Ethics education in management accounting studies: evidence from business schools in Ghana

Management accounting in recent times, and perhaps rightly so, has begun to gain recognition as a profession separate and complimentary to financial accounting. Evidence exists to suggest that management accountants are exposed to a unique set of ethical challenges within industry and that a significant high number of management accountants have engaged in unethical practices in performing their jobs. For the accounting profession as a whole, the growing number of corporate failures has created a credibility crisis that requires a deliberate intervention to mitigate. If this is not addressed sooner, the accounting profession stands the risk of losing relevance. Scholarship on ethical issues in accounting practice have either focused mostly on financial accounting or have sought to combine ethical issues for financial and management accounting. Various arguments have been made in recent times of the need to treat ethical issues in behavioural studies as context-specific and therefore separate ethical considerations in management accounting from financial accounting. This study adopts an approach, following various literature, that effective ethics education can help practitioners deal appropriately with ethical issues at the work place, and explores students’ and faculty members’perceptions on current practices in ethics education. As expected, faculty and students differ significantly on a wide range of issues on ethics education in management accounting. Based on the insights provided from this study, appropriate recommendations have been made to improve ethics education in management accounting.

Protocol for the PINCER trial: a cluster randomised trial comparing the effectiveness of a pharmacist-led IT-based intervention with simple feedback in reducing rates of clinically important errors in medicines management in general practices

Background: Medication errors are an important cause of morbidity and mortality in primary care. The aims of this study are to determine the effectiveness, cost effectiveness and acceptability of a pharmacist-led information-technology-based complex intervention compared with simple feedback in reducing proportions of patients at risk from potentially hazardous prescribing and medicines management in general (family) practice. Methods: Research subject group: "At-risk" patients registered with computerised general practices in two geographical regions in England. Design: Parallel group pragmatic cluster randomised trial. Interventions: Practices will be randomised to either: (i) Computer-generated feedback; or (ii) Pharmacist-led intervention comprising of computer-generated feedback, educational outreach and dedicated support. Primary outcome measures: The proportion of patients in each practice at six and 12 months post intervention: - with a computer-recorded history of peptic ulcer being prescribed non-selective non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs - with a computer-recorded diagnosis of asthma being prescribed beta-blockers - aged 75 years and older receiving long-term prescriptions for angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors or loop diuretics without a recorded assessment of renal function and electrolytes in the preceding 15 months. Secondary outcome measures; These relate to a number of other examples of potentially hazardous prescribing and medicines management. Economic analysis: An economic evaluation will be done of the cost per error avoided, from the perspective of the UK National Health Service (NHS), comparing the pharmacist-led intervention with simple feedback. Qualitative analysis: A qualitative study will be conducted to explore the views and experiences of health care professionals and NHS managers concerning the interventions, and investigate possible reasons why the interventions prove effective, or conversely prove ineffective. Sample size: 34 practices in each of the two treatment arms would provide at least 80% power (two-tailed alpha of 0.05) to demonstrate a 50% reduction in error rates for each of the three primary outcome measures in the pharmacist-led intervention arm compared with a 11% reduction in the simple feedback arm. Discussion: At the time of submission of this article, 72 general practices have been recruited (36 in each arm of the trial) and the interventions have been delivered. Analysis has not yet been undertaken.

PINCER trial: a cluster randomised trial comparing the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of a pharmacist-led IT-based intervention with simple feedback in reducing rates of clinically important errors in medicines management in general practices

