Enhancing or Inhibiting Advertising's Sustainability: An Overview of Advertising Standards Organisations in Australia

The Advertising Standards Board (ASB) and its predecessor, the Advertising Standards Council (ASC), have been responsible for regulating advertising content in Australia since 1974. Research on these bodies has highlighted their respective operations, but it has inadequately investigated their impact on the industry's public image. The completion of the ASB's first decade of operations provides an opportunity to compare the structures and decisions of both organisations and the balance they have struck between the interests of industry and those of the public. In addition, this paper presents new research on public attitudes towards advertising and its regulation. The findings raise questions as to the sustainability of the current approach to self-regulation in Australia

Politics and the professions in a time of crisis

Class analysis has undergone a ‘cultural turn’ in recent years, driven most notably by the growing influence of the work of Pierre Bourdieu. We seek to connect this perspective with organization studies via an analysis of the political, economic and cultural cleavages that exist within a sample of professionals, managers and executives – summarily, the UK professional class. The results show that significant cleavages exist within the UK professional class in terms of economic and cultural capital composition and political dispositions. However, the most significant differences observable are not related to classic materialist ‘left’ and ‘right’ perspectives as recent research elsewhere suggests, but on more epiphenomenal issues such as immigration, equal rights and the environment. In an era where the professions find themselves in crisis (Leicht, 2016), the results imply that professional groups should take politics more seriously and actively articulate how professional expertise can contribute to the common good

The importance of being privileged: Digital entrepreneurship as a class project

Established professional occupations can become the preserve of elites when fitting in is driven by class-based criteria. In contrast, digital entrepreneurship has been proposed as a means by which people may emancipate themselves from societal constraints. We interrogate digital entrepreneurship’s meritocratic foundations by way of a 36-month ethnography of a start-up incubator. Attending to the dispositions of digital entrepreneurs, we reveal they use cultural tastes and manners to create the incubator as a place where members of the privileged class can reinvent themselves at their leisure, all the while adopting the meritocratic mythologies of digital entrepreneurship to disavow their own privilege. This opens up a two-fold contribution to the study of professions and occupations. Firstly, we demonstrate how professional and occupational roles are epiphenomenal to class positioning. Secondly, the parallels between the legitimating discourses of entrepreneurs and more established professional jurisdictions attest to a community that is in the process of professionalization

The importance of being privileged:Digital entrepreneurship as a class project

Established professional occupations can become the preserve of elites when fitting in is driven by class-based criteria. In contrast, digital entrepreneurship has been proposed as a means by which people may emancipate themselves from societal constraints. We interrogate digital entrepreneurship’s meritocratic foundations by way of a 36-month ethnography of a start-up incubator. Attending to the dispositions of digital entrepreneurs, we reveal they use cultural tastes and manners to create the incubator as a place where members of the privileged class can reinvent themselves at their leisure, all the while adopting the meritocratic mythologies of digital entrepreneurship to disavow their own privilege. This opens up a two-fold contribution to the study of professions and occupations. Firstly, we demonstrate how professional and occupational roles are epiphenomenal to class positioning. Secondly, the parallels between the legitimating discourses of entrepreneurs and more established professional jurisdictions attest to a community that is in the process of professionalization

Auditor judgment in the fourth industrial revolution

Discourse proclaiming the advent of a fourth industrial revolution predicts significant disruption to various work domains in the near future. Auditing is one of the domains where bold claims about the potential of technology are being made, with technology expected to augment auditors' judgments and, in time, possibly automate them. Drawing on 44 in-depth interviews with auditors, regulators, and emergent artificial intelligence software providers, we question the prevailing narrative around technological change in auditing which suggests that ostensibly simple, low-level technical tasks are areas where little judgment is at play and thus are ripe for automation. We show that significant elements of deliberation, sensemaking, and reflexivity, arguably critical for the socialization of early career auditors into the profession, may be lost when automating areas of work perceived as low value, leading us to question what it means to apply judgment in auditing. Conversely, higher-level aspects of the audit process may be assisted by technology and augmented in different ways, yet new technological structures generate new areas of indeterminacy that pose new and yet unresolved demands on auditors' judgment. Overall, the paper shows how auditor habits are changing and highlights the risks posed by new technologies to the acquisition of practical knowledge by auditors