Alternative Account Research Articles

Accounting for credit card rewards programmes: the perceptions of managers and experts

Purpose International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS) 15 required credit card rewards programmes (CCRPs) to reconsider their accounting practices. While Brink and Steenkamp (2023a, 2023b) developed a theoretical accounting model for CCRP transactions after the effective date of IFRS 15, this model should be validated and finalised as an accounting framework. Thus, the purpose of the present paper was to examine the validity of Brink and Steenkamp’s (2023b) model by interviewing CCRP managers and obtaining the opinions of experts in the field, and then develop a framework for accounting for CCRP transactions after the effective date of IFRS 15. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative exploratory approach within an interpretive paradigm was applied. Fifteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with South African CCRP managers, after which the Delphi technique (with 22 experts) was used. All data collected were analysed using thematic analysis, after which the CCRP accounting framework was finalised. Findings The study confirmed parts of the theoretical model, updated the model for what was evident in practice (e.g., not identifying interest as a relevant revenue stream, not differentiating between an open-loop and closed-loop structure and not including interest in the interchange fee) and improved the model by including alternative accounting treatments and additional guidance (e.g., to determine how the CCRP transaction should be viewed and to determine the value of award credits without an observable value). Practical implications The CCRP accounting framework provides practical guidelines for CCRP accounting and will assist managers of CCRPs in their decision-making processes and the application of judgement. Originality/value The study developed a CCRP accounting framework embedded in a decision tree and included all possible alternatives for accounting for CCRP transactions, which is a novel contribution to the field.

Complex weight distinctions in Harmonic Serialism

Abstract A number of the quantity-sensitive stress systems which are characterised by complex weight distinctions have often proven challenging for parallel constraint-based metrical frameworks. A number of parallel-OT accounts are proposed to explain stress systems with multi-level weight hierarchies, in which syllables with long vowels (CVV) are more prominent than closed syllables (CVC), and closed syllables are more prominent than short open syllables (CV). The majority of these accounts are either inadequate or implausible. This paper seeks to provide an alternative account of stress systems with complex weight distinctions. Gradual prosodification, as an application of Harmonic Serialism, is the proposed framework for analysis. Maintaining gradualness and harmonic improvement in prosodic structure across the different steps of the derivation is deemed to be sufficient to achieve the required effects. The realisation of the various prominence relations illustrated in those multi-level weight hierarchies is considered to be an epiphenomenon of the sequential application of independently motivated prosodification processes, such as coda consonant moraification and foot construction. The proposed gradual prosodification model is applied to the stress systems of Kashmiri and Pulaar, that have identical algorithms for primary stress assignment, in addition to the secondary stress patten attested in Pulaar.

Adrift in the Andaman Sea: 
Law, Archipelagos and the Making of Maritime Sovereignty

Abstract This essay focuses on the long history of archipelagic formations in the Bay of Bengal as sites of legal experimentation. This history is often narrated beginning with convict transportation and the permanent occupation of the Andaman Islands as a British penal settlement in 1857 and the violent erasure of indigenous cultures that followed it. This essay focuses instead on the hundred years preceding it where the English East India Company experimented with abandoning jurisdiction over the lesser-known islands off the Bengal and Burma coasts and people who lived on them, despite being in the position of a territorial sovereign. These experimentations were recorded most eloquently in legal and administrative records about crime - which included, for example, how assault and “river dacoity” on the deltaic islands of the Sunderbans in lower Bengal were to be dealt with and how men convicted of murder on the islands off the Tenasserim coast in southern Burma were to be prosecuted. In each case, prompted by tensions between the Company and the British Crown, policing and prosecution were abandoned, but this escaped public attention as it took place on the empire’s maritime edges. Although jurisdictional claims were central to the expansionist aims of the British empire in the nineteenth century around the Indian Ocean, these instances offer an alternate account of sovereignty, one where assertions and abandonments were both critical to the making of empires.

