Doing Business In..: A Class Exercise For International Accounting

International accounting is taught in the curriculum of about one-third of the largest institutions in the US.  Within the context of this course, many instructors will attempt to cover a diverse array of business topics while integrating financial reporting standards worldwide.   This breadth of topics is frequently challenging in obtaining a cohesive set of knowledge for the enrolled students.  The use of a research paper documenting the business practices within a particular country and the subsequent presentation to either the international accounting class or preferably a larger audience can serve as a tool for organizing students’ understanding of the breadth of the material and having individual students present a deeper depth of understanding within the selected country.&nbsp

Doing Business In Australia: Illustration Of A Class Exercise

In this paper, the authors will discuss the current regulations and culture of Australia as an educational tool for an ex-patriot hoping either to locate a business there or obtain more insight into doing business in the country.

The Impact of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS): Evidence from Canada

The Canadian transition to IFRS provides a valuable IFRS learning opportunity. The Canadian transition and implementation of IFRS provides a unique opportunity to examine the conversion of financial reporting from a similar set of financial reporting rules as U.S. GAAP in a similar economic and business environment. The implementation and adoption of IFRS is not a monolithic event. Our ability to comprehensively understand and assess IFRS requires transparent disclosures such as those mandated by IFRS 1 and disaggregation of the equity components to observe and measure the impact of IFRS as it pertains to discretionary management implementation choices, material reclassifications, and GAAP-to-GAAP differences. Comprehensive knowledge of IFRS 1, First Time Adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards is crucial to our ability to assess the transitory and future impact of IFRS. IFRS 1 sets the precedent for financial reporting under IFRS, overrides transitional provisions included in other IFRS, and prescribes detailed disclosures. This detailed “rules-based” standard permits discretionary management policy choices which have material impact on transitory reporting as well as future financial results

Learning to Adapt in a Global Pandemic of COVID-19: Insights to Support Vocational Education and Training (VET) in Southern Africa

The COVID-19 pandemic impacted all education sectors significantly during the full global lockdown between March and June 2020, including the Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector. During this period, the authors jointly led nine researchers who were postgraduate students in six Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries (Botswana, Eswatini, Mozambique, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe). Due to the restrictions during the lockdown, these nine researchers conducted a literature review and thirty interviews in local communities in these six SADC countries. This included both VET colleges as well as individuals in informal, small-scale and entrepreneurial activities. The authors refer to the qualitative data gathered by the interviews with these interviewees as ‘stories of adaptation’. In this paper we used these ‘stories of adaptation’ to explore the links between learning to adapt and expertise, and to consider how together these constructs offer insights into how VET can be strengthened to better support local communities.Two research questions were asked: (1) how do the notions of adaptive capacity and expertise as conceptual constructs help to understand vocational learning in a global pandemic? and (2) what insights can be drawn from the ‘stories of adaptation’ to strengthen the role of VET in local communities? Through a thematic analysis of the ‘stories of adaptation’, three key findings emerged: (1) capacity to adapt is a multi-level and multi-pronged construct; (2) use of digital platforms as well as local networks were key enabling mechanisms for adaptation; and, (3) learning and expertise are embedded in the capacity to adapt. Thus, we argue that building a responsive VET system for the SADC region is achievable by strengthening the nexus between learning, expertise and adaptive capacity. Keywords: adaptive capacity; expertise; global pandemic; vocational educatio

The Missing Curriculum Link: Personal Financial Planning

With increasing personal and business financial challenges facing today’s professionals, we, as business school faculty, have a responsibility to offer the educational background that should enable rising professionals to successfully manage finances.  Unfortunately, the results of a recent analysis of curriculum offerings in Personal Financial Planning indicate that we, as faculty, have not fully accepted this responsibility.  Only three out of the 131 four-year institutions reviewed have a required Personal Financial Planning course in their curriculums. Quite frankly, we’re permitting launching a generation of students who are unprepared to manage both their own and potentially others’ financial affairs.  With that shortfall of a course offering as a backdrop, we suggest the following content for a required Personal Financial Planning course for all students majoring in Business Administration

US Businesses Code Of Ethics As An Instrument To Comply With The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act

The Foreign Corruption Practices Act (FCPA) makes illegal bribing foreign officials by any US issuer, domestic concern, any type of organization with major place of business in the US and any US citizens. This paper will focus on the extent to which the FCPA is included in the Code of Ethics of Fortune 500 companies as a method of showing the importance of compliance with the Act. The following sections analyze the scope and limitations of this Act, the official compliance mechanisms and internal policies and training developed by five Fortune 500 companies in order to abide by the FCPA

Transitional Economies Of Europe And The Development Of Financial Reporting Standards: A Look At The Correlation Between A Successful Economic Transition And The Development Of Financial Reporting Standards And Laws