Background: Medication errors in general practice are an important source of potentially preventable morbidity and mortality. Building on previous descriptive, qualitative and pilot work, we sought to investigate the effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and likely generalisability of a complex pharm acist-led IT-based intervention aiming to improve prescribing safety in general practice. Objectives: We sought to: • Test the hypothesis that a pharmacist-led IT-based complex intervention using educational outreach and practical support is more effective than simple feedback in reducing the proportion of patients at risk from errors in prescribing and medicines management in general practice. • Conduct an economic evaluation of the cost per error avoided, from the perspective of the National Health Service (NHS). • Analyse data recorded by pharmacists, summarising the proportions of patients judged to be at clinical risk, the actions recommended by pharmacists, and actions completed in the practices. • Explore the views and experiences of healthcare professionals and NHS managers concerning the intervention; investigate potential explanations for the observed effects, and inform decisions on the future roll-out of the pharmacist-led intervention • Examine secular trends in the outcome measures of interest allowing for informal comparison between trial practices and practices that did not participate in the trial contributing to the QRESEARCH database. Methods Two-arm cluster randomised controlled trial of 72 English general practices with embedded economic analysis and longitudinal descriptive and qualitative analysis. Informal comparison of the trial findings with a national descriptive study investigating secular trends undertaken using data from practices contributing to the QRESEARCH database. The main outcomes of interest were prescribing errors and medication monitoring errors at six- and 12-months following the intervention. Results: Participants in the pharmacist intervention arm practices were significantly less likely to have been prescribed a non-selective NSAID without a proton pump inhibitor (PPI) if they had a history of peptic ulcer (OR 0.58, 95%CI 0.38, 0.89), to have been prescribed a beta-blocker if they had asthma (OR 0.73, 95% CI 0.58, 0.91) or (in those aged 75 years and older) to have been prescribed an ACE inhibitor or diuretic without a measurement of urea and electrolytes in the last 15 months (OR 0.51, 95% CI 0.34, 0.78). The economic analysis suggests that the PINCER pharmacist intervention has 95% probability of being cost effective if the decision-maker’s ceiling willingness to pay reaches £75 (6 months) or £85 (12 months) per error avoided. The intervention addressed an issue that was important to professionals and their teams and was delivered in a way that was acceptable to practices with minimum disruption of normal work processes. Comparison of the trial findings with changes seen in QRESEARCH practices indicated that any reductions achieved in the simple feedback arm were likely, in the main, to have been related to secular trends rather than the intervention. Conclusions Compared with simple feedback, the pharmacist-led intervention resulted in reductions in proportions of patients at risk of prescribing and monitoring errors for the primary outcome measures and the composite secondary outcome measures at six-months and (with the exception of the NSAID/peptic ulcer outcome measure) 12-months post-intervention. The intervention is acceptable to pharmacists and practices, and is likely to be seen as costeffective by decision makers.

The effect of financial leverage on real and accrual-based earnings management

Past research has documented a substitution effect between real earnings management (RM) and accrual-based earnings management (AM), depending on relative costs. This study contributes to this research by examining whether levels of (and changes in) financial leverage have an impact on this empirically documented trade-off. We hypothesise that in the presence of high leverage, firms that engage in earnings manipulation tactics will exhibit a preference for RM due to a lower possibility—and subsequent costs—of getting caught. We show that leverage levels and increases positively and significantly affect upward RM, with no significant effect on income-increasing AM, while our findings point towards a complementarity effect between unexpected levels of RM and AM for firms with very high leverage levels and changes. This is interpreted as an indication that high leverage could attract heavy outsider scrutiny, making it necessary for firms to use both forms of earnings management in order to achieve earnings targets. Furthermore, we document that equity investors exhibit a significantly stronger penalising reaction to AM vs. RM, indicating that leverage-induced RM is not as easily detectable by market participants as debt-induced AM, despite the fact that the former could imply deviation from optimal business practices.

Adapting to climate change impacts on water resources in England - an assessment of draft Water Resources Management Plans