Failure in Fully Funded Pensions: Voluntary Exchange and Coercion

Private pension failure for much of the economics mainstream would be regarded as an artifact of markets that are insufficiently regulated, such that suppliers are able to exploit monopoly advantages, and are free to make serious errors of judgment. Market failure analysis is flawed, however, by its own failure to acknowledge salient elements of the institutional context of private pension provision, which, while it has been regulated according to approved public interest ends, has been prone to suboptimal investment performance. Drawing on classical liberal political economy, an alternative account of private pension failure would emphasize the perverse consequences of state intrusion in the market for retirement income protection. The origins of regulation failure can be traced back to a combination of two policy decision dynamics, one of intentional rent creation, a second of imperfect knowledge and understanding of markets resulting in flawed regulatory arrangements. By stifling competition, regulation diminishes the capacity of pension markets to serve pension plan participants by means of improved investment performance. The prevalence of private pension failure is an artifact of regulatory intrusiveness. Given this direction of causality, a better approach to policy would rest centrally on the deregulation of pension markets.

Demystifying trauma in international relations theory: From incomprehensibility to the liberatory real

Recent work on trauma and memory in international relations has sought to emphasize the key role trauma plays in state and community formation, security policies, the mediatization of atrocities, and transitional and social justice. This article problematizes the doxology of trauma in this body of work: the assumptions about the traumatic that go without saying because they come without saying in the discipline. We counter, in particular, international relations’ unreflective consumption of Cathy Caruth’s paradigm of trauma as an incomprehensible shock. In this article, we excavate the contours, origins, and effects of this doxology. We first use the examples of post-conflict struggles for truth and reconciliation and the COVID-19 pandemic to illustrate that international relations’ vision of trauma centralizes a psychiatric and medicalized paradigm of governance and management that depoliticizes suffering. We then seek to provide an alternative account of trauma woven in dialogue with the psychoanalytical reflections of Francophone and Lusophone scholars in the Black Radical Tradition, particularly Fanon, Mbembe, Kilomba, Nascimento and Gonzalez. The goal is to move from a theory of trauma-as-event to an understanding of (colonial/racial) trauma as it appears in the writings of those who never felt protected or at peace in the white colonial order.

Explanatory Factors of the Accounting Choices for Investments Under IAS 27 of Listed European Union Entities

ABSTRACTThis study aims to analyze the explanatory factors of the accounting choices for investments of entities with securities traded on regulated markets from the European Union (EU) under International Accounting Standards (IAS) 27—Separate Financial Statements (SFS). According to IAS 27, investments in their scope can be accounted for by using the cost, equity method, or fair value, which represents alternative accounting methods commonly known in the literature as accounting choices. To identify the factors that may explain the accounting choices for investments under IAS 27, a logistic regression model is used. The research covers listed entities from 19 out of the 21 EU countries where IAS 27 is required or permitted. The findings highlight that the entities’ size and investment weight likely explain the adoption of the cost method, conversely to the size of the board of directors, which negatively explains its use. Accounting choices for investments under SFS are not yet explored in the literature. Moreover, this research also proposes further explanatory factors in the scope of the literature on accounting choices. This paper can potentially benefit a diverse set of stakeholders, namely the accounting standard‐setters, as they can draw attention to the comparability issues from the use of accounting choices, which may mitigate the financial information usefulness for decision‐making. Furthermore, auditors, supervisors, as well as investors and other users, can have a more comprehensive perspective of the reasons behind the method chosen by entities for accounting for their financial investments.

What is wrong with gentrification-related displacement?

Recently a number of theorists argue that physical displacement as a result of gentrification ought to be morally rejected on the basis of the principle of personal autonomy: displacement violates the option to exercise “place-based” or “located life-plans.” What is adversely violated is the neighborhood as a spatial background condition for the ability to realize embedded pursuits. I argue that this attempt to morally value social attachments to a particular place as means (or resources) to realize plans, is unconvincing and subject to moral risk because it instrumentalizes social attachments instead of recognizing their intrinsic significance for those concerned. The paper provides an alternative account of urban justice that is able to accommodate respect for social attachments as a separate moral category, distinct from respect for personal autonomy.

The task-switch cost is still absent after selectively stopping a response in cued task switching.

