Exactly.

Should all accountants have an accounting degree?

Tweets from this week’s Audit Quality Forum meeting revealed that Professor Peter Pope, now at LSE, had asserted that all accountants should have degrees in accounting. This caused both amusement and derision among those tweeting, professionally qualified accountants with degrees in a range of humanities and arts subjects. The tweets don’t record how Peter supported this assertion. With a degree in economics and accounting and extensive experience of delivering, examining, reviewing and developing accounting degree programmes since 1985, I have what might be considered a fairly well-informed view on the topic.

It would be foolish to prescribe that all accountants should have a degree in accounting without considering the content of accounting degrees and their relationship to professional training. There is much to be said for ensuring that the profession benefits from the broad range of experience and views that results from welcoming trainees from many other disciplinary areas. Employing firms have been known to complain that trainees with accounting degrees can present problems: these young people begin their employment knowing a bit about the area and this may lead to over-confidence. Someone with a degree in French or geography may be more malleable initially.

A more fundamental question is: what is the purpose of an accounting degree? - a particularly pertinent  question in these days of increasing university fees, Higher Apprenticeships and attempts to widen access routes to the profession. In theory, there is little point in a strongly technically based accounting degree programme.  In general, university lecturers, if they have a professional qualification at all, will, with the best will in the world, be somewhat out of touch with practice. Subsequent professional training is far more important in providing understanding of up-to-date approaches to the "how" of accounting.

What an accounting degree can provide is an introduction to the "why" of accounting. All accountants should have a good grasp of the role of their profession in society, they should take pride in the history of the profession, the huge contribution of accounting to economic growth. An understanding of this heritage is essential for the future development of the profession.  And, at a time when the profession faces considerable criticism, the accountants of the future should appreciate the immense power that the accountancy can exercise for good. There is little scope within professional training to develop critical thinking about these big issues. Accounting programmes could provide the space and support for this complementary study, not necessarily in the form of a traditional 3 year undergraduate degree.

However, I know from experience that making even a small shift towards emphasising the “why” of accounting is really difficult. Students choosing accounting degrees often seem to believe that numeracy is the most important requirement. This impression can be confirmed by a curriculum which emphasises technique and in assessment does not weight interpretation of numbers more heavily than calculations. They are likely to be more comfortable with  calculation and may be resistant to studying the history and sociology of accounting. Lecturers who have not studied these areas themselves may feel that they are having to work outside their own comfort zone.

Accreditation of accounting degrees by professional bodies is viewed as a useful marketing tool: the assumption is that students wishing to train as accountants seek degree programmes which will exempt them from some professional examinations. This aligns the curriculum to those examinations and reduces the space for studying the “why” of accounting.

There can be very few currently practising accountants who remember a time before accounting standards existed. (In a laudable initiative, ICAEW have harnessed the historical skills of Professor Steve Zeff and produced a record of that distant time: 

http://www.icaew.com/~/media/Files/Technical/Financial-reporting/Information%20for%20better%20markets/IFBM/Principles%20before%20standards.pdf 

Accounting standards were established to address the problem of trust in the profession. That problem has not gone away but standards have proliferated to the extent that financial reporting has become increasingly complex.  How can tomorrow’s accountants visualise a new solution if their training has not included some study of the history of the problem and some tools with which to critique the status quo?  This is what broadly based accounting degrees can  - and should – offer.

Board gender diversity: some thoughts

Having flu means I have just enough energy to read Tweets, anything longer requires too much concentration. And having a befuddled brain is not conducive to clear articulation of ideas but it's time I wrote something about board gender diversity, as well as collecting material for the literature review I have been planning for more than a year and harrumphing about what I see as misleading tweets about the issue. Here are some thoughts.

