Search results

The proposed use of unlatched, reverse swing flappy doors is becoming widespread in the design of residential common corridor smoke control systems. This article explores the conceptual arguments for and against the use of these systems.

This article relies on industry experience, with reference to relevant building design practices, standards and research literature, to categorise arguments. These are collated into four common areas of concern relating to compartmentation, reliability, depressurisation and modelling practices. A final comparison is made between different common corridor smoke control system types for these four areas.

The article highlights several concerns around the use of flappy door systems, including the enforced breaches in stair compartmentation, uncertainties around system reliability, the reliance on door closers as a single point of failure, the impact of day-to-day building use on the system performance and the false confidence that modelling assessments can provide in demonstrating adequacy. The article concludes in suggesting that alternative smoke control options be considered in place of flappy door systems.

Discussion on the use of flappy door smoke control systems has been ongoing within the fire engineering community for several years, but there is limited public literature available on the topic. By collating the common arguments relating to these systems into a single article, a better understanding of their benefits and pitfalls has been provided for consideration by building design and construction professionals.

Scholars have long argued that churches play a critical role in mobilizing communities marginal to the political process, primarily by pooling resources, disseminating information, and providing opportunities for members to develop community networks, leadership, and civic skills. However, recent research suggests that churches only serve as effective mobilizing institutions when they engage in direct political discussion and recruitment. Even so, churches may face economic, legal, and institutional barriers to entering the political sphere, and explicit political speech and action remain rare. Through an analysis of two years of ethnographic fieldwork following faith-based community organizers attempting to recruit Spanish speakers throughout a Catholic Archdiocese into a campaign for immigrant rights, this paper explores the institutional constraints on church political mobilization, and how these are overcome to mobilize one of the most politically marginal groups in the United States today: Hispanic undocumented immigrants and their allies. I argue that scholars of political engagement must look beyond the structural features of organizations to consider the effects of their institutionalized domains and practices. While churches do face institutional barriers to political mobilization, activists who specialize their recruitment strategy to match the institutional practices of the organizations they target can effectively overcome these barriers to mobilize politically alienated populations.

Computer based accounting information systems (AIS) have been a major force behind the current wave of corporate downsizing and reengineering (Deloitte & Touche LLP, 1996). While greater economy and competitiveness is typically associated with these changes, conventional AIS literature usually eschews a counter‐hypothesis: that this new technology may also degrade both the quality and quantity of work, and therefore people’s working lives. The advent of Accounting, Management, and Information Technologies in 1991, with an espoused aim of “critically analyzing the relationships among our information systems designs, the qualities of our social and economic life, and our practices of management and control” (Boland and O’Leary, 1991, p. 2) presents a major opportunity to redress this deficiency. This paper reviews the journal’s inaugural issue and ancillary literature to assess its likely contribution. This literature is found to lack a sufficient appreciation of the social and historical context of AIS developments and thus compromises the new journal’s ability to achieve its espoused aims. The paper calls for a better understanding of the upheavals currently under way in the accounting workplace and ways in which AIS technology (and ethnographers) may compound these instabilities. A different kind of ethnographic research is called for: one capable of recognizing the dysfunctionalities of AIS‐induced downsizing and restructuring, and more politically and socially self‐aware of AIS agency in social and technological change.

This paper aims to adapt Simons’ (1995b) theory of the role of information technology (IT) in shaping and facilitating the levers of control (i.e. the Levers of Control Applied to Information Technology – LOCaIT) as a framework for investigating how eBay’s business strategy was realized through its management control system (MCS) in the first 10 years of the online auction market.

The qualitative method uses data from public record interviews, teaching cases, books, Securities and Exchange Commission filings and other archival sources to longitudinally trace the realization of eBay’s strategy through its MCS and IT.

Realizing its strategy through the eBay MCS necessitated a diagnostic control system unlike any previously seen. This system created a close-knit online community and enabled buyers and sellers to monitor one another’s performance and trustworthiness.

The LOCaIT theory facilitated understanding the core aspects of the realization of eBay’s strategy through its MCS and IT. However, LOCaIT largely omits the strong linkages evident among elements of the MCS, the importance and necessity of building a core IT infrastructure to support eBay’s strategy and the central role of building consumer trust in the realization of this strategy.

eBay’s MCS is now, perhaps, the world’s most widely imitated model for creating online trust and user interactions (e.g. Yelp, TripAdvisor, Amazon). In addition, eBay’s MCS was “sold” as a consumer product that was instrumental in facilitating consumer trust in the online auction market.

Contributions include: tracing the creation, growth and evolution of, perhaps, the world’s largest and most widely imitated MCS, which redefined the boundaries of accounting systems monitoring; and testing the range, usefulness and limitations of Simons’ LOCaIT theory as a lens for understanding eBay’s use of IT in their MCS.

