The UN-supported Principles for Responsible Investment initiative has led to around a third of the world's financial assets being managed with a commitment to invest in a way that considers environmental, social or governance (ESG) criteria. The responsible investment trend has increased dramatically since the global financial crisis, yet understanding of this field remains at an early stage. This handbook provides an atlas of current practice in the field of responsible investment. With a large global team of expert contributors, the book explores the impact of responsible investment on key financial actors ranging from mainstream asset managers to religious organizations. Offering students and researchers a comprehensive introduction to current scholarship and international structures in the expanding discipline of responsible investment, this handbook is vital reading across the fields of finance, economics and accounting.

The theory and practice of management accounting should be seen within the context of varieties of global capitalism, to appreciate its role as a 'calculative technology of capitalism' which is practiced on factory floors, corporate boards, computer networks, spreadsheets, and so forth. This new textbook is the first to introduce the field from a rounded social science perspective. Strategizing Management Accounting offers a theoretical discussion on management accounting's strategic orientation by accommodating two interrelated lines of analyses, from historical and contemporary perspectives. The book illustrates how 'new management accounting' has evolved into the form in which it exists today in its neoliberal context and how those new management accounting practices have become manifestos for the managers, as calculative technologies of decision making, performance management, control, corporate governance, as well as global governance, and development within various forms of organizations across the globe. Each chapter draws on Foucauldian analysis of biopolitics explaining how neoliberal market logic informs a set of strategies and mechanisms through which various social entities and discourses are made governable by considering them as biopolitical entities of global governance. Written by two recognized accounting experts, this book is vital reading for all students of management accounting and will also be a useful supplementary resource for those wanting to understand and research accounting's vital role in contemporary society.

Environment and sustainable development challenges are a matter of global concern. Trillions of dollars of mostly public money are invested every year in domestic and international policies and programs to address these challenges. The effectiveness of these policies and programs is critical to environmental sustainability. Performance audits that examine the effectiveness of governmental policies and programs heavily influence their implementation. Despite this, performance auditing in the environment field has received very little academic attention. This book takes a closer look at performance auditing of public sector environmental policies and programs. It examines trends in global environmental performance auditing; and how it is currently practiced drawing on a global survey and case studies from Canada, India and Australia. In doing so, it identifies issues and challenges faced by Supreme Audit Institutions in undertaking these performance audits. This book will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners of sustainable development, environmental auditing and public sector auditing as well as to donor organisations engaged in these areas.

This collection of memorial articles and selected obituaries highlights the careers and contributions to accounting practice, the accounting profession, and the accounting literature of leading American figures in the 20th century. The memorial articles do much more than recite their subject's career. More importantly, they discuss and assess their subject's role in influencing the course of accounting practice and the profession as well as the evolution of their influential writings, revealing the names of the accounting leaders and leading thinkers of the past century. Memorial Articles for 20th Century American Accounting Leaders is useful in providing students and young researchers with a rich source of intelligence on the leaders who have established norms of practice, advanced the profession, and set the terms of debate in the literature - leaders who are cited and even quoted but who are known mostly as names without a full-bodied treatment of their backgrounds and broader roles in shaping the accounting literature.

This book, first published in 1990, is a practical manual which presents guidance on how to carry out and evaluate an employee relations audit. This title also provides audits for five key areas of employee relations, including communication and consultation, equality of opportunity and disciplinary matters. This book should be of interest to lecturers, post-graduate students and practitioners of management, personnel, employee relations and industrial relations.