The task-switch cost is one of the most robust phenomena in human task performance, but it can disappear after nogo trials where the actors decide not to respond to the target. According to the response-selection account, it is the occurrence of response selection that generates a task-switch cost on the subsequent trial, and the absence of a switch cost after nogo trials has been attributed to a nonoccurrence of response selection on nogo trials. However, an alternative account is that a task-switch cost is generated but is abolished on nogo trials because of the interference from the nogo signal with the activated task set, suggesting that the absence of a task-switch cost does not necessarily imply the nonoccurrence of response selection. The present study tested these competing accounts by using selective go/nogo procedures for which withholding a response would require selecting a response and inhibiting the selected response. Bayes factors in five experiments provided evidence for the absence of a task-switch cost after selective nogo trials, indicating that the occurrence of response selection does not necessarily result in a task-switch cost on the subsequent trial. The present results are consistent with the task-set interference account that a task-switch cost could be generated on nogo trials but is abolished because a nogo signal interferes with the activated task-set. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Taking psychology seriously: a self-determination theory perspective on Robert Sugden’s opportunity criterion

ABSTRACT Robert Sugden (2018. The Community of Advantage: A Behavioural Economist’s Defence of the Market. Oxford University Press) offers an alternative account for normative economics grounded in the view that it is in each individual’s interest to have more opportunity rather than less, irrespective of whether their decisions reveal well-ordered preferences. Our paper characterizes Sugden’s proposal as a step in the right direction, but as insufficient. His opportunity criterion does not go far enough in taking insights from psychology seriously. Sugden defends an idea of agency understood as a person’s subjective sense of being in control of her actions. To realize this sense of being in control, we argue that a focus on opportunity-only is problematic; people also need agentic capabilities. We use self-determination theory (SDT) to develop a subjective account of agency that is grounded in psychological science.

Early perceptual locus of suppression during the attentional blink.

The attentional blink (AB) demonstrates that recognizing the second of two targets (T1 and T2) is difficult when they appear in close succession in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream. The AB has been widely accepted as a suppression of T2 processing at the postperceptual stage. The current event-related potential study updates this view by demonstrating the existence of an early perceptual locus of suppression during the AB. Using line drawings of real-life objects as RSVP items, we required participants in Experiment 1 to either discriminate the exact identities or simply classify the object categories of T1 and T2, and in Experiment 2, we instructed participants to discriminate either T1 and T2 identities (dual-target task) or only T2 identity (single-target task) to invalidate the temporal expectation as an alternative account. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 showed that the T2-elicited first positive peak (P1) component was consistently decreased at Lag 3 whenever a dual-target, but not single-target, task was required, and the magnitude of this P1 suppression was significantly predictive of the behavioral AB magnitude in each dual-target task. When the RSVP items were substituted by classic but size-matched alphanumeric characters in Experiment 3, no P1 suppression was evident as expected, ruling out the large stimulus size as an alternative interpretation. These findings provide the strongest evidence to date that the AB can begin to suppress T2 processing at a very early perceptual stage, at least when observers encounter RSVP items of real-life objects, which calls for more flexible cognitive models for the AB. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Subjection to Authority in the Workplace: A Basic Structural Problem

Many liberal egalitarians argue that workers today are subjected to the authority of their bosses and that justice demands that the employment relationship be reformed. But why? What is unjust is not subjection to authority as such but subjection without adequate justification. In this article, I argue that the justificatory demand raised by subjection to workplace authority has not been well understood, primarily because the nature of the subjection itself has been misunderstood. According to the standard view, workplace subjection consists in the fact that managers issue orders backed by sanctions. I challenge this view by reconstructing the libertarian-economic theory of the firm, which construes managerial authority simply as a division of labor. I propose an alternative account, according to which workplace subjection consists in living under a society-wide arrangement that compels most workers to work under a boss. My argument reorients theorizing about justice at work from a narrow focus on corporate governance towards a broader theory of a just social system, incorporating the role of the state, class, the power of investors, and the social purpose of labor.

Protocols of Production: The Absent Factories of Digital Capitalism

Contrary to dominant theories of postindustrial society, this article advances an alternative account of digital capitalism that repositions the factory—so often associated with industrial manufacturing—as a defining yet largely overlooked feature of the internet economy. I pursue this claim by interpreting data centers and microwork platforms as digital embodiments of the factory system through a historical theory of the factory model that reconstructs the consistent mechanisms of control and extraction that have distinguished factories as consolidated infrastructures of production since their inception. I define these “protocols of production” as formal rules deployed by a combination of technological systems, spatial arrangements, and management regimes devised to fragment tasks, discipline workers, and supervise production. By probing the socioeconomic consequences of the factory’s algorithmic redeployment and adaptation to global data production, I contend that these absent factories have amplified alienation and precarity as structural social qualities of the digital labor process.

