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Avoided emissions refer to greenhouse gas emission reductions that are a result of using a product or are emission removals due to a decision or an action. Although there is no uniform standard for calculating avoided emissions, market actors have started referring to avoided emissions as “Scope 4” emissions. By default, making a claim about Scope 4 emissions gives an appearance that this Scope of emissions is a natural extension of the existing and accepted Scope-based emissions accounting framework. The purpose of this study is to explore the implications of this assumed legitimacy.

Via a desktop review and interviews, we analyse extant Scope 4 company reporting, associated accounting methodologies and the practical implications of Scope 4 claims.

Upon examination of Scope 4 emissions and their relationship with Scopes 1, 2 and 3 emissions, we highlight a dynamic and interdependent relationship between quantification, commensuration and standardization in emissions accounting. We find that extant Scope 4 assessments do not fit the established framework for Scope-based emissions accounting. In line with literature on the territorializing nature of accounting, we call for caution about Scope 4 claims that are a distraction from the critical work of reducing absolute emissions.

We examine the implications of assumed alignment and borrowed legitimacy of Scope 4 with Scope-based accounting because Scope 4 is not an actual Scope, but a claim to a Scope. This is as an act of accounting territorialization.

While inter-organizational collaboration concerns processes of organizing between firms, it is always initiated and enacted by individual people who perceive a need for collaboration. This chapter takes the perspective of these actors and their efforts to seek collaboration as they pursue an agenda for change. Collaboration processes are thus conceptualized as path creation and internal strategizing. The chapter focuses specifically on how actors sell the need for collaboration internally and how they draw on their external network to promote change. It illustrates this process of issue selling and collaboration with six case studies in the area of new product development, new forms of network governance, and network-wide change of business practices. Comparing these more or less successful trajectories highlights the relevance of the relational context in issue selling, the role of intentionality within emerging processes, and interplay between external collaboration and internal strategizing.

Some wine marketing studies make reference to the importance of Generation‐X as the next wave of wine drinkers, but draw attention to a glaring fact; this next generation is consuming less wine than national averages. Whilst considerable amounts of information about Generation‐X exist, few studies have addressed their underlying wine purchasing behaviours. A mock label for a red and white wine was developed and respondents were asked to indicate their probability of purchase and the price they would pay. A range of wine purchasing behaviour questions were included. A questionnaire was randomly presented in a mail survey to 1,144 New Zealand respondents drawn from a national wine mailing list (n=640) and an academic institution (n=504). No follow‐up was undertaken and a 28% response rate was achieved. Generation‐X wine consumers exhibited more differences than similarities to the older age cohort, with many differences being statistically significant. Whilst Generation‐X purchase wines in a similar fashion, they are mainly light purchasers of bottled wine. Generation‐X respondents showed a stronger likelihood of purchasing a never‐before‐seen wine and place a different emphasis on wine label information. More research on Generation‐X and their behaviours as wine consumers is required.

The aim of this paper is to examine the provision of education and training programmes for young people in Scotland for work and lifelong learning within the context of the skills ecosystem approach adopted by the Scottish Government.

The research drew upon findings from a large EU-funded multi-country project which ran from 2016 to 2019 that comprised experiences and perspectives with young people who were affected by these programmes as well as the managers and practitioners tasked with delivering them. The work was conducted in Aberdeenshire and Glasgow and included in-depth interviews with young people and programme managers and practitioners.

The research showed that there is a gap between the rhetoric of the intentions of the policies and how those involved at ground level experience the programmes enacted under policies which draw on a skill ecosystem approach. Whilst there was public funding for training, it was not clear from the enactment of the relevant policies where employers' responsibilities lie. Locating the findings in the skills ecosystem model highlights the weak engagement of employers in their pivotal role in the education and training system and the resulting increased precarity of the young people's futures.

The paper sheds light on the shape of education and training provision in Scotland, the range of participants engaged in the provision and the commitment of providers in comparison to policy language and intentions.

Through the skill ecosystem approach, this paper draws together policy narratives and the experiences of young people.

