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This research paper explores the type and amount of business communication education given to students in Master of Business Administration (MBA) programmes, and offers insight into the thinking of those who supervise and teach business communication within those programmes. While this particular research study focuses on US MBA schools, it is advocated that this subject and research findings have global relevance. Communication and public relations skills have been recognised as being critical to the success of aspiring managers and business leaders. Prospective managers need to possess not only the skills of communication, but also an appreciation of strategic business communication factors. However, most MBA curricula do not require or recommend communication education for students. This paper compares the findings of two studies: research conducted in 1995–96 (n = 215, 31.5 per cent response rate) replicated a 1991 study (n = 51, 26 per cent response rate). In addition, the paper discusses prior research on the subject and the role and quality of business communication currently found in MBA curricula. It also includes a model communication curriculum for MBA programmes and proposes suggestions for additional research.

Trust is built largely through the way in which the culture of communication is implemented by the organizational leadership. The role of the leader as a listener, communicator and educator is imperative in formulating and facilitating a positive organizational culture. Addresses the proposition that the central tenet of successful leadership is the building, consolidating and maintenance of successful relationships. These relationships are increasingly being identified as the cornerstone of the soft skills needed to manage and lead organizations of the twenty‐first century where an empowered workforce engages in trust‐initiated roles.

This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.

At a time when governmental corruption seems rife and administrations grow ever more secretive, the whistleblower is a crucial resource in journalism’s attempts to make accountable those who wield power. Yet despite legislation that is meant to protect employees and officials who expose wrongdoing, a governmental “war on whistleblowers” has made the hazards faced by many whistleblowers increasingly grim. This chapter explores the role of the journalist/whistleblower collaboration in disclosing important, but sensitive, information involving national security. In discussing case studies of those who have braved the government’s anger, we examine not only the circumstances of these breaches, but also their political and legal repercussions.

This study examines the use of linear regressions that include interaction terms, finding frequent interpretation errors in published accounting research. We provide insights on how to estimate, interpret, and present interactive regression models, and explain seldom-used but easily-implemented methods to report conditional marginal effects. We also examine the use of interaction terms in tax and financial reporting trade-off studies, evaluating the conceptual fit between a regression model with interactions and alternative definitions of trade-off. Although we advocate the use of interactive models, noise levels common in accounting research greatly reduce the ability to detect interaction effects.

This paper explores the value of financial statement auditing in the public sector. The study applies theory about auditing from the private sector as well as the public sector to explore ways in which public sector auditing can be expected to be valuable. It shows that there are a number of complementary explanations that can be applied to examine the value of public audit, including agency, signaling, insurance, management control, governance and confirmation explanations. The evidence from research and history is generally consistent with the agency and management control explanations. There is some support for the signaling and insurance explanations, while research evidence suggests that governance has differing impact in the public sector compared to the private. The confirmation hypothesis is also potentially relevant. Reviewing the history of the development of public sector auditing functions shows that at least some developments were consistent with explanations such as agency theory and management control. Auditing in the public sector is an area where more research is valuable. The paper concludes with a discussion of issues for further investigation.

This paper challenges and expands commonplace assumptions about problems of time and temporality in emergencies. In traditional emergency powers theory “emergency time” is predominantly an “exceptional time.” The problem is that there is “no time” and the solution is limited “in time”: exceptional behavior is allowed for a special time only, until the emergency is over, or according to formal sunset clauses. But what is characteristic of many emergencies is not the problem of “no time” but the ways in which time is legally structured and framed to handle them. Using the Israeli High Court of Justice 1999 decision on the use of physical interrogation methods under conditions of necessity, this paper illustrates how legally significant emergency-time structures that lay beyond the problematic of exceptional time, gravely implicate the way that “exceptional measures” are practiced and regularized.

We investigate the relationship between institutional shareholdings and the firm's corporate governance by looking at changes in the composition of the board of directors and audit committee while institutional ownership increases over time. Our comparison of 74 firms showing increased institutional ownership with a matched control group of 62 firms finds that increased institutional ownership is positively associated with a higher proportion of outsiders on the board and with audit committee and board members who are less entrenched. These factors are widely regarded as signs of a strengthened system of corporate governance and control, underscoring the important role that institutional ownership may play in the firm's corporate governance structure.