Herbert Simon's major contribution to decision‐making theory is the concept of “satisficing”. This was first posited in Administrative Behavior, published in 1947, and the book, concerned as it was with establishing a scientific approach to administrative theory, puts forward an adjustment of then‐current economic theory, which viewed administrative choice as a process of maximising. While, over the ensuing decades, Simon adjusted his definitions of both “economic man” and of “satisficing” in several subsequent publications, the original exposition of these was a major contribution to the area of administrative theory. An attempt has been made here to explore what circumstances might have led Simon into putting forward the concept of “satisficing”.

This paper aims to explore the gendered narratives of change management at Marks and Spencer (M&S) and uses them as a lens to consider the gendered nature of the change process itself.

Two extant stories: Sleeping Beauty and the Trojan War are taken, along with the cultural archetype of the American West gunslinger to explore the gender aspects of change. The Marks and Spencer case is analysed using the corollary patriarchal narrative of Sleeping Beauty, a story whose organising logic is revealed as one of concern for patriarchal lineage, and legitimate succession. The paper, draws on the Marks and Spencer principals' memoirs and biographies.

Sleeping Beauty is shown as a narrative saturated in misogyny, aggression and violence. This violence, which is shown to characterise the Marks and Spencer case, is amplified in the second narrative, the Trojan War, in the highly personalised battles of the über‐warriors of The Iliad. The paper concludes that violent, hyper‐masculine behaviour creates and maintains a destructive cycle of leadership lionisation and failure at the company which precludes a more feminine and possibly more effective construction of change management.

Demonstrates how M&S, gendered from its birth, its development through the golden years, the crisis, its changes in leadership and its recent change management has attempted to respond to its changing environment.

This paper argues that the search for a theory of public budgeting has proceeded mainly on assumptions of the rationalist paradigm. This approach yielded mostly technical explanations for budgeting phenomena. These explanations fail to capture the complexities of public budgeting and yield incomplete theories. Without attempting to break new ground, the authors argue that budgeting theory should be guided by heuristic concepts borrowed from open systems theory. This offers greater potential for reconciling the rational and non-rational aspects of budgeting and permits constructive synthesis of insights from extant theories of budgeting without rejecting the rationalist paradigm. This approach views budgeting as only one of the complex functions governments perform to cope with their environment and to maintain stability.

This paper attempts to provide a better understanding of behavioral processes and their impact on the transition from products to services.

Case studies are the main tool of theory development. The paper focuses mainly on German and Swiss product manufacturers, whose products require a high level of customer investment.

The objective was merely to explain behavioral dimension of transition. The paper indicated seven behavioral processes which play a critical role during the transition. Managerial service awareness and role understanding, as well as employee service awareness and role understanding seem to be the right triggers to change the behavioral processes in the desired manner.

The main focus was on the German and Swiss machinery and medical equipment manufacturing industries, and the remarks are limited to these sectors.

The key managerial implications and recommendations can be formulated as follows: establish a “value‐added” managerial service awareness; change managerial role understanding – from traditional customer support to business manager; establish a “value‐added” employee service awareness; and change employee role understanding – from selling products to providing services.

The authors were able to add a complementary perspective to existing literature on the transition process from products to services. For service management theorists, it is suggested that the transition from product manufacturers into service providers is influenced strongly by several behavioral processes. A complete theory of the transition process requires an interdisciplinary theory that integrates service management and human decision making.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on how to apply the abductive research process for developing a theoretical explanation in studies on performance management and management control systems. This is important because theoretically ambitious research tends to require explanatory study outcomes, but prior research frameworks provide little guidance in this regard, potentially facilitating ill-defined research designs and a lack of common vocabulary and criteria for evaluating studies.

The authors introduce a methodological framework that distinguishes three interwoven theoretical abstraction levels: descriptive, analytical and explanatory. They use a recently published qualitative field study to illustrate an application of the framework.

The framework and its illustrated application make the systematic logic of the abductive research process visible and accessible to researchers. The authors explain how the framework supports moving from empirical description to theoretical explanation during the research process and where the three levels might open spaces for the positioning of novel practices and conceptual and theoretical innovations.

The framework provides guidance for an explanatory research design and theory-building purpose and has been developed in response to recent criticism in the field that highlights the wide gap between leading-edge practice and the lagging state of theory. It offers interdisciplinary vocabulary and evaluation criteria that can be applied by any accounting and management researcher regardless of whether they pursue critical, interpretive or positivist research and whether they primarily use qualitative or quantitative research methods.

The Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards are an extension to the Mental Capacity Act (2005). They provide protection for those who lack capacity to make a decision about residing in a hospital or care home and require a deprivation of their liberty. The following paper is a summary of the safeguards.