Management accounting and power: A contested relationship

This paper is structured in two parts. In the first part we undertake a brief discussion on the concept of power and we explore the way this concept has been regarded in several strands of literature on management accounting – the conventional, the contingency, the pluralist, the interpretive, the critical and the post-structuralist. Some of these strands – for instance, the pluralist, the critical and the post-structuralist – explicitly recognise the importance of (some conception of) power in their approach to management accounting in society and organisations. Other approaches are less explicit in that recognition or simply overlook/reject it. The second part of the paper takes sides, departing from the idea that there is a relationship between management accounting and power and proposes a framework for conceptualising that relationship. This framework attempts to bring together different dimensions/conceptions of power, and is proposed as a way to study management accounting and its change within organisations.power, management accounting, change, circuits of power

Power, ERP systems and resistance to management accounting: a case study

This paper reports an intensive longitudinal case study carried out in a Portuguese manufacturing organisation in which attempts to promote change through management accounting were made in recent years. In a first pilot visit to the organisation, two puzzling observations were made. Firstly, and particularly in the manufacturing area of the organisation, management accounting systems introduced in recent years were not being used in everyday interactions and practices. Secondly, a newly introduced ERP system was having no apparent impact on management accounting or on the work of management accountants. We found that these observations were related to issues of power. There were different and conflicting conceptions of which rules should be followed in the manufacturing area, and strategic attempts to enact those conceptions (or to resist alternative ones). This paper draws on the insights of the Circuits of Power (Clegg, 1989a) in order to explain, in theoretically informed manner, the puzzling observations in the case.

A Solution Merging Heuristic for the Steiner Problem in Graphs Using Tree Decompositions

Fixed parameter tractable algorithms for bounded treewidth are known to exist for a wide class of graph optimization problems. While most research in this area has been focused on exact algorithms, it is hard to find decompositions of treewidth sufficiently small to make these al- gorithms fast enough for practical use. Consequently, tree decomposition based algorithms have limited applicability to large scale optimization. However, by first reducing the input graph so that a small width tree decomposition can be found, we can harness the power of tree decomposi- tion based techniques in a heuristic algorithm, usable on graphs of much larger treewidth than would be tractable to solve exactly. We propose a solution merging heuristic to the Steiner Tree Problem that applies this idea. Standard local search heuristics provide a natural way to generate subgraphs with lower treewidth than the original instance, and subse- quently we extract an improved solution by solving the instance induced by this subgraph. As such the fixed parameter tractable algorithm be- comes an efficient tool for our solution merging heuristic. For a large class of sparse benchmark instances the algorithm is able to find small width tree decompositions on the union of generated solutions. Subsequently it can often improve on the generated solutions fast

Ionising radiation exposure from medical imaging – A review of Patient's (un) awareness

Introduction: Medical imaging is the main source of artificial radiation exposure. Evidence, however, suggests that patients are poorly informed about radiation exposure when attending diagnostic scans. This review provides an overview of published literature with a focus on nuclear medicine patients on the level of awareness of radiation exposure from diagnostic imaging. Methods: A review of available literature on awareness, knowledge and perception of ionising radiation in medical imaging was conducted. Articles that met the inclusion criteria were subjected to critical appraisal using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool. Results: 140 articles identified and screened for eligibility, 24 critically assessed and 4 studies included in synthesis. All studies demonstrated that patients were generally lacking awareness about radiation exposure and highlighted a lack of communication between healthcare professionals and patients with respect to radiation exposure. Conclusion: Studies demonstrate a need to better inform patients about their radiation exposure, and further studies focusing on nuclear medicine patients are particularly warranted. Implications for practice: Adequate and accurate information is crucial to ensure the principle of informed consent is present

Efficient graphene-based photodetector with two cavities

We present an efficient graphene-based photodetector with two Fabri-P\'erot cavities. It is shown that the absorption can reach almost 100% around a given frequency, which is determined by the two-cavity lengths. It is also shown that hysteresis in the absorbance is possible, with the transmittance amplitude of the mirrors working as an external driving field. The role of non-linear contributions to the optical susceptibility of graphene is discussed.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures. published version: minor revisio

Working-class royalty: bees beat the caste system

The struggle among social classes or castes is well known in humans. Here, we show that caste inequality similarly affects societies of ants, bees and wasps, where castes are morphologically distinct and workers have greatly reduced reproductive potential compared with queens. In social insects, an individual normally has no control over its own fate, whether queen or worker, as this is socially determined during rearing. Here, for the first time, we quantify a strategy for overcoming social control. In the stingless bee Schwarziana quadripunctata, some individuals reared in worker cells avoid a worker fate by developing into fully functional dwarf queens