Why Business Unit Controllers Create Budget Slack: Involvement in Management, Social Pressure, and Machiavellianism

2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 27-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank G. H. Hartmann ◽  
Victor S. Maas
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Social Pressure ◽  
Business Unit ◽  
Budgetary Slack ◽  
Management Accountants ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Personality Construct

ABSTRACT: This paper investigates business unit (BU) controllers’ inclination to engage in the creation of budgetary slack. In particular, we explore whether controllers who are involved in BU decision making are more susceptible to social pressure to engage in slack creation than controllers who are not. We expect, and find, a crucial role of the controller’s personality. Results from an experiment among 136 management accountants suggest that the personality construct Machiavellianism interacts with involvement to explain controllers’ responses to social pressure to create budgetary slack. Controllers scoring high on Machiavellianism are more likely to give in to pressure by BU management to create budgetary slack when they have been involved in decision making. In contrast, controllers scoring low on Machiavellianism are less likely to give in to pressure to create slack when they have been involved in decision making.

Maximising Soft Power: the Role of Digital Diplomacy in Building Trust with Nation-Branding

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Jess Gosling
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Public Diplomacy ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
Nation Branding ◽  
Building Trust ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Digital Diplomacy

Perceptions of attractiveness and trustworthiness impact the prosperity and influence of countries. A country's soft power is not guaranteed. Countries have their brands, an image shaped by the behaviour of governments, by what they do and say, whom they associate with, and how they conduct themselves on the global stage. Increasingly, digital diplomacy plays a crucial role in the creation and application of soft power. This paper argues that digital diplomacy is increasingly vital in the articulation of soft power. Digital diplomacy is a new way of conducting public diplomacy, offering new and unparalleled ways of building trust with previously disengaged audiences. Soft power is now the driving force behind reputation and influence on the global stage, where increasingly digital diplomacy plays an essential role.

African Clergy, Bishop Lucas and the Christianizing of Local Initiation Rites: Revisiting 'The Masasi Case'

2008 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-208
Author(s):  
Anne Marie Stoner-Eby
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
African Culture ◽  
Christian Initiation ◽  
Initiation Rites ◽  
The Creation

AbstractOne of the most famous instances of missionary 'adaptation' was the Christianizing of initiation rites in the Anglican Diocese of Masasi in what is now southeastern Tanzania. This was long assumed to be the work of Bishop Vincent Lucas, who from the 1920s became widely known in mission, colonial and anthropological circles for his advocacy of missions that sought 'not to destroy, but to fulfill' African culture. Terence Ranger in his groundbreaking 1972 article on Lucas and Masasi was the first to point out the crucial role of the African clergy. In reexamining the creation of Christian initiation in Masasi, this article reveals that Lucas's promotion of Christianized initiation was actually based on the vision and efforts of the African clergy, an indication that mission Christianity in the colonial period cannot be assumed to reflect European initiative and African compliance.

scholarly journals Can philosophy contribute to a change of ethos? (The road from the law of the ethos toward European law

2003 ◽  
pp. 117-135
Author(s):  
Jovan Arandjelovic
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
European Law ◽  
The Road ◽  
European Institutions ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
The Law ◽  
Sense Of Justice ◽  
New Criteria

The author examines the character of the changes taking place in contemporary Serbian society. He emphasizes at the same time that contemporary Serbian philosophy is facing these crucial questions as well, which without it cannot be even addressed, let alone solved. The key difference between modern West European and contemporary Serbian societies, seen from the perspective of philosophy, is demonstrated most clearly in the manner of constituting institutions and transforming the modern Serbian society. In the process of building modern institutions philosophy, not just in our country but throughout the Slavic East, has not had the role it played in Europe. Here lies the explanation why natural consciousness and an original ethos, though considerably modified, still remain unadapted and today represent a major obstacle to the establishment of the rule of European law. Without a change in the sense of justice and respect for the law it is impossible to accomplish the transformation of the society in which the law recognized by a democratic state could not be super ordinate to any reason. The crucial role of philosophy in this process is seen by the author not only in establishing modern European institutions and acceptance of the principle of European legislation, but above all in its influence on the transformation of the original ethos and establishment of new criteria on which the reflection, decision making and action of any individual would be based. .

