For the public without the public

How is the notion of public interest operationalised in the regulatory practices of the International Public Sector Accounting Standards Board (IPSASB)? A fundamental objective in setting international accounting standards for both the private and public sector is to serve the ‘public interest’. Who or what constitutes ‘public interest’ however remains a highly complex and controversial issue. Private sector financial reporting research posits that users (of financial information) are used as a proxy for the ‘public’ and users are further refined to current and potential investors - a small proportion of the public. The debates surrounding public interest are even more contentious in public sector financial reporting which deals with ‘public’ (tax payers’) money. In our study we use Bourdieu’s notion of semi-homogenous fields to show how autonomous and heteronomous pressures from the epistemic community of the accounting profession and political/government interests compete for the right to define the public interest and determine how (by what accounting solutions) this interest is best served. This is a theoretical study grounded in the analysis of empirical data from interviews with the board members of the IPSASB. The main contribution of the paper is to further our understanding of the perceptions of the main decision makers from the ‘inner regulatory circle’ with regards to the problematic construct of public interest. The main findings suggest a paternal and un-reflexive attitude of the board members leading to the conclusion that the public have no real voice in these matters.

Parliamentary sovereignty, popular sovereignty, and Henry Parker's adjudicative standpoint

Discussions of popular sovereignty in early modern England have usually been premised upon a sharp distinction between ‘legal/constitutional’ forms of discourse (which merely interpret the law) and ‘political’ ones (which focus upon the right to make it). In such readings of the period, Henry Parker has a pivotal position as a writer who abandoned merely legalistic thinking. This chapter takes a different view. It argues that Parker’s major intellectual achievement was not so much to abandon legal/constitutional discourse as to offer a theorisation of its most distinctive features: he offered an account of a new kind of politics in which concern for ‘interests’ in property and in self-preservation replaced humanist concern with promotion of virtue. Parker drew upon ideas about representation best expressed by Sir Thomas Smith and ideas about law best expressed by Oliver St John. The theory he developed was not intended as a justification of legislative sovereignty, but of adjudicative supremacy. His picture of the two Houses as supreme adjudicators was meant to block the path to direct democracy. But the adjudicative standpoint they came to occupy presupposed that freeborn adults had ‘interests’ in life, liberty, and possessions. This had democratising implications.

Scoring rules and competitive behavior in best value construction auctions

This paper examines the extent to which engineers can influence the competitive behavior of bidders in Best Value or multi-attribute construction auctions, where both the (dollar) bid and technical non-price criteria are scored according to a scoring rule. From a sample of Spanish construction auctions with a variety of bid scoring rules, it is found that bidders are influenced by the auction rules in significant and predictable ways. The bid score weighting, bid scoring formula and abnormally low bid criterion are variables likely to influence the competitiveness of bidders in terms of both their aggressive/conservative bidding and concentration/dispersion of bids. Revealing the influence of the bid scoring rules and their magnitude on bidders’ competitive behavior opens the door for the engineer to condition bidder competitive behavior in such a way as to provide the balance needed to achieve the owner’s desired strategic outcomes.

Incorporation of different and changing client interests in the course of a project

There is a widespread assumption that clients’ expectations should be accommodated during a building project. However, there may be conflicting expectations within a client organization and these may change over time in the course of a project. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is used to study the incorporation of client expectations into the on-going development of a building project. To illustrate this, negotiations over a particular decision, namely the location of a building on one university campus was analysed. Negotiations went through a number of stages, involving a master plan architect, members of the public, campus maps and the Vice Chancellor. An ANT analysis helped to trace diverse actors' interests in a series of discussions and how these interests conflict with each other as one option was chosen over another. The analysis revealed new client interests in each negotiation process. Also, the prioritisation of client interests changed over time. The documentation of diverse and dynamic client interests especially contributes to the understanding of how some client interests fail to be incorporated in decision-making processes

Tracing client interests in the course of a project: why are some client interests incorporated whereas others are not?

Many construction professionals and policy-makers would agree that client expectations should be accommodated during a building project. However, this aspiration is not easy to deal with as there may be conflicting interests within a client organization and these may change over time in the course of a project. This research asks why some client interests, and not others, are incorporated into the development of a building project. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is used to study a single building project on a University campus. The building project is analysed as a number of discussions and negotiations, in which actors persuade each other to choose one solution over another. The analysis traces dynamic client engagement in decision-making processes as available options became increasingly constrained. However, this relative loss of control was countered by clients who continued the control over the timing of participants' involvement, and thus the way to impose their interests even at the later stage of the project.

Opening movements in Ophuls: Caught (and Madame de …)

This audiovisual essay was created at the wonderful NEH-funded workshop in videographic criticism at Middlebury College, ‘Scholarship in Sound and Image’. The essay provides an analysis of the orchestration of long takes and camera movement in the opening of Caught (Ophuls, 1949), and develops a comparison with the opening of Madame de… (Ophuls, 1953 – U.S. release title The Earrings of Madame de…), not least through a series of juxtapositions, which can be directly presented and compared in an audiovisual essay. The openings share a concern with the subjectivity of the female protagonists and our relationship toward it, evoking the women’s experience while balancing this with other kinds of perspective. As has been noted in the critical literature on Ophuls, and on melodramas of passion more generally, such views enable us to perceive the women concerned to be caught in material and ideological frameworks of which they are at best partially aware. Among the interests of this particular comparison, however, is the extent to which the dynamic around female subjectivity is played in relation to luxury goods, imagined, owned or admired. Tensions between on- and off-screen spaces and sounds are critical to the interest of the long takes under discussion. Camera movements subtly inflect the extent to which we are aligned (or otherwise) with the characters and the ways in which their material circumstances are revealed to us.