The debate, if it can be called that, about board gender diversity is now focusing on how to get more women on boards, not why this should be a sensible objective.The Davies review asserted that the business case was proven: women on boards improve corporate performance. But the evidence is very mixed. The authors of academic studies which identify a correlation between board gender diversity and various measures of performance are generally careful to note the limitations of their studies: correlation is not causation and the study may relate to a very specific context and not be generalisable. Media reporting of such studies often ignores such caveats. Policy makers and regulators are also prone to reviewing evidence selectively: Davies did not present a thorough review of the available research, possibly because it is scattered through various disciplines.

But why are the other arguments for increasing board diversity (in all forms) not widely discussed? There are undoubtedly good social and moral arguments to be made. US legal scholars have highlighted this: see for example the paper by Lisa Fairfax at http://www.nclawreview.org/documents/89/3/fairfax.pdf

Whether consciously or unconsciously, those who are pushing for change have chosen to present only the business case: is this because they see this as the best way to influence men, using the type of discourse with which they think men are most comfortable? It doesn't seem to be working too well.

The political aspects of the debate may be obscured by this focus on the business case. Viviane Reding and Angela Merkel, for example, are astute politicians who happen to be women: the board diversity issue provides them with a convenient platform. (I wonder how Margaret Thatcher would have positioned herself on this issue? Perhaps more interestingly, why wasn't it an issue in her day?) The issue also fuels the political ambitions of those who purport to be supporting male interests in the face of feminism.

One important effect of the Cadbury Code was to begin to make prescriptions for board composition acceptable. The consequences of this are still playing out. Although there was some initial resistance, board structures in large public companies have changed significantly over the last twenty years out (it's worth noting that current board structures are looking remarkably like the two tier boards that Cadbury critics were so afraid of, but that's a story for another blog) and the role of the independent non-executive director has become firmly embedded in the corporate governance architecture. But the notion of independence in this context is very problematic. Independence of connection which can be objectively demonstrated is a poor proxy for independence of mind which is the real goal. And the jury is still out on whether an independent board is always a good thing: see, for example, Bhagat and Black's study at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=133808

The gender diversity of a board is very easy to measure. But conflicting evidence is emerging as to whether gender diverse boards do result in all the benefits claimed for them. Does diversity of board composition promote diversity of thinking? It's easy to trot out mantras like "One is a token, two is a presence, three is a voice" but we are short of evidence as to how that voice influences board behaviour.

Is it cynical to sense an implicit expectation that boards need "good" women to restrain "bad" men, with gender providing some sort of innate distancing, just as independence is expected to assist NEDs in monitoring executives. In 1993, John Corrin, then chief executive of Allied Textiles, compared the  Cadbury Committee's report to "… a script for a ‘soap’ where the non-executive director is cast as saint, the auditor is a tarnished guardian angel, and the executive director is a villain."

 (Corrin, J. (1993) ‘A Blatant Slur on Executive Directors’ Integrity.’ Accountancy, April, 81)

However much people try to focus on the apparently objective business case, diversity remains a much more emotive subject than independence.

This is the sort of journalism that I find so frustrating:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/10390970/Diversity-is-the-key-to-superior-performance.html

The headline "Diversity is the key to superior performance" is completely misleading: the article has interesting things to say about other aspects of boards. But my goodness - nine children! Did she have to mention that? To my mind, it undermines the whole tenor of the discussion.

At last....

.. the book!

Can't quite believe it!

Almost the end of August...

.. and the professor is on holiday this week, but it seems impossible to turn off completely if you're interested in corporate governance. Every time I open a newspaper something relevant pops out to get me thinking about research issues. And reading my Twitterfeed keeps me in touch. I have several contacts on Twitter (some of whom I know in Real Life) who do an amazingly helpful job of reading very widely and tweeting links to all sorts of useful reports and articles. I don't know how they find the time!

