News judgements: a critical examination of reporting non-convictions for minor crimes

This paper considers issues related to the reporting of non-convictions for minor criminal offences. The entry point for the discussion is a content analysis of press court reporting across the Australian state of Victoria that shows that many newspapers report non-convictions. The paper observes that as the practice of reporting non-convictions has extended into digital space, a person the local court decides should not have a black mark recorded against their name can now be named and shamed before a global audience for an indefinite period. 

Hyponatraemia: an audit of aged psychiatry patients taking SSRIs and SNRIs

Objective: 

It comes with the territory: 'remote' Indigenous reporting for mainstream audiences

Mainstream news coverage of ‘remote’ Indigenous Australia is arguably one of the most distinctive forms of Australian journalism practice. While there has been considerable scholarly interest in news media representations of ‘remote’ Indigenous people, little research has been done until now on the logic or operations of this reporting specialisation. This monograph presents a Bourdieuian analysis of the subfield based in the insights study participants offered in interviews undertaken as part of The Media and Indigenous Policy project. It analyses the reporting subfield through an investigation of the practices participants say shape the way white, mainstream journalists understand their role, its possibilities and limitations. Reporting specialists spoke of the geographical and ontological distances they have to negotiate in dealing with Indigenous and government sources, as well as the ways in which they are constrained by institutional pressures. They attribute many of the difficulties with covering ‘remote’ Indigenous issues to factors linked with these physical and cultural distances.

Doctors under the microscope: the birth of medical audit

In 1989 a UK government White Paper introduced medical audit as a comprehensive and statutory system of assessment and improvement in quality of care in hospitals. A considerable body of research has described the evolution of medical audit in terms of a struggle between doctors and National Health Service managers over control of quality assurance. In this paper we examine the emergence of medical audit from 1910 to the early 1950s, with a particular focus on the pioneering work of the American surgeons Codman, MacEachern and Ponton. It is contended that medical professionals initially created medical audit in order to articulate a suitable methodology for assessing individual and organisational performance. Rather than a means of protecting the medical profession from public scrutiny, medical auditing was conceived and operationalised as a managerial tool for fostering the active engagement of senior hospital managers and discharging public accountability. These early debates reveal how accounting was implicated in the development of a system for monitoring and improving the work of medical professionals, advancing the quality of hospital care, and was advocated in ways, which included rather than excluded managers.

Institutional Ownership, Audit Committee and Risk Disclosure – Evidence from Australian Stock Market

This study investigates the influence of institutional ownership and audit committees corporate risk disclosures. Focusing on analysing firms’ risk disclosures make in their 2009 annual reports, our sample constitutes a sample of 66 Australian listed firms. We divide institutional shareholders into dedicated-type institutional block shareholders and transient-type institutional block shareholders. We find that while there is no significant relationship between dedicated-type institutional block shareholders and risk disclosure, there is a positive relationship between transient-type institutional block shareholders and risk disclosures. Our result is consistent with a principal that wields limited monitoring resources while achieving high resource dependency over management. We also find a significant and positive relationship between audit committee independence and risk disclosures, showing the positive role played by audit committee in improving the information transparency and reducing information asymmetry in capital market.

Contractor quantity surveyor using ERP system in cost reporting

Quantity surveying is the key profession in cost management for construction business. However, construction industry is notorious in using information technology that makes reporting inefficient. A construction company in Hong Kong has been using an enterprise resource planning system as the information communication technology in management and cost reporting backbone since 2003. This paper investigates if such system represents an efficient tool for quantity surveyors and any intervening actions are required to enhance its efficiency. In doing so, a team of surveyors interviewed and then the soft system methodology was used as the research approach to depict the situation. This leads to the improvement needs and list of actions. Participants have prioritized working closely with top/senior management to design a proper report format; avoiding unnecessary adjustments and undue influence to reporting, and ensuring accurate data as the top three critical actions crucial for reliable cost reporting.