Climate change is expected to produce reductions in water availability in England, potentially necessitating adaptive action by the water industry to maintain supplies. As part of Ofwat's fifth Periodic Review (PR09), water companies recently released their draft Water Resources Management Plans, setting out how each company intends to maintain the balance between the supply and demand for water over the next 25 years, following Environment Agency guidelines. This paper reviews these plans to determine company estimates of the impact of climate change on water supply relative to other resource pressures. The approaches adopted for incorporating the impact in the plans and the proposed management solutions are also identified. Climate change impacts for individual resource zones range from no reductions in deployable output to greater than 50% over the planning period. The estimated national aggregated loss of deployable output under a “core” climate scenario is ~520 Ml/d (3% of deployable output) by 2034/35, the equivalent of the supply of one entire water company (South West Water). Climate change is the largest single driver of change in water supplies over the planning period. Over half of the climate change impact is concentrated in southern England. In extreme cases, climate change uncertainty is of the same magnitude as the change under the core scenario (up to a loss of ~475 Ml/d). 44 of the 68 resource zones with available data are estimated to have a climate change impact. In 35 of these climate change has the greatest impact although in 10 zones sustainability reductions have a greater impact. Of the overall change in downward pressure on the supply-demand balance over the planning period, ~56% is accounted for by increased demand (620 Ml/d) and supply side climate change accounts for ~37% (407 Ml/d). Climate change impacts have a cumulative impact in concert with other changing supply side reducing components increasing the national pressure on the supply-demand balance. Whilst the magnitude of climate change appears to justify its explicit consideration, it is rare that adaptation options are planned solely in response to climate change but as a suite of options to provide a resilient supply to a range of pressures (including significant demand side pressures). Supply-side measures still tend to be considered by water companies to be more reliable than demand-side measures.

Knowledge and information evaluation practice: an exploratory study in a construction firm

There are a number of challenges associated with managing knowledge and information in construction organizations delivering major capital assets. These include the ever-increasing volumes of information, losing people because of retirement or competitors, the continuously changing nature of information, lack of methods on eliciting useful knowledge, development of new information technologies and changes in management and innovation practices. Existing tools and methodologies for valuing intangible assets in fields such as engineering, project management and financial, accounting, do not address fully the issues associated with the valuation of information and knowledge. Information is rarely recorded in a way that a document can be valued, when either produced or subsequently retrieved and re-used. In addition there is a wealth of tacit personal knowledge which, if codified into documentary information, may prove to be very valuable to operators of the finished asset or future designers. This paper addresses the problem of information overload and identifies the differences between data, information and knowledge. An exploratory study was conducted with a leading construction consultant examining three perspectives (business, project management and document management) by structured interviews and specifically how to value information in practical terms. Major challenges in information management are identified. An through-life Information Evaluation methodology (IEM) is presented to reduce information overload and to make the information more valuable in the future.

The influence of environmental policy on the decisions of managers to adopt G-SCM practices

This article explores the reasons that affect the decisions of managers of firms to adopt management practices in order to green their supply chain management. Under the context of environmental policy, the relationship between policy instruments (‘command and control’, market-based, and self-regulated) and the decisions of managers to adopt green supply chain management (G-SCM) practices is examined. The results show that in some cases the environmental legislation, market-based instruments and self-regulated incentives could play a critical role in the decisions of managers to adopt some specific G-SCM practices, while in other cases environmental policy instruments have not seemed to affect the decisions of managers regarding some other G-SCM practices.

Ecological intensification: harnessing ecosystem services for food security

Rising demands for agricultural products will increase pressure to further intensify crop production, while negative environmental impacts have to be minimized. Ecological intensification entails the environmentally friendly replacement of anthropogenic inputs and/or enhancement of crop productivity, by including regulating and supporting ecosystem services management in agricultural practices. Effective ecological intensification requires an understanding of the relations between land use at different scales and the community composition of ecosystem service-providing organisms above and below ground, and the flow, stability, contribution to yield, and management costs of the multiple services delivered by these organisms. Research efforts and investments are particularly needed to reduce existing yield gaps by integrating context-appropriate bundles of ecosystem services into crop production systems.