The greatest concern for all Americans today - leaders and followers alike - is how their prosperity seems to depend on a shrinking foundation of technology-only growth. And the onset of artificial intelligence only threatens to marginalize people even more with job loss and increasing isolation inside the few remaining jobs that it will leave behind. This book helps us understand that business growth fueled by labor productivity does not rely on leadership as we've come to celebrate it, but on our ability to sustain loyalty and commitment to one another- a following if you will - inside and outside our workplaces. When we recognize and understand our historical Followership Cycles, we can begin to restore our workplaces to their lost role as a place to meet the demand of all Americans for a better future. This illuminating book: Provides a new, sustainable growth model based in the socioeconomic realities of modern America and the world it wants to lead - a new Followership System. Tells the story of how one profession, on the brink of disappearing into irrelevance, will lead the new Decision Economy into the 21st century. Demonstrates the development of the "leaderless" specialists who will manage evidence together to pursue a Reason-to-Grow. Stresses the importance of charging all C-Suite executives with leading a continuous process of discovering, articulating and then defending those stakeholder agreements to share purpose. Reveals, not the technology infrastructure, but the social architecture that organizations will use to build new social capital - the Followership that will propel our New Giants to future greatness. New Giants Rising takes us on a journey of the Followership Cycles of our recent past. And, more importantly, it puts forth a plan of action - voiced very simply by Henry Ford during the last cycle over a century ago when he faced the same moment then as we do now: "Coming Together is the Start. Keeping Together is Progress. Working Together is Success."

Accounting irregularities are at the heart of those kinds of frauds that hit financial statements and include misstatement, misclassification as well as misrepresentation. In essence, they involve manipulation of accounting data, description or disclosure in order to distort the true financial picture of the organization in question. This book provides an in-depth practical reference, designed for litigators, investigators, auditors, accountants and other professionals who need to understand and combat accounting irregularities and to uphold the integrity of financial statements. Regulators will find this book an essential source of ideas and references when considering reforms. Educators and students will see this book as an alternative, inspiring way of understanding accounting and how to stay alert for accounting irregularities. The first two chapters introduce the basics of accounting irregularities in the context of the financial reporting environments, and generally accepted accounting principles in the UK and Hong Kong. Perpetrators often seek ways to creating financial illusions in four common directions - selling more, costing less, owning more and owing less as discussed in Chapters 3 to 6. The seventh chapter considers various ways that perpetrators manipulate the classification and disclosure of financial statements. Chapter 8 explores three scenarios of accounting irregularities - tax evasion, theft and commercial dispute. The concluding chapter sets out the deterrents to accounting irregularities in two dimensions. At the micro-level, deterrents are implemented within the authority of the organization in question, whilst the macro-level deterrents refer to the external environment beyond the controls of any individual organization.

The Meaning of Company Accounts first appeared in 1971 and quickly achieved recognition among managers, financial and non-financial alike. It is now seen as the standard text in the subject. It aims to help anyone using company accounts to gain a firm grasp of what they mean and how they relate to business activities. Throughout the book, ideas are developed in a logical, structured sequence, involving a high degree of reader participation, while at the same time being extremely flexible. The workbook approach, including examples to be worked through, enables readers to achieve understanding of topics they may previously have found difficult. This eighth edition has been thoroughly revised to ensure that the text and appendices are current. It includes up-to-date references of both international and UK accounting standards.

This book examines the transgressions of the credit rating agencies before, during and after the recent financial crisis. It proposes that by restricting the agencies' ability to offer ancillary services there stands the opportunity to limit, in an achievable and practical manner, the potentially negative effect that the Big Three rating agencies - Standard & Poor's, Moody's and Fitch - may have upon the financial sector and society moreover. The book contains an extensive and in-depth discussion about how the agencies ascended to their current position, why they were able to do so and ultimately their behaviour once their position was cemented. This work offers a new framework for the reader to follow, suggesting that investors, issuers and the state have a 'desired' version of the agencies in their thinking and operate upon that basis when, in fact, those imagined agencies do not exist, as demonstrated by the 'actual' conduct of the agencies. The book primarily aims to uncover this divergence and reveal the 'real' credit rating agencies, and then on that basis propose a real and potentially achievable reform to limit the negative effects that result from poor performance in this Industry. It addresses the topics with regard to financial regulation and the financial crisis, and will be of interest to legal scholars interested in the intersection between business and he law as well as researchers, academics, policymakers, industry and professional associations and students in the fields of corporate law, banking and finance law, financial regulation, corporate governance and corporate finance.

