The reception pattern of the balanced scorecard: accounting for interpretative viability

‘The role of fads and fashions in shaping management accounting practices in contemporary organizations requires further inquiry’ (Malmi, T. (1999). Activity based costing diffusion across organizations: an exploratory empirical analysis of Finnish firms. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 24, 669). Against the background of the evolving management fashion literature we discuss the ‘reception pattern’ of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) in the Netherlands. To get insight into the organizational changes induced by and associated with the BSC-discourse, we systematically discovered how the concept, since its launch by Kaplan & Norton (1992), has grown into an umbrella that encompasses a variety of interpretations and uses. The paper offers a framework to show how BSC-discourse and its actual use have developed in interrelated yet loosely coupled ways.

An Exceptional SSM from E6 Orbifold GUTs with intermediate LR symmetry

We propose a class of E6-based local orbifold Grand Unified Theories (GUTs) which yield an exceptional supersymmetric standard model as their low energy theory including leptoquark and unhiggs exotics and a Z' at the TeV scale. Unification is achieved in two steps through an intermediate scale symmetry breaking.Comment: Minor typos corrected, and extended conclusions a bi

Co-word Analysis using the Chinese Character Set

Until recently, Chinese texts could not be studied using co-word analysis because the words are not separated by spaces in Chinese (and Japanese). A word can be composed of one or more characters. The online availability of programs that separate Chinese texts makes it possible to analyze them using semantic maps. Chinese characters contain not only information, but also meaning. This may enhance the readability of semantic maps. In this study, we analyze 58 words which occur ten or more times in the 1652 journal titles of the China Scientific and Technical Papers and Citations Database. The word occurrence matrix is visualized and factor-analyzed

Witten's conjecture and Property P

Let K be a non-trivial knot in the 3-sphere and let Y be the 3-manifold obtained by surgery on K with surgery-coefficient 1. Using tools from gauge theory and symplectic topology, it is shown that the fundamental group of Y admits a non-trivial homomorphism to the group SO(3). In particular, Y cannot be a homotopy-sphere.Comment: Published by Geometry and Topology at http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/gt/GTVol8/paper7.abs.html Version 5: links correcte

Review: Ian Gough: Heat, Greed and Human Need - Climate Change, Capitalism and Sustainable Wellbeing

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F-Theory, T-Duality on K3 Surfaces and N=2 Supersymmetric Gauge Theories in Four Dimensions

We construct T-duality on K3 surfaces. The T-duality exchanges a 4-brane R-R charge and a 0-brane R-R charge. We study the action of the T-duality on the moduli space of 0-branes located at points of K3 and 4-branes wrapping it. We apply the construction to F-theory compactified on a Calabi-Yau 4-fold and study the duality of N=2 SU(N_c) gauge theories in four dimensions. We discuss the generalization to the N=1 duality scenario.Comment: 13 pages, late