Non-financial information disclosure and communication in large UK companies.

This study aims to investigate the disclosure of non-financial information by UK companies in the absence of regulatory and statutory requirements. The study focuses on answering two key questions: (1) whether UK companies disclose non-fiiiancial information to legitimise their corporate behaviours to their stakeholder groups, and (2) whether UK companies disclose nonfinancial information to meet the information requirements of their stakeholder groups. To start this study, traditional theories and concepts used in the accounting literature are reviewed. The researcher takes the view that among the existing theories and concepts, legitimacy and stakeholder theories provide the best explanationf or the disclosure of non-financial information by UK companies. While the arguments presented by the proponents of the legitimacy theory is used to explain how companies may disclose information to present themselves as having the same norms and values as those of the society, the arguments in support of the stakeholder rheory are used to highlight the existence of different stakeholder groups and how companies attach different importance to them. The author takes the view that if companies disclose non-financial information to their stakeholder groups, they should do so regardless of their corporate characteristics. To explore the reasons for the disclosure of non-financial information further, the quality of the disclosed non-financial information is heeded by considering two characteristics of 'Social and Ethical Accounting, Auditing and Reporting' (SEAAR), namely stakeholder identification and stakeholder dialogue. It is argued that if companies disclose information to meet the requirements of their stakeholder groups, they are expected to: (1) identify their stakeholder groups, and (2) hold dialogue with them. Before startingt he empirical investigation, methodological isues that are believed to be relevant to this research project are discussed wherein non-financial information categories are divided into two groups of governance and non-govemance. While governance in formation encompasses information categories on corporate managerial structures, non-governance information categories are on non-managerial aspects of companies and can be related to both external and internal matters. Having decided on the non-financial information categories, the level of non-financial information disclosed by the Top 100 UK companies is measured for 1985,1990 and 1995. The findings show that the level of information disclosureh ad increasedin terms of both governance and non-governance in formation categories from 1985 to 1995. The thesis proceeds by probing the two key questions. The question of whether companies disclose non-financial information to legitimise their behaviours is investigated by choosing a number of corporatec haracteristics and examining if either of these characteristicsis associated with the level of non-financial information disclosed by UK companies. The observation of association between any of the corporate characteristics and the level of non-financial information disclosure is used to demonstrate how companies divulge information to legitimise those aspects of behaviours that are closely linked to their characteristics. The question of whether companies report non-financial information to meet the information requirements of their stakeholders' groups is probed using questionnaire surveys. The questionnairews ere sent out to companies and two stakeholder groups, namely investors and employees. The responsesre ceived from the three groups castlight on stakeholder identification and the state of stakeholder dialogue. According to the findings of this study, a number of corporate characteristics were associated with the disclosure of non-financial information illustrating that UK companies disclosed information to legitimise their behaviours to their stakeholder groups in the absence of any regulatory and statutory requirements. This was particularly the case for non-governancein formation. The findings also suggest that UK companies attached more importance to their investors than to their employees and they met the information requirements of their investors despite holding a relatively higher level of dialogue with their employees

Corporate governance and HRM

This chapter begins with a comparison of different definitions of corporate governance arguing that governance structures are the end results of social and political processes. The chapter then moves on to discuss different corporate governance mechanisms and how employees in each mechanism are considered. Three governance mechanisms, namely the Anglo-Saxon mechanism in the UK, the stakeholder approach in Germany and the Japanese corporate governance mechanism are discussed. This is followed by a review of the development of those aspects of the regulatory codes that could have impacts on employees. The chapter ends with a section on three theoretical perspectives that are commonly used in corporate governance literature and how employees are positioned in governance structure within each theoretical perspective

Study of the charge profile of thermally poled electrets

The charge profile of thermally poled electrets has been studied using two different methods, laser induced pressure pulse (LIPP) and pulsed electroacoustic (PEA), to gain insight into the mechanisms that are activated and assess which is the most appropriate method to study the charge profile. Disc--shaped PET samples have been conventionally poled to activate both the alpha and the rho relaxation and, right after, partially discharged up to a temperature Tpd. In this way, samples with a different combination of dipolar and space charge polarization have been obtained. Both LIPP and PEA reveal asymmetric profiles for Tpd below the glass transition temperature, that progressively become antisymmetric for higher temperatures. The shape and evolution of the charge profiles can be explained assuming injection of negative carriers from the anode that enhances the trapping of positive carriers near this electrode. It can be observed that PEA is able to detect a wider variety of polarization mechanisms in the system while LIPP gives a simpler picture of the charge profile.Comment: 19 pages, 11 figure

A multilabel fuzzy relevance clustering system for malware attack attribution in the edge layer of cyber-physical networks

The rapid increase in the number of malicious programs has made malware forensics a daunting task and caused users’ systems to become in danger. Timely identification of malware characteristics including its origin and the malware sample family would significantly limit the potential damage of malware. This is a more profound risk in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), where a malware attack may cause significant physical damage to the infrastructure. Due to limited on-device available memory and processing power in CPS devices, most of the efforts for protecting CPS networks are focused on the edge layer, where the majority of security mechanisms are deployed. Since the majority of advanced and sophisticated malware programs are combining features from different families, these malicious programs are not similar enough to any existing malware family and easily evade binary classifier detection. Therefore, in this article, we propose a novel multilabel fuzzy clustering system for malware attack attribution. Our system is deployed on the edge layer to provide insight into applicable malware threats to the CPS network. We leverage static analysis by utilizing Opcode frequencies as the feature space to classify malware families. We observed that a multilabel classifier does not classify a part of samples. We named this problem the instance coverage problem. To overcome this problem, we developed an ensemble-based multilabel fuzzy classification method to suggest the relevance of a malware instance to the stricken families. This classifier identified samples of VirusShare, RansomwareTracker, and BIG2015 with an accuracy of 94.66%, 94.26%, and 97.56%, respectively

