Reflections on the value concept in accounting

The recent meltdown in global finances and the reasons for it may make people doubtful about the stewardship function of accounting. In the global financial markets, there is a great fascination with the reality that accounting values intend to reflect. However, what many people considered valuable is now suddenly of no value. The question can therefore be asked what is meant by the value concept as a foundation to modern-day accountancy. “Value” is a concept that is open to different interpretations, based on the needs, perspectives and personal values of the interpreter. This article aims to reflect on the value concept from an accounting perspective in analysing the fundamental quali-tative perspectives and how these perspectives might affect the quantitative value measurements, as reported in the financial statements. From a quantitative perspective, accounttancy aims to measure and report the monetary values of items. However, there is a move towards a mixed valuation model with many financial statements, including both historical cost and value-based accounting information. The article concludes that this questionable development opens up many additional and subjective interpretations of accounting value measurement and reporting. Both valuation measurement methods have merit when considered in the overall purpose of accounting information. However, subjective value-based mea-surements may cast a shadow of doubt on the reliability and comparability requirements of accounting value information

Towards a managed service encounter process as an instrument to improved customer satisfaction

M.Com.Please refer to full text to view abstrac

In pursuit of a foundational accountancy philosophy

Recent accounting history is characterised by many developments, including several high-profile corporate failures, such as Enron, Parmalat and even Saambou, as well as major developments in financial reporting standards, such as the broadbased acceptance of international financial reporting standards and the convergence efforts between the UK-based International Accounting Standards Board and the US-based Financial Accounting Standards Board. As a result, long-accepted accounting assumptions are being challenged in favour of new principles and practices. Furthermore, in academic circles the scientific foundation of accounting is being questioned. At many universities, limited education is taking place in the underlying theory and philosophy of accounting in favour of teaching prospective accountants how to pass difficult professional exams. Seen against this backdrop, a reconsideration of the objectives and purpose of accountancy may be overdue. This article attempts to illuminate the intrinsic assumptions and objectives of accountancy, seen in the light of modern-day accounting issues and developments

Partition functions:Zeros, unstable dynamics and complexity

This thesis considers the complexity of approximating the partition functions of the ferromagnetic Ising model and of the hard-core model (independence polynomial) within the class of bounded degree graphs. It is known that the absence of zeros essentially implies that approximation is easy. In this thesis the inverse is proved: the presence of zeros implies that approximation is #P hard. The most important step of the proof is relating both the "zero parameters" and the "#P hard parameters" to the set of parameters around which a related set of functions, namely the occupation ratios, behaves chaotically. The first two chapters contain the proof of the main theorem for the ferromagnetic Ising model and the independence polynomial respectively. Chapters 3 and 4 concern the set of zeros of the independence polynomial for bounded degree graphs. In Chapter 3 it is shown that zeros of Cayley trees are not extremal within the set of zeros of all bounded degree graphs, something that was previously conjectured. In Chapter 4 a very precise description of the set of zeros is given as the degree bound goes to infinity

Wat wil die apologetiek?

Oor die Apologetiek bestaan daar veel verwarring. “Men krijgt het gevoel, alsof men de hand gestoken heeft in een wespennest. Geen enkel vak der godgeleerdheid toont zulk een beeld van volslagen wanorde als dit” (Hepp, 1922, p. 16)

A doctrinal research perspective of master's degree students in accounting

This article reflects on the incorporation of doctrinal research in the curriculum of a master’s degree programme in accounting at a South African university. Since accounting concepts, principles and rules are more developed through practice, the question is whether there is place for doctrinal research in accounting research. Doctrinal research is a research approach that focus on the development of the underlying doctrines of a field of enquiry and not on the development of theory per say. In the master’s degree programme doctrinal research is introduced as an alternative research approach to conventional research approaches. The perspective of the master’s degree students is obtained through structured interviews from which different themes are identified by thematic analysis. The participant students agreed that doctrinal research has an important role to play in accounting research. The students also agree that their critical engagement with the underlying doctrines of accounting has improved significantly and that deeper understanding of the concepts and principles of accounting was created

Lee-yang zeros and the complexity of the ferromagnetic ising model on bounded-degree graphs

We study the computational complexity of approximating the partition function of the ferromagnetic Ising model in the Lee-Yang circle of zeros given by |λ| = 1, where λ is the external field of the model. Complex-valued parameters for the Ising model are relevant for quantum circuit computations and phase transitions in statistical physics, but have also been key in the recent deterministic approximation scheme for all |λ| ≠ 1 by Liu, Sinclair, and Srivastava. Here, we focus on the unresolved complexity picture on the unit circle, and on the tantalising question of what happens in the circular arc around λ = 1, where on one hand the classical algorithm of Jerrum and Sinclair gives a randomised approximation scheme on the real axis suggesting tractability, and on the other hand the presence of Lee-Yang zeros alludes to computational hardness. Our main result establishes a sharp computational transition at the point λ = 1; in fact, our techniques apply more generally to the whole unit circle |λ| = 1. We show #P-hardness for approximating the partition function on graphs of maximum degree Δ when b, the edge-interaction parameter, is in the interval [EQUATION] and λ is a non-real on the unit circle. This result contrasts with known approximation algorithms when |λ| ≠ 1 or [EQUATION], and shows that the Lee-Yang circle of zeros is computationally intractable, even on bounded-degree graphs. Our inapproximability result is based on constructing rooted tree gadgets via a detailed understanding of the underlying dynamical systems, which are further parameterised by the degree of the root. The ferromagnetic Ising model has radically different behaviour than previously considered anti-ferromagnetic models, and showing our #P-hardness results in the whole Lee-Yang circle requires a new high-level strategy to construct the gadgets. To this end, we devise an elaborate inductive procedure to construct the required gadgets by taking into account the dependence between the degree of the root of the tree and the magnitude of the derivative at the fixpoint of the corresponding dynamical system