Business begins at home

One of the most significant trends in the post-industrial era has been for the home to become an important focus for work. The boundaries between work and home are now increasingly blurred, reversing the forces of the industrial era in which places deemed suitable for each were clearly demarcated and physically separate. The most recent published figures available from the Labour Force Survey (2005)1 indicate that 3.1m people now work mainly from home, 11% of the workforce. This represents a rise from 2.3m in 1997 (9% of the workforce), a 35% increase. The majority of homeworkers (2.4m or 77% of the total) are 'teleworkers' – people who use computers and telecommunications to work at home. The number of teleworkers has increased by 1.5m between 1997 and 2005, a 166% increase. Clearly, it is the growth in the number of teleworkers which is driving the increase in homeworking

Sustainable development : fourth annual assessment of progress by the Scottish Government

SDC Scotland’s annual assessment is based on a review of government policy across a range of topics from economy and energy to education, health, waste and biodiversity. The conclusions and recommendations are also based on discussions with expert groups in each policy area, government civil servants and a stakeholder survey.Publisher PD

Truth, objectivity and subjectivity in accounting

The central thesis defended here is that we can have truth and objectivity in accounting. We do not contend that this potential is presently realized: On the contrary, we argue that certain contradictions immanent to capitalism give rise in late modernity to crisis tendencies in financial accounting as a way of knowing - epistemological crisis. We do contend that accounting's tendencies to epistemological crises can, at least in theory, be overcome. We begin to defend this view by considering accounting as an essentially descriptive activity. The account given by the philosopher Donald Davidson of the very possibility of knowledge is used to justify the view that intersubjectivity is all the foundation we need, or can have, for objectivity, and to defend out claim that we can have accounting knowledge, that is, true accounts/descriptions of an objective and intersubjectively accessible public world. The defence here is against those theorists, including those inspired by certain strands of the phenomenological, (post)structuralist and hermeneutic traditions, who would deny the possibility of any such objectivity in accounting. Using an analysis of the history and debate surrounding the issue of accounting for deferred tax in the United Kingdom (UK), we endeavour to locate accounting in terms of the dichotomy the philosopher Bernard Williams draws between science and ethics. We find that the descriptive and normative are inextricably entangled in accounting concepts in much the same way as they are entangled in thick ethical concepts such as 'chastity' or 'courage'. We recognise that the descriptive aspect of accounting can not be neatly distinguished from the normative and dealt with separately. Furthermore, following Williams, we argue that difficulties associated with the objective validation of the normative dimension of thick accounting concepts renders knowledge held under them vulnerable to destruction by reflection

Futures Studies in the Interactive Society

This book consists of papers which were prepared within the framework of the research project (No. T 048539) entitled Futures Studies in the Interactive Society (project leader: Éva Hideg) and funded by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA) between 2005 and 2009. Some discuss the theoretical and methodological questions of futures studies and foresight; others present new approaches to or procedures of certain questions which are very important and topical from the perspective of forecast and foresight practice. Each study was conducted in pursuit of improvement in futures fields

Restaurant management in Lebanon: Current trends and future concerns

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Nonmarket Values in Family Businesses

Despite the economic importance of family businesses, legal scholarship has often overlooked their distinctive character. Instead, scholars focus on the chosen form of business organization— partnership, corporation, LLC—and assume that the participants are economically rational actors who seek to maximize their individual preferences. This Article contends that family businesses are extensions of family relationships and that nonmarket values affect their goals and governance choices. Just as family law scholars have shown that contract principles can be applied to regulate intimate relationships, corporate law scholars should recognize that the intimacy of family life often substitutes for arm’s length bargaining in family businesses. Notably, although relationships of trust and loyalty can lower transaction costs, the strength of family ties offers an intrinsic benefit for family business participants apart from any economic return they may achieve. When disputes arise in family businesses, courts have an indispensable role to play because the parties cannot anticipate and resolve all potential conflicts in advance. Like other business ventures, family businesses are long-term relational contracts. However, rather than seeking to supply the terms that would have been chosen by individuals who are disconnected from one another and economically rational in their pursuit of their own advantage, the law should recognize the importance of shared family values relevant to the parties’ expectations. Put differently, to respect private ordering, the law must respond to the ways that individuals actually choose to order their affairs

Performance Evaluation of Distributed Security Protocols Using Discrete Event Simulation

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) that manages inter-domain routing on the Internet lacks security. Protective measures using public key cryptography introduce complexities and costs. To support authentication and other security functionality in large networks, we need public key infrastructures (PKIs). Protocols that distribute and validate certificates introduce additional complexities and costs. The certification path building algorithm that helps users establish trust on certificates in the distributed network environment is particularly complicated. Neither routing security nor PKI come for free. Prior to this work, the research study on performance issues of these large-scale distributed security systems was minimal. In this thesis, we evaluate the performance of BGP security protocols and PKI systems. We answer the questions about how the performance affects protocol behaviors and how we can improve the efficiency of these distributed protocols to bring them one step closer to reality. The complexity of the Internet makes an analytical approach difficult; and the scale of Internet makes empirical approaches also unworkable. Consequently, we take the approach of simulation. We have built the simulation frameworks to model a number of BGP security protocols and the PKI system. We have identified performance problems of Secure BGP (S-BGP), a primary BGP security protocol, and proposed and evaluated Signature Amortization (S-A) and Aggregated Path Authentication (APA) schemes that significantly improve efficiency of S-BGP without compromising security. We have also built a simulation framework for general PKI systems and evaluated certification path building algorithms, a critical part of establishing trust in Internet-scale PKI, and used this framework to improve algorithm performance

Unfreezing Legal Reality: Critical Approaches to Law

Critical Legal Studies continues to flourish despite persistent criticism concerning its goals and aims. In the lecture reproduced below, Professor Gordon demonstrates why such global criticism is not only harmless but irrelevant to the central message of the movement. Borrowing from the growing body of CLS scholarship, he illustrates, through example, that the most valuable contributions of CLS are essentially local in nature. But these predominantly local critiques, he explains, can be readily extended to new areas in order to destory [sic] the seemingly necessary connection the seemingly necessary connection between the way our law is and the way it must be

Systems theory and the commercial development process : towards an understanding of complex behaviour and change

Abstract unavailable please refer to PD

Unfreezing Legal Reality: Critical Approaches to Law

Critical Legal Studies continues to flourish despite persistent criticism concerning its goals and aims. In the lecture reproduced below, Professor Gordon demonstrates why such global criticism is not only harmless but irrelevant to the central message of the movement. Borrowing from the growing body of CLS scholarship, he illustrates, through example, that the most valuable contributions of CLS are essentially local in nature. But these predominantly local critiques, he explains, can be readily extended to new areas in order to destory [sic] the seemingly necessary connection the seemingly necessary connection between the way our law is and the way it must be