Short communication: A survey on growth performance, intestinal micro-flora and meat shelf-life in rainbow trout fed with Pistacia atlantica kurdica essential oil

Qualitative characteristics and nutritional value of fish can reduce by microbial growth and oxidative changes during storage (Rezaei et al., 2008). To prevent or delay such deteriorative changes and extend fish meat shelf life, several ways were recommended. The use of natural preservatives such as essential oils is one of the suggested solutions (Çoban, 2013). Essential oils (EOs) which are aromatic oily liquids of plant material consider in many aspects such as antioxidant, antibacterial, antiviral, antimycotic, antitoxigenic and antiparasitic properties (Burt, 2004; Miguel, 2010). EOs can also replace antibiotic growth promoters in aquatic and terrestrial animal feeds. Supplementation of animal’s diet with EOs can effect on growth performance, intestinal microbiota,non-specific immune response and antioxidant status of their products (Giannenas et al., 2012)

A survey of growth performance, intestinal micro-flora and meat shelf-life in rainbow trout fed with Pistacia atlantica kurdica essential oil

In this study, the essential oil (EO) of Pistacia atlantica subsp. kurdica was added at the rate of 10 g/kg of daily diet of rainbow trout and its effect on gut microbiota (Enterobacteriaceae, Lactobacillus spp., total count), growth performance and antioxidant status of rainbow trout fillet was investigated. Sixty apparently healthy rainbow trout with an approximate weight of 150 g ±3.5 were randomly divided into treatment and control groups. Physical and chemical conditions of water were adjusted to optimal for fish farming and sampling was done after 3 months. The results showed that feed conversion ratio in the control group was significantly (p0.05) after 1 and 7 days cold storage (3°C). According to the obtained results, the EO of Pistacia atlantica kurdica at this dose is not advised for increasing the shelf life of meat and growth performance of fish

Transparency and disclosure in supply chains: modern slavery and worker voice

Under section 54 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 (MSA), large British companies are required to report on their efforts to monitor and protect the labour rights of their employees and workers on an annual basis. There are however criticisms. First, there is no requirement to audit Modern Slavery statements and this raises question over the credibility of the information that companies report. Second, the MSA is a soft governance tool that allows too much reporting flexibility. While the original intention behind this was to encourage companies to get to know their supply chains in the first place and subsequently focus on improving their reporting over time, there have been general calls to tighten up the non-mandatory reporting requirements of the MSA in the hope that this would in turn result in better quality of reporting. In this report, we present the key findings for our detailed examination of the Modern Slavery Statements of the largest 100 British companies. In order to examine the statements, we devised a detailed index, based on (a) the mandatory and optional aspects of the Modern Slavery Act (2015, s. 54), (b) content recommended by CORE (2017) and (c) additional criteria based on consultation with The Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, an internationally based labour rights NGO with an office in London. We focus on 6 information categories. Apart from the General Information, which covers mostly mandatory disclosures, the remaining five categories were optional under section 54. These five categories are: Organisation and Structure of Supply chains, OS; Due Diligence, DD; Risk Assessment, RA; Codes of Conduct/Policies/Strategy(ies), CPS; and Training collaboration, TC. We find that of the five non-mandatory information categories, companies prioritise reporting on two: RA procedures and DD processes These are the categories of most importance to investors. We find that any changes to reporting on these two categories are positively linked to reporting on CPS but not to those on OS and TC. While the level of reporting for all the three latter categories were lower than reporting on RA and DD, the reason why changes in CPS is closely linked those of the RA and DD lies in the way companies report to illustrate their parallel efforts to devise the necessary CPS to support the outcome of RA and facilitate the implementation of DD processes. However, the same could not be said about OS and TC. It was evident that while companies are reluctant to draw attention to potential challenges and problematic areas along their supply chains, they show limited efforts on their training programmes, raising questions over how in-depth corporate efforts have been in changing their culture on labour rights issues and/or perhaps the more serious challenges that they encounter in the process of devising training programmes. While our findings reveal an interesting reporting pattern, we can see areas that we still have very limited knowledge of before any meaningful proposals can be made to move the labour rights reporting agenda forward. We anticipate that there are complexities and challenges that companies face along their supply chains, especially in areas that are outside their national jurisdictions and where the legal framework can be either weak or non-existent and/or regional norms and cultures are in a way that can make it controversial or costly for companies to devise training programmes at local level

Multi-population genetic algorithms with immigrants scheme for dynamic shortest path routing problems in mobile ad hoc networks

Copyright @ Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.The static shortest path (SP) problem has been well addressed using intelligent optimization techniques, e.g., artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms (GAs), particle swarm optimization, etc. However, with the advancement in wireless communications, more and more mobile wireless networks appear, e.g., mobile ad hoc network (MANET), wireless mesh network, etc. One of the most important characteristics in mobile wireless networks is the topology dynamics, that is, the network topology changes over time due to energy conservation or node mobility. Therefore, the SP problem turns out to be a dynamic optimization problem in mobile wireless networks. In this paper, we propose to use multi-population GAs with immigrants scheme to solve the dynamic SP problem in MANETs which is the representative of new generation wireless networks. The experimental results show that the proposed GAs can quickly adapt to the environmental changes (i.e., the network topology change) and produce good solutions after each change.This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council(EPSRC) of UK under Grant EP/E060722/1