Regionalisation and Civil Society in a Time of Austerity: The Cases of Manchester and Sheffield

Within the UK and as well as further afield, the spatial delineation of the ’city region’ has seen a renaissance as the de-facto spatial political unit of governance for economic development (Clarke & Cochrane, 2013).  This spatial realignment has been central to the construction of state projects such as the Northern Powerhouse, charged with taking forward the combined agendas of devolution, localism and austerity. The chapter deploys case study research from two city regions (Manchester and Sheffield) to look at the ways in which the city region is being constructed and the different ways in which ‘civil society’ is negotiating its way through this changing governance landscape. It is in this context that the chapter considers how city regions are being built and the ways in which this process is being limited or undermined through austerity

The Role of Individual Variables, Organizational Variables and Moral Intensity Dimensions in Libyan Management Accountants’ Ethical Decision Making

This study investigates the association of a broad set of variables with the ethical decision making of management accountants in Libya. Adopting a cross-sectional methodology, a questionnaire including four different ethical scenarios was used to gather data from 229 participants. For each scenario, ethical decision making was examined in terms of the recognition, judgment and intention stages of Rest’s model. A significant relationship was found between ethical recognition and ethical judgment and also between ethical judgment and ethical intention, but ethical recognition did not significantly predict ethical intention—thus providing support for Rest’s model. Organizational variables, age and educational level yielded few significant results. The lack of significance for codes of ethics might reflect their relative lack of development in Libya, in which case Libyan companies should pay attention to their content and how they are supported, especially in the light of the under-development of the accounting profession in Libya. Few significant results were also found for gender, but where they were found, males showed more ethical characteristics than females. This unusual result reinforces the dangers of gender stereotyping in business. Personal moral philosophy and moral intensity dimensions were generally found to be significant predictors of the three stages of ethical decision making studied. One implication of this is to give more attention to ethics in accounting education, making the connections between accounting practice and (in Libya) Islam. Overall, this study not only adds to the available empirical evidence on factors affecting ethical decision making, notably examining three stages of Rest’s model, but also offers rare insights into the ethical views of practising management accountants and provides a benchmark for future studies of ethical decision making in Muslim majority countries and other parts of the developing world

SDSS-IV MaNGA: stellar population gradients as a function of galaxy environment

We study the internal radial gradients of stellar population properties within 1.5 $\textit{R}$e and analyse the impact of galaxy environment. We use a representative sample of 721 galaxies with masses ranging between 109 M⊙ and 10$^{11.5}$ M⊙ from the SDSS-IV survey MaNGA. We split this sample by morphology into early-type and late-type galaxies. Using the full spectral fitting code firefly, we derive the light and mass-weighted stellar population properties, age and metallicity, and calculate the gradients of these properties. We use three independent methods to quantify galaxy environment, namely the Nth nearest neighbour, the tidal strength parameter $\textit{Q}$ and distinguish between central and satellite galaxies. In our analysis, we find that early-type galaxies generally exhibit shallow light-weighted age gradients in agreement with the literature and mass-weighted median age gradients tend to be slightly positive. Late-type galaxies, instead, have negative light-weighted age gradients. We detect negative metallicity gradients in both early- and late-type galaxies that correlate with galaxy mass, with the gradients being steeper and the correlation with mass being stronger in late-types. We find, however, that stellar population gradients, for both morphological classifications, have no significant correlation with galaxy environment for all three characterizations of environment. Our results suggest that galaxy mass is the main driver of stellar population gradients in both early and late-type galaxies, and any environmental dependence, if present at all, must be very subtle.DG is supported by an STFC PhD studentship. MAB acknowledges NSF AST-1517006. AW acknowledges support from a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. For more information regarding funding, please visit the publisher's website

Taking stock of accounting ethics scholarship: a review of the journal literature

The proportion of business ethics literature devoted to accounting and the proportion of academic accounting literature devoted to ethical issues are both small, yet over the past two decades there has been a steady accumulation of research devoted to ethical issues in accounting. Based on a database of more than 500 articles gathered from a wide range of accounting and business ethics academic journals, this paper describes and analyses the characteristics of what has been published in the past twenty years or so. It identifies and explores patterns and trends in publication outlets and the type of research conducted. Furthermore, through a comparison with issues that have been raised in the general business ethics literature, it offers guidance to researchers who intend to take the field of accounting ethics forward using empirical methods