Description and process evaluation of pharmacists’ interventions in a pharmacist-led information technology-enabled multicentre cluster randomised controlled trial for reducing medication errors in general practice (PINCER trial)

Objective To undertake a process evaluation of pharmacists' recommendations arising in the context of a complex IT-enabled pharmacist-delivered randomised controlled trial (PINCER trial) to reduce the risk of hazardous medicines management in general practices. Methods PINCER pharmacists manually recorded patients’ demographics, details of interventions recommended, actions undertaken by practice staff and time taken to manage individual cases of hazardous medicines management. Data were coded and double entered into SPSS v15, and then summarised using percentages for categorical data (with 95% CI) and, as appropriate, means (SD) or medians (IQR) for continuous data. Key findings Pharmacists spent a median of 20 minutes (IQR 10, 30) reviewing medical records, recommending interventions and completing actions in each case of hazardous medicines management. Pharmacists judged 72% (95%CI 70, 74) (1463/2026) of cases of hazardous medicines management to be clinically relevant. Pharmacists recommended 2105 interventions in 74% (95%CI 73, 76) (1516/2038) of cases and 1685 actions were taken in 61% (95%CI 59, 63) (1246/2038) of cases; 66% (95%CI 64, 68) (1383/2105) of interventions recommended by pharmacists were completed and 5% (95%CI 4, 6) (104/2105) of recommendations were accepted by general practitioners (GPs), but not completed at the end of the pharmacists’ placement; the remaining recommendations were rejected or considered not relevant by GPs. Conclusions The outcome measures were used to target pharmacist activity in general practice towards patients at risk from hazardous medicines management. Recommendations from trained PINCER pharmacists were found to be broadly acceptable to GPs and led to ameliorative action in the majority of cases. It seems likely that the approach used by the PINCER pharmacists could be employed by other practice pharmacists following appropriate training.

Accounting information systems as institutional carriers: a case study of regulatory compliance in UK asset management houses

Previously, governments have responded to the impacts of economic failures and consequently have developed more regulations to protect employees, customers, shareholders and the economic wellbeing of the state. Our research addresses how Accounting Information Systems (AIS) may act as carriers for institutionalised practices associated with maintaining regulatory compliance within the context of UK Asset Management Houses. The AIS was found to be a strong conduit for institutionalized compliance related practices, utilising symbolic systems, relational systems, routines and artefacts to carry approaches relating to regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive strands of institutionalism. Thus, AIS are integral to the development and dissipation of best practice for the management of regulatory compliance. As institutional elements are clearly present we argue that AIS and regulatory compliance provide a rich context to further institutionalism. Since AIS may act as conduits for regulatory approaches, both systems adopters and clients may benefit from actively seeking to codify and abstract best practices into AIS. However, the application of generic institutionalized approaches, which may be applied across similar organizations, must be tempered with each firm’s business environment and associated regulatory exposure. A balance should be sought between approaches specific enough to be useful but generic enough to be universally applied.

South Korean MNEs' international HRM approach: hybridization of global standards and local practices

This paper analyses the international Human Resource Management (HRM) approaches of Korean Multinational Enterprises (MNEs). Through a study of nine major Korean MNEs’ approaches to subsidiary-HRM, it is argued that the firms pursue hybridization through a blending of localization and global standardization across detailed elements in five broad HRM practice areas. Local discretion is allowed if not counter to global HRM system requirements and “global best practices” used as the template for global standardization of selected HRM elements. This strategic orientation appears to be part of a deliberate response to the “liabilities of origin” born by firms from non-dominant economies.

A new regime of carbon counting: the practices and politics of accounting for everyday carbon through C02e