This title was first published in 2001: Product and particularly customer profitability are black holes in most managers' understanding of their business. Identifying customer revenue is easy but identifying what they cost - so we can understand whether or not they are profitable - is difficult. In a world in which competition, regulation and the increasing use of the Internet put ever greater pressure on margins it is vitally important to understand both product- and customer-profitability. Activity Based Management (ABM) enables you to do this. This book explains the power of using ABM to increase the profitability of your business. It provides step-by-step guidance on basic principles, comparisons between traditional methods, definitions of processes, activities and cost-drivers as well as details of data collection techniques and implementation steps. Through the book's numerous detailed examples a logical picture builds up of how to obtain the benefits that ABM can deliver. On its own ABM will change management decision-making: by showing how ABM also supports other profit improvement initiatives such as Business Process Reengineering, Shareholder Value Added and Customer Relationship Management, managers will learn how they can use the best possible toolkit to put their business firmly on the road to leaps in profitability.

This title was first published in 2003. Based on psychological research, auditing studies have focused on 'belief revision' as a way of understanding how auditors evaluate evidence. Moreover a belief revision process is consistent with US auditing standards. UK standards on the other hand do not appear to give guidance on the process to follow when evaluating evidence. Research in the US indicates that auditors do in fact follow a belief revision process in accordance with US standards. Employing survey research (based on personal interviews with a number of experienced UK auditors) this book demonstrates how auditors prefer to be described as following the open mind approach. Building on the findings of the interviews the book then describes an experimental study to investigate the differences between the belief revision and open mind approaches in terms of their effect on the efficiency and effectiveness of the audit process. The book concludes that the belief revision approach would improve the efficiency of the audit process without affecting its effectiveness or outcomes.

Contemporary Environmental Accounting: Issues, Concepts and Practice has been written by two of the world's leading experts in the field in order to provide the most comprehensive and state-of-the-art textbook on environmental accounting yet attempted. The book is suitable for both undergraduate and graduate students and their teachers, professional accountants, and corporate and organisational managers. Although no prior knowledge of environmental accounting is necessary to understand the critical issues at stake, academic accountants will also find that the book provides a useful introduction to the topic. The goals of the book are to discuss and illustrate contemporary conceptual approaches to environmental accounting; to make readers aware of crucial controversial topics; and to offer practical examples of how the concepts have been applied throughout Europe, North America and Australia. In order to increase the usefulness of the book for relevant courses, each chapter concludes with a set of questions for review. This book is essential reading for all those who are interested in how environmental issues influence accounting. A solutions manual is available on request with the purchase of this book.

The Routledge Companion to Intellectual Capital offers a comprehensive overview of an important field that has seen a diverse range of developments in research in recent years. Edited by leading scholars and with contributions from top academics and practitioners from around the world, this volume will provide not just theoretical analysis but also evaluate practice through case studies. Combining theoretical and practice perspectives, this comprehensive Companion addresses the role of IC inside and between organisations and institutions and how these contribute to the IC of nations, regions and clusters. Drawing on an extensive range of leading contributors,The Routledge Companion to Intellectual Capital will be of interest to scholars who want to understand IC from a variety of perspectives, as well as students who are seeking an authoritative and comprehensive source on IC and knowledge management.