Usually I just take a quick look at the linked pages and bookmark them for later: sometimes later never comes.. but while I'm on leave I have time to read a bit more carefully if something really catches my attention, this for example (thanks to Dina):

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/listing-decisions-of-uk-companies-motivations

This survey provides some interesting insights into what influences companies in making decisions about listings but covered only a limited sample of 31 companies. It is full of caveats about representativeness but, as I've discovered in much recent reading, those are likely to be lost if the findings are more widely reported. (Also note that it carries the authoritative imprimatur of BIS. I wonder how they review commissioned reports: at ICAEW all the research we fund is rigorously scrutinised from start to finish.)

The topic of this example is not very controversial but in other areas it could make a big difference. The recent Credit Suisse report illustrates this:

http://www.fortefoundation.org/site/DocServer/cs_women_in_leading_positions_FINAL.pdf?docID=17902

The authors of the report make it extremely clear that they have identified correlation between gender diversity and corporate performance but that the causes of this remain opaque. Not all the press reports of this study made this clear. The CS report is pretty comprehensive but there are some important studies omitted. Sadly the only people to note this seem to be the "anti-feminist" campaigners, who are more likely to focus on the studies indicating negative correlation, just as those at the other end of the spectrum will focus on those indicating positive correlation - for example, people who, for their own political purposes, are pushing very hard for regulation to enforce greater representation of women on boards. Angela Merkel and Viviane Reding come to mind..  (Eventually my paper on all this will get written...)

We could probably use a Ben Goldacre pulling apart some of the poor press reporting of social science.

Yesterday I went to hear Raj Thamotheram speak on responsible and sustainable investing. His talk was part of a course being run by the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment
http://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/  Raj is a great speaker. You can read about him here: http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=16019900&trk=tyah  He has lots of experience as an investor so can talk with considerable authority about the issues. I spend much of my time thinking about how corporate power can be controlled. Raj's thinking is more positive: he wants to see corporate power harnessed and used to do good, through the influence of investors. I'm rather too old and cynical to cheer for his suggestions as to how this might be achieved but I applaud his work and really hope he can persuade like-minded people to make things happen.

He cited Unilever as an example of a company doing good beyond lip service to CSR through establishing, with WWF, the Marine Stewardship Council. I had a quick look at Unilever's web site while he was talking: 5 women NEDs out of 12, and not all recent appointments, but only two women on the "leadership executive".  What we don't know is why women join boards: are they attracted to companies which are already doing good things or are they attracted to companies where they think they can make a change for the better? That's the research that someone needs to do - and do properly, so that the findings are reliable. Not short phone chats with small numbers of people selected who-knows-how (here's another: http://www.warrenpartners.co.uk/pdf/mind-the-gender-gap.pdf).

So, many thanks to my Tweeting friends for finding me links to thought-provoking stuff, even though the worst of it should sink without trace...

Late spring cleaning

This is the time of year when, for the last 25 years or so, I have tidied out my office. I've just moved into a new office, my 14th office move in that time, and back into the place where I first started. Some of the offices I've inhabited no longer exist because the building housing them has vanished. Some have now been taken over by admin staff. They've all had advantages and disadvantages but one thing in common: I've never found it easy to do any work in them that required sustained thought. This means that my study at home is full of the material I use most often and would be lost without. In the days when publishers reps used to knock on my door regularly to ask about what textbooks I used and whether I would write one for them, they used to scan my shelves furtively and make quick notes about what they saw there: I always felt obliged to explain that I never used any of those books, they were the inspection copies that never made the grade.

The single filing cabinet in my office houses copies of paperwork that might be needed for future reference; copies of minutes of meetings and papers relating to all the admin responsibilities I've had over the years; and old teaching material which predates electronic versions. It could all be shredded and at some point between now and next April I shall probably have to do that. But the recent move meant that much of the stuff I no longer need has been thrown out and the office looks fairly neat and tidy.