Management Accountants’ Empathy and Their Violation of Fiduciary Duties: a Replication and Extension Study Using fMRI

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergeja Slapničar ◽  
Mina Ličen ◽  
Frank G. H. Hartmann ◽  
Anka Slana Ozimič ◽  
Grega Repovš
Keyword(s):  
Brain Activity ◽  
Cognitive Empathy ◽  
Affective Empathy ◽  
Business Unit ◽  
Personal Interest ◽  
Functional Magnetic Resonance ◽  
Resonance Imaging ◽  
Management Accountants ◽  
Personal Interests

Research shows that management accountants’ role to support business unit managers’ decision-making may cause them to succumb to managers’ pressures to misreport. Using electroencephalographic (EEG) evidence, Eskenazi, Hartmann and Rietdijk (2016) demonstrate the role of automatic emotional mimicry, which drives misreporting when managers’ personal interest is at stake, but not when BU interest is at stake. In this study, we aim to replicate this finding using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which enables us to separate affective from cognitive empathy. Thirty accounting professionals completed an emotion observation task during which empathy-related brain activity was recorded. We then explored accountants’ inclination to misreport using empathy-invoking accounting scenarios. We find that the inclination to misreport correlates with activation of cognitive empathy regions, but only for scenarios in which accountants misreport to serve business unit’s interests, rather than managers’ personal interests. We find no evidence for a role of affective empathy.

God, Tsar, and People

2020 ◽  
pp. 358-388
Author(s):  
Daniel B. Rowland
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
The West ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Social Units

This chapter provides a background on the crucial role of fictions in history and in current lives, a role arguably bigger than that played by any other force, human or even natural. It mentions Yuval Noah Harari's claim that cultural skill allowed humans to first organize themselves into political or social units larger than a few tens of individuals. It also reviews developments in Russian culture that made the creation and preservation of the Muscovite state possible. The chapter explains how Muscovite culture was more effective as social cement than the broader, more diffuse, and more divided cultures of the West. It explores some of the themes that Muscovite churchmen created and elaborated, like the importance of the Old Testament to the historical thinking of Muscovy.

scholarly journals The role of conviction and narrative in decision-making under radical uncertainty

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 501-523 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Tuckett ◽  
Milena Nikolic
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Narrative Theory ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Causal Models ◽  
Approach And Avoidance ◽  
Rules Of Thumb ◽  
The Future ◽  
Radical Uncertainty

We propose conviction narrative theory (CNT) to broaden decision-making theory in order to better understand and analyse how subjectively means–end rational actors cope in contexts in which the traditional assumptions in decision-making models fail to hold. Conviction narratives enable actors to draw on their beliefs, causal models, and rules of thumb to identify opportunities worth acting on, to simulate the future outcome of their actions, and to feel sufficiently convinced to act. The framework focuses on how narrative and emotion combine to allow actors to deliberate and to select actions that they think will produce the outcomes they desire. It specifies connections between particular emotions and deliberative thought, hypothesising that approach and avoidance emotions evoked during narrative simulation play a crucial role. Two mental states, Divided and Integrated, in which narratives can be formed or updated, are introduced and used to explain some familiar problems that traditional models cannot.

Usage-based Theory and Exemplar Representations of Constructions

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan L. Bybee
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Construction Grammar ◽  
Repeated Exposure ◽  
Linguistic Knowledge ◽  
Token Frequency ◽  
The Creation

This chapter outlines a view of Construction Grammar in which the mental grammar of speakers is shaped by the repeated exposure to specific utterances, and in which domain-general cognitive processes such as categorization and cross-modal association play a crucial role in the entrenchment of constructions. Under this view, all linguistic knowledge is viewed as emergent and constantly changing. The chapter emphasizes that the process of chunking along with categorization leads to the creation of constructions. It also provides semantic/pragmatic and phonetic arguments for exemplar representation and a discussion of the role of type and token frequency in determining the structure of the schematic slots in constructions, as well as the productivity of constructions.

Divestment Decision-Making: The Role of Business Unit Size

1987 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 483-498 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irene M. Duhaime ◽  
Inga S. Baird
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Business Unit ◽  
Unit Size
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document