IT governance seems to be one of the best strategies to optimize IT assets in an economic context dominated by information, innovation, and the race for performance. The multiplication of internal and external data and increased digital management, collaboration, and sharing platforms exposes organizations to ever-growing risks. Understanding the threats, assessing the risks, adapting the organization, selecting and implementing the appropriate controls, and implementing a management system are the activities required to establish proactive security governance that will provide management and customers the assurance of an effective mechanism to manage risks. IT Governance and Information Security: Guides, Standards, and Frameworks is a fundamental resource to discover IT governance and information security. This book focuses on the guides, standards, and maturity frameworks for adopting an efficient IT governance and information security strategy in the organization. It describes numerous case studies from an international perspective and brings together industry standards and research from scientific databases. In this way, this book clearly illustrates the issues, problems, and trends related to the topic while promoting the international perspectives of readers. This book offers comprehensive coverage of the essential topics, including: IT governance guides and practices; IT service management as a key pillar for IT governance; Cloud computing as a key pillar for Agile IT governance; Information security governance and maturity frameworks. In this new book, the authors share their experience to help you navigate today's dangerous information security terrain and take proactive steps to measure your company's IT governance and information security maturity and prepare your organization to survive, thrive, and keep your data safe. It aspires to provide a relevant reference for executive managers, CISOs, cybersecurity professionals, engineers, and researchers interested in exploring and implementing efficient IT governance and information security strategies.

The Origins Of Accounting Culture aim at studying the origins of the accounting culture in Venice, with a specific focus on accounting education. The period covered by the work ranges from Luca Pacioli to the foundation (in 1868) of the Royal Advanced School of Commerce (Regia Scuola Superiore di Commercio), that in 2018 is celebrating its 150 anniversary as Ca' Foscari University of Venice. Ever since the Middle Ages, Venice was home of a number of favourable circumstances that have been accumulating over the years. As a trading city par excellence, Venice allowed the spreading of the bookkeeping at first among firms and then in the public administration that was much in need of sophisticated accounting principles for the purpose of controlling its activities. Venice was among the first cities to implement Gutenberg print method and it quickly became the most important city in the world in the publishing industry, allowing printing and spreading the first handbooks about double-entry bookkeeping and merchant studies. The Origins Of Accounting Culture goes beyond the study of Luca Pacioli and tackles in a more organic and holistic way the social and economic conditions that allowed the accounting culture to spread in Venice. This book will be a vital resource to academics and researchers in the fields of Accounting, Accounting History, Economic Development and related disciplines.

The Net Present Value (NPV) forecast lies at the heart of the business case on many projects. Martin Hopkinson's guide explains when, why and how NPV models should be built for projects and how this approach can be integrated with the risk management process. NPV models tend to be used during the earliest phases of a project as the business case is being developed. Typically, these are the stages when uncertainty is at its highest and when the opportunities to influence the project's plan are at their greatest. This book shows how project financial forecasting and risk management principles can be used to both improve NPV forecasts and to shape the project solution into one that is risk-robust. The text is sufficiently broad to be practicable for first-time users to employ the methods described. But it also contains insights into the process that are likely to be new to the majority of experienced practitioners. All users should find that the models used in this book will help to provide useful templates for exploiting the techniques that are used.

This volume describes a range of experiences of internal audit in higher education institutions from the UK, USA, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Germany. It presents approaches to best practice designed to enable readers to assess and develop their own audit procedures.

This book, first published in 1990, is a practical manual which presents guidance on how to carry out and evaluate an employee relations audit. This title also provides audits for five key areas of employee relations, including communication and consultation, equality of opportunity and disciplinary matters. This book should be of interest to lecturers, post-graduate students and practitioners of management, personnel, employee relations and industrial relations.

The Second Edition of "The Essential Guide to Internal Auditing" is a condensed version of the "Handbook of Internal Auditing, " Third Edition. It shows internal auditors and students in the field how to understand the audit context and how this context fits into the wider corporate agenda. The new context is set firmly within the corporate governance, risk management, and internal control arena. The new edition includes expanded coverage on risk management and is updated throughout to reflect the new IIA standards and current practice advisories. It also includes many helpful models, practical guidance and checklists.

This book explores the relevance of management accounting research and practice for a range of broader, societal phenomena related to corporate governance and regulation, the creation and maintenance of markets and their concomitant social and political implications. It also explores the theoretical and methodological implications of pursuing a research agenda exploring such phenomena in greater detail. Containing a number of theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions by leading management accounting scholars, The Societal Relevance of Management Accounting seeks to advance novel research approaches that go beyond the traditional intra-organisational focus that has long dominated management accounting research. As such, it seeks to enhance the relevance of management accounting research for a broader range of stakeholders and interest groups in and around individual organisations. This book was originally published as a special issue of Accounting and Business Research.

