordable Care Act. Based on 300 hours of participant-observation and 35 interviews with hospital staff, findings show that the restructuring lowered staff resources and intensified work, which limited their ability to practice care they defined as teamwork and undermined the unit’s collective identity as a team. Findings also show how staff members used teamwork as a sensitizing concept to make sense of what they did at work. The meanings attached to teamwork were anchored to positions in the hospitals’ organizational hierarchy. This paper advances our understanding of he flexible work arrangements in the health care industry and their effects on workers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the importance of cross‐communal cooperation and its contribution to peacebuilding and reconciliation in Northern Ireland through the opinions of 752 respondents.

A multivariate analysis of the respondents' opinions was gathered through a Public Opinion Survey (MBU 2006), which addresses the issue of physical separation of the Catholic and Protestant communities in the context of the Northern Ireland peace process.

Findings indicate that religion is a key variable in any discussion of the sustainability of the Northern Ireland peace process in relation to cross‐community initiatives, social and economic integration as well as existing divisions between both communities. Moreover, professional and skilled worker respondents disagreed that the impacts of physical separation between both communities supports the peace process. Catholic Nationalists and respondents from Belfast city and the Western region of Northern Ireland were less likely to perceive the physical separation of both communities as negatively impacting the peace process.

The implication for practice necessitates that the liberal peacebuilding model includes hybrid approaches to harness external economic aid in post‐accord societies that are inclusive of local people, ideas and concerns.

The value of the paper to practitioners and policymakers is that the research on the impact of external economic aid on cross community conflict must include the triangulation of both qualitative and quantitative methods to fully grasp its complexity.

This paper explores the nature of audit automation as control within audit firms. The themes of the paper are control over the work process and audit staff, deskilling and resistance, and competition, which are analysed using the theoretical framework provided by Coombs et al., who applied Giddens’ structuration theory to research the impact of information technology in organizations. Building on a previous survey study we interviewed audit staff at all levels in two Big 5 audit firms. The results show that audit automation cannot be viewed simply as a technology for improving the quality and/or productivity of the audit process. It also has value as a symbol of the firm’s market competitiveness and hence helps to promote the firm both to clients and internally. In addition, the research shows that audit automation offers considerable opportunities for greater managerial surveillance and control, but at the same time it facilitates a less hierarchical and more informal organisational structure.