Book review: the politics of financial risk, audit and regulation: a case study of HBOS by Atul K. Shah

In The Politics of Financial Risk, Audit and Regulation: A Case Study of HBOS, Atul K. Shah utilises the case of the HBOS collapse of 2008 to critically examine financial regulation by governments and the audit profession. Strongly implicating banking culture and an absence of ethics in the sector in bank failures and wider financial crises, this book is an impassioned and impressively researched call for change, finds Prabhu Sivabalan

Firms adopt corporate social responsibility for complex reasons

Some don't even report it and most fail to achieve their primary goal for doing CSR, argue Alnoor Bhimani, Hanna Silvola and Prabhu Sivabala

How do enterprises respond to a managerial accounting performance measure mandated by the state?

We study the application of Economic Value Added (EVA®) by Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) following a regulatory requirement to deploy the measure. Our theoretical framing engages conceptual elements of institutional work and public accountability research to consider why key actors vary in their responses to the mandated application of EVA®. Our data derives from thirty interviews with managers in three SOEs and their oversight body (the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council). We identify two relevant dimensions associated with managers: 'accounting centricity' and 'institutional potential' and report that they drive the authenticity of actors' responses in the absence of enforcement of the mandated measure. When accounting centricity and institutional potential align to the dictates of the higher implementing body, accountability remains high notwithstanding the absence of enforcement. When these two factors do not align, accountability fails even when politicization is high and formal accountability claims are high. Where the two factors are partially present, the accountability response is mixed. Our study contributes to a refinement of the perspective advanced by prior investigations of institutionally sanctioned roll outs of accounting systems highlighting in particular, the role of human agency in explaining actor responses

Voluntary corporate social responsibility reporting: a study of early and late reporter motivations and outcomes

Neo-institutional logics for the early adoption of innovations are often argued as more authentic than for late adopters. To what extent might this be so in relation to corporate social responsibility reporting (CSRR)? We specifically focus on neo-institutionalist perspectives with an emphasis on isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983) to illustrate alternative motivations, and verify our hypotheses using a mixed methods approach (survey data and field evidence from five organizations). We find that the rationale for early reporters entails a financial pragmatism that is absent in current debates surrounding corporate social responsibility (CSR). We also show that normative and coercive isomorphism interplay among early adopters to drive their adoption decision over time, and these facilitate the generation of different strategic postures to placate key external stakeholders. This contrasts with prior studies that have mainly argued for mimetic and normative isomorphism to dominate the decision to implement CSRR amongst adopters. Finally, we argue that late reporters choose not to engage earlier as (ironically) their strategic proximity to the phenomena being reported is intrinsically close, meaning most internal and external stakeholders assume the proper functioning of the phenomena being reported, and therefore do not demand it. This rationale for mimetic isomorphism is unique and its narrative more positive than that normally ascribed to it in the prior literature. Firms are subsequently less inclined to opportunistically validate or signal their sustainability ethos using formal reporting systems, and only do so superficially to engage in practice

Comparison of Face Recognition Based on Global, Local and Component Classifiers using Multisensory Images

Abstract: A feature selection technique along with an information fusion procedure for improving the recognition accuracy of a visual and thermal image-based facial recognition system is presented in this study. A novel modular Kernel Eigen spaces approach is developed and implemented on the phase congruency feature maps extracted from the visual and thermal images individually. This study proposes a novel face recognition method which exploits both global and local discriminative features. In this method, global features are extracted from the whole face images by keeping the low-frequency coefficients of fourier transform, which we believe encodes the holistic facial Information, such as facial contour. For local feature extraction, Gabor wavelets are exploited considering their biological relevance. After that, to the global fourier features and each local patch of Gabor features

A study of the linkages between rolling budget forms, uncertainty and strategy

Addressing the dearth of studies on rolling budgets, we investigate how the importance of rolling budgets for various planning, control and evaluation reasons relate to a business unit's strategy and uncertainty, and report on the variation in these responses when partitioned into quarterly and monthly rolling budget types. We use a survey instrument with responses from 182 rolling budget firms in our investigation. Our findings reveal consistencies as well as deviations between our sub-samples (quarterly and monthly rolling budgets), and the total rolling budget sample. We report that the way rolling budgets relate to uncertainty and strategy in organisations are substantively different for monthly and quarterly rolling budget types, and vary across planning, control and evaluation budget reasons. Our findings show a greater sensitivity between monthly rolling budgets and uncertainty/strategy, and virtually nil relations between quarterly rolling budgets and uncertainty/strategy. We posit that monthly rolling budgets are used in a manner more traditionally associated to rolling budgets in prior studies, while quarterly rolling budgets might be used relatively more symbolically or in response to external pressures such as earnings forecast requirements, and are less sensitive to established organisational antecedents such as uncertainty/strategy

Relaxation Based Electrical Simulation for VLSI Circuits

Abstract: Electrical circuit simulation was one of the first CAD tools developed for IC design. The conventional circuit simulators like SPICE and ASTAP were designed initially for the cost effective analysis of circuits containing a few hundred transistors or less. A number of approaches have been used to improve the performances of congenital circuit simulators for the analysis of large circuits. Thereafter relaxation methods was proposed to provide more accurate waveforms than standard circuit simulators with up to two orders of magnitude speed improvement for large circuits. In this paper we have tried to highlights recently used waveform and point relaxation techniques for simulation of VLSI circuits. We also propose a simple parallelization technique and experimentally demonstrate that we can solve digital circuits with tens of million transistors in a few hours