1,720,982 research outputs found
Innovations in the measurement of cultural value. The British Museum
No full textIn recent years the process of managerialisation in the museum sector has become more and more intense. This is the result of challenging forces which include: increased competition in the arts sector; more sophisticated and demanding stakeholders and greater accountability required by legislation. All these things are placing pressure on museums to adopt managerial principles in order to measure and control what appears immeasurable: the creation of cultural value. The implementation of a new Performance Measurement System (PMS) at the British Museum (BM) has led to the emergence of a control model of the modern conception of cultural value. The principal aim of this PMS is to measure the effectiveness of BM policies and actions, in terms of the creation and distribution of cultural value in the community, both for purposes of internal control and accountability. Founded in 1753, the BM is today one of the oldest, largest and most famous museums in the world. It aims to promote universal understanding of culture. The BM holds artefacts dating from the 7th millennium BC to the present day. A user-focused approach progressively developed over the last few years has gradually led the BM to plan its activities in order to attract a larger audience from all parts of the world, irrespective of cultural background. This, together with the need for greater accountability, and hence the need to evaluate strategic programs, has shaped the development of the important managerial innovations described in the course of the present chapter. The event that triggered this evolution occurred in the year 2000 when the Museums, Galleries and Cultural Property Division of the Department for Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) requested the application of 17 key performance indicators to set the accreditation process of museums (DCMS, 1999). In 2005, a few years after the DCMS indications, the BM decided to formulate and implement a new PMS, which became fully operational in 2007. The PMS devised by the BM aims to measure the BM’s effectiveness in terms of cultural value production and distribution. The production of cultural value is measured using outcome and output indicators to evaluate the cultural enrichment of the visitors with regard to four aspects: emotional, spiritual, educational and leisure. With regard to the distribution of cultural value over time, the conservation processes (safeguarding, preservation and study/research) are determined using another set of non-financial indicators
Impact of Accounting Traditions, Ownership and Governance Structures on Financial Reporting by Italian Firms
No full textInstitutional differences across countries present special challenges to achieve uniformity or at least harmony in financial reporting across countries. We evaluate in this paper how accounting traditions, ownership and governance structures of Italian companies affect implementation of the European Union mandated International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) by Italian companies. This evaluation will enable investors, especially international investors, to have a better understanding of financial reporting by Italian companies and it will also highlight the problems and issues facing Italian companies to implement IFRS
Discussing the usefulness of Fair Value from the lenders’ perspective
Full text linkFair value measures in financial reporting have been at the center of recent debates, with many
scholars considering the issue increasingly relevant and useful. This paper discusses the appropriateness of
these measure in countries, like Italy, wherein lenders are the major source of financing and are therefore the
‘primary users of financial reporting. Specifically, we argue that fair valuation – while potentially useful in
countries that boast advanced capital markets with diffused equity ownership – is not as useful, and even
potentially misleading in countries like Italy.
The discussion is based on a review of the literature on the prediction of creditworthiness. In the literature, the
main informational inputs largely ignore fair values, whether measured as exit values or otherwise. Basically,
the idea that fair values are suitable for all countries and entities, regardless of differences in ownership
structure and modes of financing, may need to be re-examined. Possibly, disclosure of fair values instead of
recognition is more likely to satisfy the criterion of decision usefulness when lenders are the main users of
financial reporting
Public Sector Accounting and Auditing in Sweden
No full textSwedish public administration is organized on two levels: national and local. However, the local government sector is divided into two administrative systems: county councils (21) and municipalities (289). Gotland is a hybrid of a county council and a municipality, with responsibilities covering the duties of both. National and local government levels have different regulations and legislation regarding budgeting, accounting and auditing. © 2015, Torbjörn Tagesson and Giuseppe Grossi
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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