Earlier in the year I had a blitz on my home filing cabinets and disposed of many hard copies of academic papers that are now available electronically. I've also cleared out some of my bookshelves at home and taken the books I no longer need into the office so that they can be disposed of at the next Book Harvest collection (http://www.bookharvest.co.uk/)

So, on the surface, both my office and my study look quite tidy at the moment. The untidy mess lurks within the bright shiny Mac on my study desk. I am incredibly bad at managing electronic stuff. This didn't matter much when there was less of it. When I came across a paper or web page that was directly relevant to something I was working on or teaching about, I would download it and file it (often in a file named "Interesting papers") or bookmark it. Usually I would discover these items via alerts to new journal issues which arrived by email or through following up links and citations in whatever I was reading. The files accumulated and it wasn't always easy to find things because I couldn't remember the filenames but I managed pretty well with the occasional clear out.

Yes, I used EndNote. I had an early version on my PC and thought it was an amazingly helpful tool when I first found it but over time I forgot to enter citations. I had a brief flirtation with the web version, too. Then a student told me about Mendeley which seemed better because it searched for me but I kept forgetting my password. I also discovered Diigo which seemed like a good idea but I kept forgetting about it and using conventional bookmarking instead.

Then the PC began to develop some form of technological dementia, at a point in the progress of the book which made this very worrying, so I took the plunge and bought the Mac. And discovered its neat way of dealing with downloads and its amazing Spotlight search feature. So for the last few months it hasn't seemed to matter where I put things as they were always so easy to find. And getting used to the Mac, an ongoing process, took up more time, so organising the accumulating stuff didn't happen.

And the speed of accumulation seems to have stepped up. On Twitter I follow a bunch of journalists, academics and governance practitioners who tweet links to information which is incredibly useful for work but the volume is high.  Other sources of useful links are the LinkedIn discussion groups I belong to.

So all this stuff has piled up and this morning I decided to sort through the 200+ bookmarks, the 400+ downloads and the random files on my desktop. It's taken me two hours to deal with the bookmarks: all I've managed to do is consider and delete about a third of them and sort the others into folders labelled "Work" and "Misc", both of which will require further sub-folder refinement.

Yes, this is big-time displacement activity. Yes, I should be writing that review paper on board diversity. But I can't start it until I have collected all the relevant literature into one place so that I can re-read it. And I've just remembered that some of the papers have been picked up when I've been using the iPad so they are lurking there in GoodReader. So I need to use Dropbox to get them all into the same place. But I also need to sort out those Dropbox files....

Cooler weather...

This hot weather, combined with my post-holiday indolence, has meant that all I’ve managed to do for the last week is keep on top of email and catch up with some admin tasks. Today is cooler though, and I was up early reading two big new documents.

First, the 514 pages of the third report from the House of Commons Business Innovation and Skills Committee on the Kay Review of Equity Markets and Long-term Decision Making.

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmselect/cmbis/603/603.pdf

Following the web streams of the Committee’s hearings can be as fascinating as a soap opera but this document contains transcripts of the hearings as well as copies of all the written evidence submissions – a wonderful resource for anyone wanting to analyse in detail the responses to the Kay Review and the progress made in implementing its recommendations.

The Kay Review was a clearly written and penetrating analysis on which a series of recommendations were based. The Government response, while appreciative and supportive, has not led to any positive action so far and the BIS committee is critical of this. This report contains comments from Lord Myners who conducted a similar review more than a decade ago and is rightly disappointed that no action followed his recommendations either. The committee states that:

It is a huge disappointment that previous Governments have not implemented the recommendations of previous works nor have they kept regulation in line with the rapidly changing nature of equity investment. There is no point in commissioning a Review of the industry unless the Government is challenged to move forward and make radical changes to align the incentives facing every link in the investment chain. The Government has to deliver on the recommendations made by Professor Kay and the issues raised by his analysis. It must bring forward proposals to enhance the culture of long-termism, transparency and accountability.

Fine words but it remains to be seen whether there will be any government action. I wouldn’t bet on it….

I was interested to see that there is only one mention of the role of non-executive directors, arising in the discussion of whether major investors should be consulted in the appointment of executives. On p 21:

We asked Harlan Zimmerman, Senior Partner at Cevian Capital, how the

current appointment system could be improved and how external forces should influence the decision. He told us that it was not necessary for shareholders to be represented on the boards of companies because the non-executive directors were supposed to be fulfilling that role.

