Search results

This study aims to investigate accounting practices within a non-Western (indigenous) context and provide insights into alternative accounting approaches and perspectives.

This study adopts an interpretive research approach to gain an in-depth insight into the functioning of accounting in Solomon Islands’ unique cultural and social-political context. In-depth interviews were conducted to gain insights into the perceptions and meanings held by participants concerning Western accounting practices and their limitations.

The findings provide unique insights into different interpretations of accounting and accountability through two distinct cultural lenses – Western and non-Western. The complementary and rival explanations on what accounting and accountability are doing and what accounting and accountability should be doing will help close the gap in knowledge and contribute to shaping a better world for indigenous people.

Implications for practice involve fostering collaborative efforts among individuals, communities, leaders and institutions to harness cultural strengths through accounting. Additionally, continuous capacity building and education are essential to develop accounting skills, enhance financial literacy, promote professional expertise and build a pool of skilled accountants with local knowledge to support indigenous communities.

This study is original and provides novel insights supporting the need for accounting to recognise the importance of indigenous perspectives, adapt to cultural sensitivity and integrate cultural norms and values into accounting practices to make an impact and achieve greater social and moral accountability.

This chapter addresses the perceptions versus facts divide as the United States experiences an eruption of facts, opinions, and untruths in web-facilitated environments. It addresses how traditional and newer media undermine social justice and political inclusion in ways lingering beyond Donald Trump’s presidency. A competitive environment encouraging journalists to publicize rumor and gossip is addressed. The reliance of individuals on the personal experience of mental models, heuristics, and perceptions to separate fact from fiction is examined. Powerful influences of self-interest and political allegiance are explored. In the context of a deeply divided nation, libraries are seen as having the capability of implementing confidence-building measures to bridge the rift in their communities and organizations. The roles of information educators in advancing democracy through promoting useful theories and effective interlanguages are considered. The value of pragmatism, a philosophy promoting engagement in reformist projects possibly acceptable in conservative and mixed ideological environments is addressed. Economically advanced nations committed to equality and inclusion may find the US experience to be both a warning of potential roadblocks and a guide as to how such obstacles may sometimes be positively addressed.

Academics examining the global South who engage in informal politics to understand social and political issues should be prepared to diversify their methods toolkit. Informal ties and politics are where one learns about social and economic exclusion. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Mixed qualitative methods – such as individual interviews, surveys, and focus groups – provide an understanding of the people’s perspective, enabling the researcher to truly know what is going on.

Fieldwork in the downtown communities of Kingston, Jamaica, has an element of danger because violence and politics are very much a part of the daily reality of the people being interviewed. In this paper, the author argues that studying how financial resources are allocated to low-income people and understanding why some groups purposefully self-exclude themselves from economic development programs require unorthodox field methods. The author thus uses political ethnography to understand the experience of marginalized Jamaican people.

Mixed qualitative methods and political ethnography assisted the author to understand the actual experience of marginalized people and politicized financial programs.

Analysts of modern-day sub-Saharan Africa have argued that its “neopatrimonial regimes,” descending from pre-colonial polities, translate badly to the scale of the nation-state and hinder democratic accountability. In this paper, I argue by contrast that the problem with today’s failed or failing states is that they are not patrimonial enough, if we understand patrimonialism in classic Weberian terms as a system based on traditions of reciprocal interdependence between rulers and citizens, and characterized by personal but malleable ruling networks. I make this argument by showing how the Asante Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries shifted from a working model, incorporating both patrimonial and bureaucratic forms of authority, to an exploitative one that reneged on its traditional commitments to the wider public. The cause of this shift was the expansion of exchange with European nations as a rival avenue to power and wealth. This problem continues today, where African rulers are incentivized by the demands of global banks, the United Nations, and G20 governments rather than internal authority traditions, thus limiting their ability to establish locally effective and publically accountable hybrids of patrimonial and bureaucratic governance.

Conflict resolution efforts have larger implications for democratic development: they provide a valuable discursive space where social change can be collectively conceptualized and negotiated to the benefit of democratic development, and where participants gain democratic experience, providing a constructive catalyst in the ongoing social transformation of values, norms, and political cultures. Through a fusion of discourse-based and democratic culture analysis of the Nigerian case, we explore how conflict resolution practices may better engage and catalyze public discourses that promote processes of constructive social change, and how conflict resolution practices can help to build democracy and good governance. We use the example of Nigerian discourses on democratic governance to investigate the broader importance of recognizing and engaging discursive realities. Secondly, we explore how transformative conflict resolution methods, such as workshop models, promote democratic values at the same time that they provide a valuable democratic experience.

Relations between Indigenous women and the Australian women’s movement have never been easy. For some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women the white women’s movement has seemed irrelevant to the real struggles in Aboriginal women’s lives, which have tended to be more politically aligned with Indigenous struggles more broadly. Many Aboriginal women have viewed white feminists as insensitive to their own role in Australia’s colonial history and the implications of this for contemporary intercultural relations. In response to such criticism, many white feminists have struggled with the challenge of effective cross cultural engagement and collaboration.

This chapter brings an intersectional analysis to bear in an effort to understand these challenges, developing a framing of agonistic processes of collective identity as a way of thinking about the potentially productive role of conflict in social movements. Through an examination of Indigenous and non-Indigenous responses to a particular policy framework, the chapter suggests that feminist interventions focussing on the negative, racist impacts of the policy have tended to neglect the gendered dimensions of the underlying problem. As a result these arguments risk neglecting (some) women’s lived experiences.

The purpose of this paper therefore is to identify and examine major issue-areas in law, prominent among which are the Plea-Bargain and S308 Immunity Clause, and how they impact the process of effectively combating corruption in Nigeria.

The paper uses documentary sources and analytical method to examine the issues involved.

The identified issue-areas are inhibitors rather than facilitators.

The implication is that the government needs to change the existing laws to strengthen the fight against corruption.

This is to ensure that the war against corruption is strengthened and effective.

To ensure that offenders face the full weight of the law for their action.

This paper is the author's original work and all references are appropriately acknowledged.

Healthcare for the poor in India has traditionally been a domain of public services. New business models based on cross-boundary cooperation between stakeholders are unique in their attempts to be inclusive, affordable, and viable. This chapter studies the process of cross-boundary cooperation by analyzing partnerships in Aravind Eye Care System (Aravind), a renowned eye care service delivery in southern India, known for its low cost, high quality, and high volume. Through the use of ethnographic narratives, one sees the process of partner selection, achievement of network goals, and cooperative learning—as well as the way these factors influence inclusivity and affordability in eye care. The chapter attempts to understand how values like empathy and compassion, integral to healthcare services, get transmitted outside the boundaries of the participating organizations and become embedded in the extended network. The chapter is divided into two sections. The first shows how Aravind has attempted to scale up compassion by partnering with local organizations in Tamil Nadu, the state where it primarily operates. The second part examines the process of blurring organizational boundaries where Aravind extends its services to other hospitals in India and elsewhere. Atypically, Aravind gives away its knowledge to these hospitals.

In this chapter, the words “big businessmen at the helm” refers to the situation when wealthy and prominent businessmen become prime ministers, ministers, and hold other key political positions in government. Many high political positions in governments around the world are held by big businessmen-turned-politicians. For them the distinction between business and government is blurred and maybe useless. The typical business lobbyists have conquered government. We can no longer expect government to act in the public interests when dealing with powerful companies belonging to government politicians. When big businessmen are at the helm of government, combating corruption becomes an elephantine task.