The awareness of probability was observed in ancient cultures through the discovery of primitive dice games made with animal bones. The history of analytics in the workplace, as it is currently known (defined as predictive analytics), probably started in ancient Roman times, when the concept of insurance was first created. While the previous example showed that analytics for business had been around for some time, it is only relatively recently that there is an increased emphasis on the use of analytics in the modern firm. Credit card firms and retail catalog companies relied on analytics to drive their business models, for most of the latter half of the twentieth century. The use of advanced analytics for business also grew around the Millennium since the widespread use of data warehousing and relational databases on client servers. Moreover, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Techniques, which have been around for many decades, have had very few breakthrough successful applications up until recently when cloud computing and being able to take advantage of the infrastructure of companies, such as Amazon and Google, with their Cloud Services enabled these algorithms to be used to their full extent in firms. This powerful infrastructure availability coupled with BIG DATA is creating breakthrough applications across many business models on a consistent basis. This chapter explores the use of advanced analytics across different business functional areas. It also introduces some breakthrough models, which include Netflix, Pandora, eHarmony, Zillow, and Amazon, and explores how these are not only changing the lives of consumers but also changing the nature of the workplace and creating new issues for firms such as data protection and liabilities for the actions of automated algorithms.

The fastest growing sector of the prison population is older people. Although the numbers are still relatively small (just under 2,500 in 2007), it would seem that the ‘sameness’ principle within prisons renders older prisoners invisible. The health of older prisoners is a matter of concern ‐ research indicates that you age 10 years faster in prison (Uzoaba, 1998) which can compound the problems that may be associated with ageing. The provision of health and social care do not match those for older people outside of the prison system. This article considers the legal issues surrounding the treatment of older prisoners. It recognises that restrictions on liberty are a component of the prison system; however, it questions whether the consequences of ‘sameness’ infringe the legal rights of older prisons. It recommends a statutory presumption of equivalence of care, which can only be rebutted expressly or by necessary implication.

Although accounting professors around the globe have addressed various social aspects of accounting, very rarely does that research address the concerns of students. This is despite the fact that students are the focus of the educational mission of most universities. In an effort to address this gap, this chapter extends the field of social accounting to an issue critical to students: the cost of accounting textbooks in the United States. Textbook cost is drawing increasing attention from public interest groups and government regulators as costs are growing at a more rapid rate than many other costs, and constitute a significant portion of the total cost of obtaining a higher education degree. For accounting students, these costs are exacerbated by the fact that accounting textbooks are among the most expensive of any major, and they are being revised with increasing frequency – which eliminates students’ ability to buy less expensive used books – often with little or no discernible benefit to students. We argue that in some subfields of accounting – especially managerial/cost and introductory courses – topics are relatively stable, and that frequent textbook revisions are unnecessarily costly for our students, many of whom, along with their families, are making significant financial sacrifices to earn their degrees. In this study, we provide background on the textbook pricing issue, include data from a survey of accounting faculty demonstrating that they consider the revisions too frequent, document the increasing frequency of accounting textbook revisions over recent decades, analyze content in a leading accounting textbook, and discuss options for reducing the cost of accounting textbooks, including following student activists’ lead in advocating for open-source, free textbooks.

Collaboration is viewed as an essential ingredient for education systems and school improvement. Collaborative leadership has both emergent and intentional components (Woods & Roberts, 2018). Collaborative practices can emerge over time as teachers and schools work together, and intentional interventions and decisions can either support this emergence and/or work against it. In this chapter, we discuss the New Zealand case of collaboration between schools. The context is situated in policy reform associated with an incentivized and voluntary programme that groups of schools could participate in. The programme, communities of schools (CoLs), was implemented in 2014 and continues at the time of writing this chapter. We draw on critical commentary of the programme, as well as the small number of research studies available. The experienced way of CoLs is replete with tensions. These are illustrated with the help of Hoods’ (1998) social regulation and cohesion matrix. Rather than locate the New Zealand case in one quadrant of the matrix, we illustrate how multiple aspects of Hoods’ matrix (1998) have been and are currently in play regarding collaboration between schools in New Zealand.