However, he went on to explain that the role of non-executive directors had been ignored and described the fact that this was overlooked by Professor Kay as being “the single biggest problem” with the Review: “Fidelity, even with the best will in the world, cannot look after the day-to-day operations of thousands of companies, so we have non­executive directors who are there, who are supposed to be doing that job for us. Now, the companies will say they do consult with their major shareholders on non­execs, and the asset managers will say that they do consult as well, but the reality is that when that happens it is a very superficial consultation in most cases. It very often takes the form of a Sunday night call before an announcement on Monday. If you look at one single damning fact, director elections here in the UK for non­executives are a rubber-stamping exercise.

I found that all a bit confusing, even when I read the detailed transcript. But it does suggest that major investors have expectations of NEDs that may not be satisfied, possibly can never be satisfied, even if investors have a specific involvement in NED appointments. Makes me wonder if the corporate governance focus needs to shift away from shareholders and back to directors, not in the sense that boards are not performing properly, which was a driver of Cadbury, but to re-examine the legal duties of directors to see if they need to be rethought in the context of the development of the investment intermediary chain.

The discussion about narrative reporting on p 74 reminded me of the BDO Terrapinium exercise, which I haven’t yet had a chance to study but looks very interesting:

http://www.bdo.uk.com/services/audit/terrapinium-group

  

The second report was shorter: Good Governance in the Public Sector—Consultation Draft for an International Framework, published by CIPFA and IFAC.

http://www.ifac.org/sites/default/files/publications/files/Good-Governance-in-the-Public-Sector.pdf

This proposes a framework of seven principles to underpin “good” public sector governance. Its scope is international which is ambitious and the report recognises that the public sector and the size and structure of the organisations it encompasses will differ widely across the world. The principles are simple enough:

2.1. The function of good governance in the public sector is to ensure that entities act in the public interest at all times.

2.2. Acting in the public interest requires:

A. Strong commitment to integrity, ethical values, and the rule of law; and

B. Openness and comprehensive stakeholder engagement.

2.3. In addition to the requirements for acting in the public interest, achieving good governance in the public sector also requires:

C. Defining outcomes in terms of sustainable economic, social, and environmental benefits;

D. Determining the interventions necessary to optimize the achievement of intended outcomes;

E. Developing the capacity of the entity, including the capability of its leadership and the individuals within it;

F. Managing risks and performance through robust internal control and strong public financial management; and

G. Implementing good practices in transparency and reporting to deliver effective accountability

Having set these out, the paper continues with more detailed guidance on organisations might follow the principles with some checklists and some examples under each one.  I don’t think anyone would argue with the principles but I think it’s quite difficult to distinguish between governance and management in some areas. More food for thought on whether this matters, as I discussed in my MARG presentation. I hope I manage to get all these ideas into a paper eventually.

And now I need to write some comments on this:

http://www.icaew.com/~/media/Files/Technical/Corporate-governance/dialogue-in-corporate-governance/icaew-tl-q2-web.pdf

More principles! One problem that the Cadbury Committee encountered was the demand for detailed practical guidance on how to apply principles, which rather undermines the whole idea of a principles-based approach which is intended to allow report preparers to use their initiative and tailor their reports to specific company situations. Perhaps the answer lies in some sort of Socratic dialogue…

Market based accounting research...

..is a bit of a mystery to me. Partly because of my innate suspicion of numbers but also because I don't really understand why the questions asked are important in any practical sense. The dominance of this type of research probably explains why it took me so long to realise that qualitative approaches to research were possible and that I could do a PhD that didn't have any numbers in it.

