Accounting Undergraduates’ Perceptions of Cooperative Learning as a Model for Enhancing their Interpersonal and Communication Skills to Interface Successfully with Professional Accountancy Education and Training

To interface effectively with professional accountancy training, accounting educationalists should ensure that they turn out graduates who possess the interpersonal and communication skills required of today's accountant. Attainment of these skills is promoted by group work. However, little empirical evidence exists to help academics make an informed choice about which form of group learning enhances interpersonal and communication skills. This paper addresses this deficiency by comparing perceptions of skills enhancement between accounting students who experienced traditional or simple group learning and those who undertook cooperative learning. The findings reveal that the cooperative learning cohort perceived their learning experience to be significantly more effective at enhancing interpersonal and communication skills than that of the simple group learning cohort. This study provides evidence that cooperative learning is a more effective model for delivering interpersonal and communication skills than simple group learning, thereby creating a more successful interface between academic accounting and professional accountancy training.

Pulmonary rehabilitation and follow-on services: a Northern Ireland survey

There should be a clear pathway through pulmonary rehabilitation and follow-on services. The aim of this survey was to determine the characteristics of the different components of the patient pathway, that is, pulmonary rehabilitation programs, ongoing exercise facilities, and support networks in Northern Ireland. Questionnaires were sent to current providers of pulmonary rehabilitation, providers of ongoing exercise, and support groups in Northern Ireland. Findings relating to the current status of pulmonary rehabilitation in Northern Ireland up to January 2007 are reported. There are currently 23 pulmonary rehabilitation programs in Northern Ireland. There appears to be a pathway through the short-term pulmonary rehabilitation program (6-8 weeks). Programs met standards for structure and format, except for the frequency of supervised exercise. Not all programs have links for the provision of ongoing exercise, but a range of exercise programs are available in leisure centers in Northern Ireland that include people with respiratory disease. There are 13 support groups for patients with respiratory disease in Northern Ireland and their function is diverse. Pulmonary rehabilitation is established in Northern Ireland, although not all patients are able to access these. Facilities for ongoing exercise and support groups are less developed. Improvements could be facilitated by better communication within the patient pathway and a strategic coordinated approach.

Humanitarian Travels: Ethical Communication in Lonely Planet Guidebooks

Aside from the more mundane purpose of telling us where to eat, sleep and sightsee in foreign lands, guidebooks communicate an ethical vision that sees travel as the key to reducing cultural differences and inequalities. This article argues that Lonely Planet guidebooks in particular encourage a form of ‘responsible independent travel’ that both reflects and produces a powerful discourse of humanitarianism. By examining the controversy over Lonely Planet’s publication of guidebooks to Burma, this article uncovers the problematic colonial logic embedded in that ethical vision.

Communication, recognition and social work: Aligning the ethical theories of Habermas and Honneth

The modern world is replete with ethical challenges of Orwellian proportions. The violation of human rights and misrecognition of identities are two of the most pressing examples. In this paper, the ethical theories of Habermas and Honneth are aligned as a way of addressing these specific challenges within social work. It is suggested that these theories are complementary, mutually rectifying and concordant at the meta-ethical level of analysis. The alignment is also justified, pargmatically, through the construction of three hypothetical vignettes demonstrating different kinds of practice dilemmas. The need for egalitarian communication and the imperative to recognise human identity in all its dimensions subsequently emerge as the two foundation stones for ethical deliberation in social work.

Network formation under mutual consent and costly communication

We consider two different approaches to describe the formation of social networks under mutual consent and costly communication. First, we consider a network-based approach; in particular Jackson–Wolinsky’s concept of pairwise stability. Next, we discuss a non-cooperative game-theoretic approach, through a refinement of the Nash equilibria of Myerson’s consent game. This refinement, denoted as monadic stability, describes myopically forward looking behavior of the players. We show through an equivalence that the class of monadically stable networks is a strict subset of the class of pairwise stable networks that can be characterized fully by modifications of the properties defining pairwise stability.