Tony Dobbs, Merlin Stone and Julie Abbott
This paper summarises the situation regarding the penetration of data warehouses and business intelligence systems in companies across a range of industries in the UK. Data…
Abstract
This paper summarises the situation regarding the penetration of data warehouses and business intelligence systems in companies across a range of industries in the UK. Data warehouses are being implemented due to the business need for tools within companies today to analyse the increasing amounts of data being collected. The paper then presents a short case study describing an example of a successful implementation of a business intelligence solution that supports CRM in a major retailer. Points are emphasised via the use of results from a recent IBM‐sponsored qualitative study done in the UK.
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Capitalism, religion and science (including calculative sciences such as accounting) have a long and turbulent relationship that, today, is manifest in the “War on Terror”. As…
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Capitalism, religion and science (including calculative sciences such as accounting) have a long and turbulent relationship that, today, is manifest in the “War on Terror”. As social ideologies, religion and science have played a sometimes decisive influence in the history of capitalism. What can one learn from these past encounters to better understand their relationship today? This paper explores the historical origins of this relationship as a struggle over the ideals of the Enlightenment: – as decline of the modern and the rise of the postmodern. The paper begins by tracing the evolution of Christianities and their different potentials in both resisting and accommodating the extant social order. Islam, in contrast, has,until recently, enjoyed a relatively sheltered existence from capitalism, and today, some factions present a militant stance against the market and the liberal democratic state. Overall, the Enlightenment and modernist projects are judged to be jeopardy – a condition fostered by orthodox economics and accounting ideology, where it is now de rigueur to divide the secular from the non‐secular, the normative from the positive, and the ethical from the pragmatic or realist. Finally, the mechanisms behind this Enlightenment regression are examined here using literary analysis, as a modest prelude to developing a new politics for a progressive accounting; one that seeks to restore the integrity and probity of the Enlightenment Ideal.
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Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are…
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Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.
This paper traces the path of Marxism in the 20th century with special focus upon its place within political economy. It argues that the emphasis upon Marxism as a political…
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This paper traces the path of Marxism in the 20th century with special focus upon its place within political economy. It argues that the emphasis upon Marxism as a political economy has been directly connected to movement away from Marxism as a theory of class struggle. It begins by establishing how and why, in Marx’s view, all history is a history of class struggles and integrates this perspective with his work in Capital. It is argued that political economy was one of the things Marx was critiquing and that he was attempting to show political economy to be a product of capitalism rather than seeking to establish a Marxist political economy.
Computer based accounting information systems (AIS) have been a major force behind the current wave of corporate downsizing and reengineering (Deloitte & Touche LLP, 1996). While…
Abstract
Computer based accounting information systems (AIS) have been a major force behind the current wave of corporate downsizing and reengineering (Deloitte & Touche LLP, 1996). While greater economy and competitiveness is typically associated with these changes, conventional AIS literature usually eschews a counter‐hypothesis: that this new technology may also degrade both the quality and quantity of work, and therefore people’s working lives. The advent of Accounting, Management, and Information Technologies in 1991, with an espoused aim of “critically analyzing the relationships among our information systems designs, the qualities of our social and economic life, and our practices of management and control” (Boland and O’Leary, 1991, p. 2) presents a major opportunity to redress this deficiency. This paper reviews the journal’s inaugural issue and ancillary literature to assess its likely contribution. This literature is found to lack a sufficient appreciation of the social and historical context of AIS developments and thus compromises the new journal’s ability to achieve its espoused aims. The paper calls for a better understanding of the upheavals currently under way in the accounting workplace and ways in which AIS technology (and ethnographers) may compound these instabilities. A different kind of ethnographic research is called for: one capable of recognizing the dysfunctionalities of AIS‐induced downsizing and restructuring, and more politically and socially self‐aware of AIS agency in social and technological change.
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Tony Tinker and Rob Gray
Sustainability – in the sense of a system of deep‐rooted social justice and a fair and responsible allocation and use of ecological resources – requires a political philosophy…
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Sustainability – in the sense of a system of deep‐rooted social justice and a fair and responsible allocation and use of ecological resources – requires a political philosophy adequate to its unique task in effecting change. Traditional Cartesian epistemes, that rely on formalistic policy declarations and which appeal to morality, are seen as inadequate without a rigorous historical and politically informed praxis, wherein our own cognitive, spiritual, and aesthetic development is seen as integral to developing processes “out there”. Several examples of attempts to form organic ties are provided to illustrate the use of praxis as a methodology of intervention.