During the late 1980s to early 1990s, countries around the world, such as Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, began transitioning their economies from planned socialism, more specifically, Communism, to free market capitalism. The purpose of this paper is to analyze these economies of Europe and Asia and their adoption of appropriate financial reporting. With Poland and the Czech Republic, there is a positive correlation between a successful transition and the number of financial reporting standards implemented. However, deviations from this correlation can arise, such as in the cases of Lithuania and Russia, where the promulgation of accounting standards is delayed or there is no organization to regulate the implementation of the accounting standards

Cases of recontextualising the environmental discourse in the National Curriculum Statement (R-9)

With an intention of opening a vantage point on the story of how curriculum is actually created, this study follows the recontextualising of the environmental discourse of the National Curriculum Statement (R-9) in three case sites. These are: Grade seven Department of Education training material developed to introduce educators to the NCS (R-9), Delta Environmental Centre an environmental education non-governmental organisation, a rural primary school situated south of Durban. Using elements of the Bernstein’s (1990) framework of pedagogic discourse, the study traces how the environmental discourse was de-located from the field of production and relocated into the pedagogic practice of each case. In trying to follow the continuity, changes and discontinuities in the official [environmental] discourse as it is recontextualised, the study utilises Bernstein’s conceptual constructs of selective appropriation and ideological transformation. These constructs of selective appropriation and ideological transformation enabled me to ‘look into’ each case and get a perspective of how to explain the recontextualising processes. The study acknowledged that discourses are shaped and steered by historical, political and economic realities and begins by tracing the genesis of the environmental discourse within formal curriculum policy in South Africa. This socio-historical review highlights the main factors and happenings that shaped the present curriculum discourse and its production as official policy discourse. The study highlighted that within each case the recontextualising story is unique but some clear patterns emerged as factors that impacted on recontextualising processes. These were the role of history and context, knowledge and experience of the discourse, ideology and emphasis, and the depth with which the discourse was engaged. The discussion of these factors gave valuable insights into the recontextualising of curriculum discourses. The study comments on the need to clarify the environmental focus in the Learning Areas and to actualise this into practice so that the discourse becomes an integral part of teaching, learning and assessment. The study also highlights the need for professional development opportunities that will enable educators to clarify the nature and focus of the environmental discourse in the NCS (R-9), and its articulation in Learning Area in context. In particular, the environment and social justice relationships appear to require greater clarity of focus and interpretation in recontextualising processes. There also appears to be a need to develop educators’ foundational knowledge of environmental issues to strengthen the recontextualising of this discourse

A critical realist dialectical understanding of learning pathways associated with two scarce skill environmental occupations within a transitioning systems frame