Inspired by the commercial desires of global brands and retailers to access the lucrative green consumer market, carbon is increasingly being counted and made knowable at the mundane sites of everyday production and consumption, from the carbon footprint of a plastic kitchen fork to that of an online bank account. Despite the challenges of counting and making commensurable the global warming impact of a myriad of biophysical and societal activities, this desire to communicate a product or service's carbon footprint has sparked complicated carbon calculative practices and enrolled actors at literally every node of multi-scaled and vastly complex global supply chains. Against this landscape, this paper critically analyzes the counting practices that create the ‘e’ in ‘CO2e’. It is shown that, central to these practices are a series of tools, models and databases which, in building upon previous work (Eden, 2012 and Star and Griesemer, 1989) we conceptualize here as ‘boundary objects’. By enrolling everyday actors from farmers to consumers, these objects abstract and stabilize greenhouse gas emissions from their messy material and social contexts into units of CO2e which can then be translated along a product's supply chain, thereby establishing a new currency of ‘everyday supply chain carbon’. However, in making all greenhouse gas-related practices commensurable and in enrolling and stabilizing the transfer of information between multiple actors these objects oversee a process of simplification reliant upon, and subject to, a multiplicity of approximations, assumptions, errors, discrepancies and/or omissions. Further the outcomes of these tools are subject to the politicized and commercial agendas of the worlds they attempt to link, with each boundary actor inscribing different meanings to a product's carbon footprint in accordance with their specific subjectivities, commercial desires and epistemic framings. It is therefore shown that how a boundary object transforms greenhouse gas emissions into units of CO2e, is the outcome of distinct ideologies regarding ‘what’ a product's carbon footprint is and how it should be made legible. These politicized decisions, in turn, inform specific reduction activities and ultimately advance distinct, specific and increasingly durable transition pathways to a low carbon society.

Adaptive project planning and management based on best practices - COBRA system

Planning a project with proper considerations of all necessary factors and managing a project to ensure its successful implementation will face a lot of challenges. Initial stage in planning a project for bidding a project is costly, time consuming and usually with poor accuracy on cost and effort predictions. On the other hand, detailed information for previous projects may be buried in piles of archived documents which can be increasingly difficult to learn from the previous experiences. Project portfolio has been brought into this field aiming to improve the information sharing and management among different projects. However, the amount of information that could be shared is still limited to generic information. This paper, we report a recently developed software system COBRA to automatically generate a project plan with effort estimation of time and cost based on data collected from previous completed projects. To maximise the data sharing and management among different projects, we proposed a method of using product based planning from PRINCE2 methodology. (Automated Project Information Sharing and Management System -�COBRA) Keywords: project management, product based planning, best practice, PRINCE2

Soil fertility management in the mid-hills of Nepal: Practices and perceptions

Sustaining soil fertility is essential to the prosperity of many households in the mid-hills of Nepal, but there are concerns that the breakdown of the traditional linkages between forest, livestock, and cropping systems is adversely affecting fertility. This study used triangulated data from surveys of households, discussion groups, and key informants in 16 wards in eastern and western Nepal to determine the existing practices for soil fertility management, the extent of such practices, and the perception of the direction of changes in soil fertility. The two principal practices for maintaining soil fertility were the application of farmyard manure (FYM) and of chemical fertilizer (mainly urea and diammonium phosphate). Green manuring, in-situ manuring, slicing terrace risers, and burning plant residues are rarely practiced. FYM usage was variable with more generally applied to khet land (average 6053 kg fresh weight manure ha(-1)) than to bari land (average 4185 kg fresh weight manure ha-1) with manure from goats and poultry preferred above that from cows and buffaloes. Almost all households (98%) apply urea to khet land and 87% to bari land, with 45% applying diammonium phosphate to both types of land. Application rates and timings of applications varied considerably both within and between wards suggesting poor knowledge transfer between the research and farming communities. The benefits of chemical fertilizers in terms of ease of application and transportation in comparison with FYM, were perceived to outweigh the widely reported detrimental hardening of soil associated with their continued usage. Among key informants, FYM applied in conjunction with chemical fertilizer was the most popular amendment, with FYM alone preferred more than chemical fertilizer alone - probably because of the latter's long-term detrimental effects. Key informant and householder surveys differed in their perception of fertility changes in the last decade probably because of differences in age and site-specific knowledge. All key informants felt that fertility had declined but among households, only about 40% perceived a decline with the remainder about evenly divided between no change and an increase. Householders with small landholdings (< 0.5 ha) were more likely to perceive increasing soil fertility while those with larger landholdings (> 2 ha) were more likely to perceive declining fertility. Perceived changes in soil fertility were not related to food self-sufficiency. The reasons for the slow spread of new technologies within wards and the poor understanding of optimal use of chemical fertilizers in conjunction with improved quality FYM may repay further investigation in terms of sustaining soil fertility in this region.