Search results

The purpose of this note is to expose accounting students and others to recent findings in management control, specifically to the relationship between the informativeness of a performance measure and its usefulness in performance evaluation.

Numerical examples illuminate key ideas and are easy to follow and replicate by students.

Seemingly in contradiction to the controllability principle, performance measures that are informative about actions taken by employees are not necessarily useful for performance evaluation. This occurs when the performance being measured is related to an intermediate task, such as prepping items prior to final assembly. If prepping is an important factor in the quality of not only the intermediate good but also the finished good, and the quality of the finished good can be reasonably measured, it may not be useful to measure the prepping performance. This result holds even if obtaining the intermediate measure is costless and the intermediate measure provides unique information on the effort given to the intermediate task.

Opportunities to measure employees’ intermediate outputs are ubiquitous; therefore, judicious decisions should be made regarding the use of limited monitoring resources. This note contains intuitive, easy-to-follow illustrations (based on recent findings) that will help students and others identify situations where such evaluations are more and less useful.

This paper aims to describe two scenarios where the problem of information search interacts with the firm’s investment decisions. Investment decisions cannot be made separately from the need to acquire information.

The scenarios are illustrated with easy-to-follow numerical examples. Vignettes put the numerical examples in their real-world context.

In both scenarios, the firm should choose what might myopically appear as the lower net per value (NPV) alternative to efficiently deal with the information search problem.

Long-term investments are an important topic in the study of both accounting and finance, but it is in the study of accounting where information issues related to long term investments come to the fore. The traditional textbook approach on whether to accept long-term investment opportunities is to use the NPV rule. However, as illustrated in this note, in many important situations where information search is crucial to investment choice, the NPV rule will not lead to efficient investment decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of accounting discretion in a principal-agent setting, wherein accounting information is used in performance evaluation. The agent may choose one from among several allowable accounting methods. However, limited audit resources allow only for verification of only the method the agent chooses, and this is the only one used to determine the agent's compensation.

This paper uses the model developed by Penno (1990) and construct relatively simple examples that illustrate the effects of accounting discretion on performance evaluation. These examples may make the implications of Penno (1990) clearer to educators and practitioners.

Accounting discretion can be useful in performance evaluation even if the accounting method chosen is not disclosed. Lower limits on compensation reduce the usefulness of accounting discretion. If the principal declares a preferred accounting treatment, it enhances the usefulness of accounting discretion; in fact, it guarantees that accounting discretion is weakly preferred to no discretion.

Accounting discretion is often viewed pejoratively. Those responsible for designing performance evaluation schemes should be aware of the potential benefits of accounting discretion, and those charged with promulgating accounting rules should consider the possibility that rules can be too inflexible.

This paper provides accessible illustrations of the effects of accounting discretion on performance evaluation and offer discussion to place the conclusions drawn from the model into a standard setting context.

The purpose of this paper is to document the long‐term, transformational change strategies that the authors are using to create a new Library at Macquarie University.

The strategies are explained using the metaphor of a journey, with a roadmap, or guiding principles, the milestones reached and next steps for the future. They are also discussed in the context of University and Library strategic planning and with reference to the concepts emerging from Library 2.0 discussions.

During 2005/2006 the authors transformed the design of jobs and structure to build a more flexible Library that is agile, resilient, informed, connected, successful and responsible. These changes are being implemented during 2006/2007, supported by extensive training and new approaches to planning, team building, performance monitoring and governance. Two significant changes are being made. One is the construction of a new library building to reaffirm the centrality to research and learning. Also, strategies to maximise the visibility and use of physical resources in this new environment are being implemented. A new technical architecture to underpin all of the activities is being designed.

The aim in creating a new Library is to make the services client‐centric rather than library‐centric.

This article analyses how higher education institutions (HEIs) have responded to government policy to increase the participation rates of students from lower social classes through their admissions policies.

The article uses documentary evidence and interviews with institutional policy makers to examine HEI admissions policies and the rationale underpinning them.

This research found that admissions policies owed more to the nature of demand than attempts to widen participation. Old universities tend to ask for high A‐level grades and were sceptical about the value of vocational qualifications, but demonstrated a willingness to be more flexible where there was a low demand for courses. Less prestigious institutions tend to recruit more students from working class backgrounds because of the markets they were able to recruit in rather than because of their widening participation policies.

Whilst this study is based on a small number of cases, the evidence suggests that institutional admissions policies perpetuate the problem of working class disadvantage. The ability of HEIs to review and change their admissions policies is, however, constrained by the way government policy encourages a competitive and stratified system of higher education. This is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future, but those wanting equality of opportunity in HE need to continue to put pressure on institutional policy makers to develop more inclusive systems of admission.

By interviewing key institutional policy makers this article has been able to provide insights into the rationale behind HEI policy on admissions and widening participation.

Rashidah N. Andrews is an academic advisor in the College of Liberal Arts at Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She earned an Ed.M. in higher education at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education and is currently a doctoral student in educational administration at temple. Before arrival at Temple, Rashidah spent three years as project manager for the Ethnic Minorities Student Achievement Grant (EMSAG) at Halesowen College in England, one year as director of College Retention at a non-profit in Philadelphia and two years as admission counselor at her alma mater. Her research interests include access, retention and persistence of low-income, first-generation students.

This study engages an understudied presupposition that values are relatively impervious to situational pressures. We do this within a key sociological context, incorporating social status as a meso-level structure, by measuring values before and after a competition situation with an experimentally controlled outcome to determine the situational robustness of values.

We incorporate measures of values into a standard competition experiment, looking at how winning or losing and the status of the perceived competition influence peoples’ values.

Drawing on the well-established expectation states literature, we demonstrate that perceptions of gaining or losing a competition influence core values. Overall, positive, related situational feedback seemed to heighten all of the values-measures, while receiving (manipulated) negative, specific feedback dampened the rating of all values.

This is an initial exploration of the received wisdom; future work should involve different manipulations, wider arrays of values-measurement, and more diverse samples.

We hope that our interpretations of these results suggest how perceived status influences core internal experiences. The processes described have implications for the experiences of groups that win or lose political competitions, and other social interactions whereby people feel more or less affirmed in terms of their core beliefs.

This suggests that individuals and groups who perceive themselves as winning competitions, elections, or challenges will feel affirmed in their core beliefs, and be more motivated to pursue those valued ends. People who perceive themselves as being situationally unsuccessful will feel a general dampening of these core beliefs.

This chapter is the first to link the internal study of values with the general expectation states tradition. It is exploratory, and results suggest this is a fertile area for future inquiry.