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This article provides a detailed investigation of how Lewis revisited classical and Marxian concepts such as productive/unproductive labor, economic surplus, subsistence wages…
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This article provides a detailed investigation of how Lewis revisited classical and Marxian concepts such as productive/unproductive labor, economic surplus, subsistence wages, reserve army, and capital accumulation in his investigation of economic development. The Lewis 1954 development model is compared to other models advanced at the time by Harrod, Domar, Swan, Kaldor, Solow, von Neumann, Nurkse, Rosenstein-Rodan, Myint, and others. Lewis applied the notion of economic duality to open and closed economies.
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Tony Carter and Demissew Diro Ejara
The purpose of this paper is to export the idea of “Core Competency Based Valuation”. Wireless network operations services companies have exploded in importance and face…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to export the idea of “Core Competency Based Valuation”. Wireless network operations services companies have exploded in importance and face unprecedented challenges in valuing them. This article considers how one firm's managers are enhancing their value through better performance and decision making to input long‐term value, along with the industry growth and highly favorable customer response to their quality products and services.
Design/methodology/approach
This fairly extensive, yet focused paper, was based on accepted financial valuation procedures, due diligence from visit with managers and relevant market data. This paper also reflects other critical valuation quantitative information concerning their considerable business activity and excellent future prospects in the “sales deals pipeline” such as Nokia, a key customer development, that should be reflected in any detailed report regarding valuation.
Findings
Effective management requires that the emphasis return to fundamentals, even if it makes analysts unhappy in the short‐term. For managers, DCF tools will continue to be important. However, history also shows that on occasion market valuations can and do deviate. They can benefit that way only if they understand the real underlying values. Managers need to keep their focus on discounted cash flow and all those factors in the company and marketplace that reflect the firm's capabilities and opportunities.
Originality/value
What makes wireless firms, and especially new wireless firms, different? First, they usually have not been in existence for more than a year or two, leading to a very limited history. Second, their current financial statements reveal very little about the component of their assets – expected growth – that contributes the most to their value. Third, these firms often represent the first of their kind of business. In many cases, there are no competitors or a peer group against which they can be measured.
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Benjamin W. Kelly and W. Peter Archibald
Erving Goffman has been variously interpreted as a symbolic interactionist, a structural functionalist, or an a-structural power-game theorist. However, when considering Goffman’s…
Abstract
Erving Goffman has been variously interpreted as a symbolic interactionist, a structural functionalist, or an a-structural power-game theorist. However, when considering Goffman’s affiliation with the human ecology (HEC) of Robert Park and Everett Hughes, one is able to shed new light on Goffman’s relationship to the aforementioned sociological paradigms. This chapter will demonstrate that his Darwinist underpinnings and overall implicit evolutionary perspective allowed him to develop a dramaturgical theory that explicates how actors are able to understand, predict, anticipate, accommodate to, and influence others while pursuing one’s own or own group’s interests, through one or more of role “taking,” “playing,” and “making.” Furthermore, Goffman elaborates upon Park’s use of dramaturgy, following him in making more room for competition and inequalities in status and power, and offering new dimensions and categories for specifying when and why different adaptive strategies will be used, within different types and degrees of accommodation. Ecological dramaturgy is the term we give to these interdependent lines of social action within stratification contexts. Such structural concerns ultimately separate Goffman from the more subjective and less deductive elements of traditional symbolic interactionist thought. We argue that Goffman’s much neglected ecological and evolutionary-minded approach to role-taking and its inspired analysis of competitive interactive processes provide a missing link in better understanding his complicated intellectual heritage.
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The growing interest in sharing information about the preservation of library and archival material has resulted in the production of numerous audiovisual programs on the subject…
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The growing interest in sharing information about the preservation of library and archival material has resulted in the production of numerous audiovisual programs on the subject over the past 15 years. Each year more items appear.