So how did I come to attend an MBAR conference this week? A couple of people I knew expressed great surprise to find me there. Well, the title was appealing - "What constitutes Financial Reporting Quality?"- and I was especially keen to hear an investor relations expert talking about how annual reports are put together. And to hear some discussion of narrative reporting from the perspectives of quants people. And there was no fee and the venue was very conveniently situated. And it's always good to step out of one's comfort zone occasionally.

The first speaker was a very engaging young woman from Stanford, talking about modelling the relationship between voluntary disclosure and earnings management. She was so good that I actually understood some of what she was saying: suddenly, complex equations and Greek letters began to make some sense. But at coffee when I remarked happily on this, an eminent scholar responded that she had misjudged her audience and made it too simple. Put me in my place..

The second speaker was also very engaging, a computer linguist from Michigan, on assessing the quality of annual report narratives. He began with a lengthy preamble on why the analysis of narrative reports is of research interest: he clearly anticipated that the audience would need convincing and early interruptions confirmed this (mostly from an irritating young man wearing red braces and bright blue socks with white circles). He went on to explain the considerable challenges of using computer analysis to move beyond examining the "bag of words" to more contextual analysis. And I began to see that the quants people have cottoned on to the importance of words - but they are trying to turn them into numbers.

The investor relations guy was very good. The organisers had sent him a list of 16 questions about the process of putting together annual reports and he answered them all, mostly with variations on "It depends". I liked "Who is your audience?" to which the answer was "We don't know". He had worked for a lot of big companies - interestingly, mostly ones where I had interviewed audit committee members, internal auditors and finance directors. He made the limitations of the annual report very clear, which seemed to surprise some of the audience. He suggested that it should be carved up into different chunks for different users distributed at different times, something that has for some time seemed sensible to me, especially as we now have the technology to do this relatively easily. He said firmly that his job was not about selling the company but about providing the best possible information for investment decisions but he did let slip that his background was in marketing. If I were studying how annual reports are put together I'd want to hear from a lot of other people who are involved - company secretaries, for example, not to mention the directors themselves. And the auditors, who weren't mentioned.

The other speakers were all interesting and I left feeling quite pleased with myself for having dipped a toe in the MBAR waters. But there is little doubt that the researchers I talked to think that qualitative research is easy, anyone can do a few interviews but qualitative researchers don't understand the stats which make quantitative research much more rigorous. When I emailed the organiser to thank him I observed that it had been fascinating to experience a different ontology. He replied that he didn't know what ontology meant but agreed that there is more than one way to skin a cat.

Canary Wharf

I spent some time yesterday wandering around Canary Wharf. It occurs to me that, in its contrast to the old buildings of City of London, it offers a powerful reflection of all the disadvantages of progress that we now seem to experiencing. It feels almost dystopian. I don't think I would like to work there (although I sometimes wish that I had a really comfortable modern office in a clean, smart building) but I really like visiting the place. Things that I noticed:

• street sweepers and private security guards in abundance
• areas between buildings designated as non-smoking
• crowds of smokers outside buildings in designated areas: passing among them, the smoke was almost tangible. One might have expected conversations to be taking place but these were all solitary individuals who did not appear to be enjoying their cigarettes. Have sociologists explored the implications of this strange corralling of addicts and its impact on corporate culture, I wonder? (Having written that, I'm very tempted to spend the rest of the afternoon searching online instead of getting on with coding interviews which is my main task for today...)
• coffee shops full of people having meetings: don't these huge office blocks have meeting spaces? I suppose that there must be something about the neutrality and informality of Carluccio's (where I noticed that people were also eating huge bowls of pasta at 10.30 am: presumably jet setting executives still operating in different time zones? I really wanted to ask) that is conducive to business meetings. But there is outside seating and it was very sunny at the time. 
• the shopping malls: up-market retailers like Tiffany cheek by jowl with high street chains and the same disorienting sensation I get in large malls in N. America, the oppression of things I have no need or desire to own demanding my attention
• signposting: extensive but confusing, especially to the DLR and underground stations
• people pushing prams: many of them, which seemed odd in a space that is predominantly devoted to work

It is not difficult to imagine that in this carefully designed, artificial environment it would be very easy to behave quite differently, to forget the ethical norms of civilised society outside the financial sector and to view the traditional and tried and tested as old-fashioned.