Policy, environmental, social and economic factors are all driving South Africa's transition to sustainable development and a greener economy. Various policies have been developed to foster sustainable development in the post-apartheid era in South Africa (i.e. since 1994) and there are various projections on potential job creation for a green economy. However, there is a problem related to both the achievement of sustainable development and green economy objectives: South Africa is said to lack adequately qualified people to implement these goals resulting in what is termed 'scarce skills' in the environmental and sustainable development sector. This problem has, in turn, prompted various skills development studies in the environmental sector, including a national Environmental Sector Skills Plan produced in 2010. All these studies point to a reactive skills development system that provides inadequate learning pathways for existing and newly emerging green occupations, which provided the impetus for a more proactive, transformative praxis oriented system of skills development that supports environmental learning pathways in South Africa. A second problem is that the concept of 'learning pathway' is poorly defined in the South African environmental education and wider education and training policy context. This term is often used in policy discourse within the notion of 'seamless learning pathways' and is only vaguely defined. This study set out to investigate selected occupationally directed environmental learning pathways in the South African National Qualifications Framework (NQF) and green transitioning context. In attempting to characterise the nature of the environmental pathway, the study utilised critical realist metatheory which serves as an underlabourer for domain specific theory of transitioning societies and systems, life-course transitions and career development. This theoretical work allowed the characterisation of environmental learning pathways as educational and occupational progression. The study investigated the nature of learning and work transitions across the life- course of selected environmental professionals in two key occupational categories - environmental engineer and environmental scientist - both of which have been defined as scarce skills in South Africa. This enabled a nuanced examination of the formation of what emerged as 'boundaryless' career stories of professionals engaged in these two occupations. The study also sought to engage with a methodological problem in learning pathways research, notably that studies are generally framed either at the micro level career story, emphasising agency of individuals (voluntarism), or at the policy level, emphasising structural aspects of the skills development system (determinism). This study sought to bridge the macro-micro problem drawing on critical realist retroductive analysis; this facilitated the shift from a focus on events and experiences that can be empirically observed (captured in case study approaches) to the causal mechanisms influencing environmental learning pathways in these two scarce skill occupations (discussed and analysed using dialectical critical realism), shedding light on how systemic and structural dynamics and mechanisms shape and influence the emergence of learning pathways as experienced in scarce skill occupations in the environmental sector. The opening chapters of the thesis provide an historical view of how the South African education and training system, itself in a transitioning process, has had to grapple with how to respond to and meaningfully take up the new emerging environmental / sustainable development mandate, which is increasingly framed within a multi-levelled transitioning social-ecological system perspective in post-apartheid South Africa. These transitioning systems are shaped by substantive policy imperatives for societal transformation, social justice, sustainable development and equity. Since 1994, various transformations have been taking place, often in paradoxical forms, in both the environmental and educational sectors, shaping a complex multi-levelled transitioning systems perspective for the study. This background work on transitioning systems provides the foundation for the first data chapter, which provides a descriptive outline of key supply side systemic elements as these pertain to environmental learning pathways more broadly (qualifications; occupational framing; career systems; sector skills planning). It also points to the lack of adequate mechanisms for analysing demand for environmental occupations, and highlights some of the contradictions in the supply- demand relation as these pertain to newly emerging environmental occupations. This helps to explain the empirical findings of previous environmental sector studies on the slow and reactive defining of environmental education and training for environmental occupations within the transforming education and training system in South Africa. The next two chapters, using case-based qualitative data, present the analysis of the two scarce skill occupations investigated - environmental engineer and environmental scientist. These chapters outline the dominant institutional educational pathway and the key supply platforms that support these pathways (career guidance; qualifications, occupational framings, skills planning) and the learning and work transitions of professionals within the occupation. The chapters highlight the factors and causal mechanisms influencing these learning pathways and thus provide insight into the multi-level dynamics that underpin learning pathways. The final chapter uses dialectical critical realism to outline generative mechanisms influencing the construction of the learning pathways. It also highlights key absences that are shaping the emergence (or not) of environmental learning pathways, thus pointing to opportunities for how the NQF might respond to the two scarce skill occupations under study, and to the emergence of environmental learning pathways more broadly within the framework of society-in-transition. Through this, the study links the career stories as analysed within the framework of learning pathways and skills system transitioning literature, to generative mechanisms and system development elements. The study concludes with providing occupational and systemic insights into absences and disjunctures that characterise the emergence (or not) of occupationally oriented environmental learning pathways. It also provides insight into what leads to these absences, and how they are kept in place and suggests possibilities and openings for transformative praxis within a multi-levelled transitioning system framework. The study makes the following contributions: At a theoretical level, the study has shown that environmental learning pathways need to be viewed as a complex phenomenon that is emergent in open systems and constituted by dialectically interdependent planes. A deeper understanding of environmental learning pathways is driven by both educational and occupational progression. It utilises key contemporary ideas around learning and work transitions but links them to the broader analyses of transitioning societies influencing the environmental sector, indicating the significance of how environmental education and training system development is situated within the wider transitioning process oriented towards social-ecological sustainability, social justice and greener economies. This study has further identified green skills as an important focus in research work on transitioning societies. At a methodological level, the study has shown how macro-micro and laminated system research can be useful in studying transitioning systems. As a laminated systems study with a focus on transitioning societies, it provides a baseline for further systems study on green work and green skills. At a practical level, the study has made actual contributions to the conceptualisation of learning pathways in the South African NQF context, to building and informing future green skill developments in the South African post-school system, the environmental sector and to informing conceptualising in the emergent Green Skills project

Cases of recontextualising the environmental discourse in the National Curriculum Statement (R-9)

With an intention of opening a vantage point on the story of how curriculum is actually created, this study follows the recontextualising of the environmental discourse of the National Curriculum Statement (R-9) in three case sites. These are: Grade seven Department of Education training material developed to introduce educators to the NCS (R-9), Delta Environmental Centre an environmental education non-governmental organisation, a rural primary school situated south of Durban. Using elements of the Bernstein’s (1990) framework of pedagogic discourse, the study traces how the environmental discourse was de-located from the field of production and relocated into the pedagogic practice of each case. In trying to follow the continuity, changes and discontinuities in the official [environmental] discourse as it is recontextualised, the study utilises Bernstein’s conceptual constructs of selective appropriation and ideological transformation. These constructs of selective appropriation and ideological transformation enabled me to ‘look into’ each case and get a perspective of how to explain the recontextualising processes. The study acknowledged that discourses are shaped and steered by historical, political and economic realities and begins by tracing the genesis of the environmental discourse within formal curriculum policy in South Africa. This socio-historical review highlights the main factors and happenings that shaped the present curriculum discourse and its production as official policy discourse. The study highlighted that within each case the recontextualising story is unique but some clear patterns emerged as factors that impacted on recontextualising processes. These were the role of history and context, knowledge and experience of the discourse, ideology and emphasis, and the depth with which the discourse was engaged. The discussion of these factors gave valuable insights into the recontextualising of curriculum discourses. The study comments on the need to clarify the environmental focus in the Learning Areas and to actualise this into practice so that the discourse becomes an integral part of teaching, learning and assessment. The study also highlights the need for professional development opportunities that will enable educators to clarify the nature and focus of the environmental discourse in the NCS (R-9), and its articulation in Learning Area in context. In particular, the environment and social justice relationships appear to require greater clarity of focus and interpretation in recontextualising processes. There also appears to be a need to develop educators’ foundational knowledge of environmental issues to strengthen the recontextualising of this discourse