Managing Finance is developed from tried and tested materials that are easy to read and work is written from a managerial perspective for general managers on executive or MBA courses. The text focuses on accounting from the viewpoint of the needs of managers for financial information and understanding. Scenarios and examples are included that demonstrate a socially responsible approach. Business Scenarios are presented at the opening of each chapter and this is then used to explore the topics covered given at the start of the chapter. This approach is very appealing to people with business experience There is supplementary material with this text for the website with additional exercises, cases, multiple choice questions, Powerpoint presentations, and tutorial material. This will be kept up-to-date and provide links to other resources.

****This is a pocket-sized version of the A4 pictorial guide***Whatever the shape or size of a business, they all have one thing in common - they hope to make money. A major factor in determining success is the ability of management to control its finances. Business Finance painlessly demystifies the process of accounting and the understanding of business finance. Follow the adventures of a small-time entrepreneur and his finance director as she helps him turn his business from a potential casualty of the 'Death Valley Curve' into an efficient, profit-making success story. Balance sheets, profit and loss statements, cash flow, working capital, depreciation, cash flow forecasting, budgeting, and gearing are all explained making this the book to guide readers safely through the jargon jungle of financial management.

This book goes beyond traditional financial institutions textbooks, which tend to focus on mathematical models for risk management and the technical aspects of measuring and managing risk. It focuses on the role of financial institutions in promoting social and economic goals for the communities in which they operate for the greater good, while also meeting financial and competitive challenges, and managing risks. Cooperman divides the text into seven easily teachable modules that examine the real issues and challenges that managers of financial institutions face. These include the transformative changes presented by social unrest, climate change and resource challenges, as well as the changes in how financial institutions operate in light of the opportunities that rapid innovations and disruptive technologies offer. The book features: Up-to-date coverage of new regulations affecting financial institutions, such as Dodd Frank and new SEC regulations. Material on project financing and new forms of financing, including crowd funding and new methods of payment for financial institutions. New sustainable finance models and strategies that incorporate environmental, social, and corporate governance considerations. A new chapter on sustainable financial institutions, social activism, the greening of finance, and socially responsible investing. Practical cases focusing on sustainability give readers insight into the socioeconomic risks associated with climate change. Streamlined and accessible, Managing Financial Institutions will appeal to students of financial institutions and markets, risk management, and banking. A companion website, featuring PowerPoint slides, an Instructor's Manual, and additional cases, is also available.

This monograph is concerned with individual, though related, aspects and economic implications of historic cost (HC) accounting indices. The conceptual basis of the model that is advocated as a yardstick for assessing such implications, including potential corporate financial policy consequences, namely, a multiperiod cash flow-market value (CF-MV) model, is elaborated and evaluated at some length.

Savvy managers no longer look at contracting processes and documents reactively but use them proactively to reach their business goals and minimize their risks. To succeed, these managers need a framework and A Short Guide to Contract Risk provides this. The foundation of identifying and managing contract risk is what the authors call Contract Literacy: a set of skills relevant for all who deal with contracts in their everyday business environment, ranging from general managers and CEOs to sales, procurement and project professionals and risk managers. Contracts play a major role in business success. Contracts govern companies' deals and relationships with their suppliers and customers. They impact future rights, cash flows, costs, earnings, and risks. A company's contract portfolio may be subject to greater losses than anyone realizes. Still the greatest risk in business is not taking any risks. Equipped with the concepts described in this book, business and risk managers can start to see contracts differently and to use them to find and achieve the right balance for business success and problem prevention. What makes this short guide from the authors of the acclaimed Proactive Law for Managers especially valuable, if not unique, is its down-to-earth managerial/legal approach. Using lean contracting, visualization and the tools introduced in this book, managers and lawyers can achieve legally sound contracts that function as managerial tools for well thought-out, realistic risk allocation in business deals and relationships.