Then I went to Greenwich, to the gracious Wren buildings in which the university is housed and learned something about the conflict that has to be managed on a daily basis between the demands of a modern university and the constraints of the preservation of ancient buildings which were not designed for students.

And I rounded off a day of thinking about different sorts of space with a visit to a fascinating exhibition:

http://www.rmg.co.uk/visit/events/visions-of-the-universe

Some very beautiful displays to look at, although none quite as compelling in my opinion as Commander Chris Hadfields' tweeted pictures from the International Space Station over the last few months. I had never before realised how far space is filled with explosions of matter: it's just as well we can't hear it all happening.

Now back to coding interview transcripts...

Monday morning

Time for elevenses, after reading and commenting on the delayed literature review which arrived first thing. Not a bad effort, the student has done a great deal of relevant reading but it needs a bit of restructuring. And the referencing is poor. I can understand why international students sometimes confuse authors' first names and surnames but misspelling names is very careless and if a citation in the text does not appear in the references my plagiarism detector goes into full alert.

I have been dipping into a weighty tome entitled "The Oxford Handbook of Corporate Governance"

http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199642007.do#.Ub7dtvZ4anM

The book has four editors. Editing such a volume must be a real labour of love: everyone I know who has produced an edited book has found it a struggle, even with the most co-operative of contributors.  I've been asked to edit a special issue of a journal but I'm still pondering whether I want to deal with the hassle: a book must be much worse.

The copy editing of the Handbook leaves something to be desired but having struggled with this with our book, with only two authors and the OUP subcontracting system, I'm not surprised. The use of "forward" for "foreword" on page 57 jumped off the page at me. And a reference to "the Cadbury Review" jarred: perhaps working on the book has made me ultra sensitive but how can I correct students' citation errors when the books they rely on for sound scholarship on which to base their work are not reliably accurate? Although published in the UK, all the spelling is US style: behavior and labor are especially noticeable.

And why a "handbook"? It's far too big even for two hands and, to me, a handbook implies something practical, a ready reference source, a manual. This book is not really any of those although it provides comprehensive overviews of a range of topics.

I began by reading the chapter on the history of corporate governance. It is a comprehensive account but, written by a North American legal scholar it takes, as one might expect, a very US-centric approach. I see that I referred to the SSRN draft of this book chapter in my blog post on 30 Dec 2011. In his reply to my message, the author said that he would seek out and include a citation to the Eells book I referred him to ,as an early use of the term "corporate governance", but in the event he obviously didn't think it was important enough to do so. I think that the way such a term, used initially by single individuals, is then adopted more widely and evolves in meaning, is of significant interest in tracing the history of a concept.

I was more interested in the chapter on boards and governance which reports a longitudinal qualitative study conducted by Annie Pye. The insights from this work are very valuable in considering, among other issues, the impact of regulation over time: "Increasing regulation merely indicates increasing one's trust in a system of regulation  rather than increasing trust in the behavior or people being regulated." (p152)

Next I turned to the chapters on board committees and on auditing and was pleased to see my work cited in both, although, where the citation just appears in a list of similar ones in parentheses at the end of a sentence with no other comment, it is difficult to see what the authors might have gleaned from my work. I suppose that's better than where an author has got hold of the wrong end of the stick, though.

I'll save the chapters on nonprofits and financialisation for later.

Following an alert to a paper which looked interesting, I found that, among the acknowledgements, delegates at the Brussels workshop last year were thanked. But although the paper was accepted for the workshop, I remember that neither author actually attended.... This resonated with this article in today's Independent:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-bad-science-scandal-how-factfabrication-is-damaging-uks-global-name-for-research-8660929.html

It will be interesting to see how this requirement filters down into the university bureaucracy.