Cassirer’s functionalist account of physical truth: object, measurement and technology

AbstractIn this paper I focus on Cassirer’s functionalist theory of truth in order to argue that the Positivistic theory of knowledge fails to explain how it is that physics provides us with truth-evaluable and reliably objective descriptions of the world. This argument is based on Cassirer’s idea that what the Positivistic theory of knowledge normally considers as the “factual” of physics is, in fact, unachievable and falsely conceived. I show that Cassirer’s focus on how measurement is made possible, as well as how technological instruments are put to use in physical research, enables him to offer an alternative account of truth, i.e., a functionalist theory of truth, which is philosophically attractive and rationally plausible.

Cabaret and decency: how contemporary definitions of cabaret are shaped by censorship

The abundant ‘cabaret’ events that populate London’s contemporary entertainment scene strategically adopt specific structures and aesthetics. Common points of reference include the Weimar Republic, Berlin clubs of the 1920’s, ‘salacious’ female nudity, ‘outrageous’ camp reveals and inevitable references to Bob Fosse’s ‘Cabaret’. The events often promise to provide a ‘high quality’ drinking and dining experience. In this way ‘nostalgia’ can be turned into financial success. This formulaic approach defines the contemporary understanding of cabaret, omitting vital aspects of the genre while turning it into a purely commercial commodity. My artistic practice as research interrogates the experimental nature of the cabaret of late nineteenth century Paris within a contemporary British context. Setting itself apart from the allure of ‘flesh and cash’ of the West End cabaret, Ms. Paolini’s Phantasmagoria Cabaret, regularly programmed at Hoxton Hall, London, since 2016, focuses on exploring an updated experience of European cabaret within the abandoned British Music Hall and Variety tradition. The wider cultural discourse fails to report on the possibility of different approaches to cabaret. I will draw on particular examples from my practice – how a 60-something performer clad in Y-fronts, for example, was regarded by a certain audience as obscene – to explore the subtleties of contemporary censorship and what it says about our cultural landscape. The ‘body reveal’ – one of the commercial selling points of West End cabaret replica productions – becomes unacceptable in the different context of Ms. Paolini’s Phantasmagoria Cabaret. This article examines how censorship operates in relation to contemporary experimental cabaret, providing an alternative account of the contemporary development of traditional cabaret and suggesting that there are different angles from which to approach discussion of the genre.

Intrinsic Properties and the Problem of “Other Things”

ABSTRACTIntrinsic properties are those which cannot be had or lacked in virtue of other things. Being a square is intrinsic, in this sense, whereas being next to a square is not. But what, exactly, counts as an “other thing” in this context? As it turns out, this is a surprisingly difficult question. I provide a critical assessment of three existing proposals (in terms of identity, mereology, and ontology), before developing my own, alternative account. Along the way, we highlight ways in which this project intersects with other philosophical issues, including debates over the nature of existence, the essentiality of origins, and the truth of priority monism.

Against Instantiation

ABSTRACT According to traditional universalism, properties are instantiated by objects, where instantiation is a ‘tie’ that binds objects and properties into facts. I offer two arguments against this view. I then develop an alternative higher-order account which holds that properties are primitively predicated of objects yet, unlike traditional nominalism, are nevertheless genuinely real. When it is a fact that Fo , it is not because object o instantiates F -ness, but just that Fo —where F still exists. Against orthodox higher-order approaches, however, my arguments against instantiation also serve to support a sparse conception of properties. In developing the view, I introduce an extension of ontological and ideological commitment in the form of syntactic commitment.

Cognitive neuropsychological and neuroanatomic predictors of naturalistic action performance in left hemisphere stroke: a retrospective analysis.

Individuals who have experienced a left hemisphere cerebrovascular accident (LCVA) have been shown to make errors in naturalistic action tasks designed to assess the ability to perform everyday activities such as preparing a cup of coffee. Naturalistic action errors in this population are often attributed to limb apraxia, a common deficit in the representation and performance of object-related actions. However, naturalistic action impairments are also observed in right hemisphere stroke and traumatic brain injury, populations infrequently associated with apraxia, and errors across all these populations are influenced by overall severity. Based on these and other data, an alternative (though not mutually exclusive) account is that naturalistic action errors in LCVA are also a consequence of deficits in general attentional resource availability or allocation. In this study, we conducted a retrospective analysis of data from a large group of 51 individuals with LCVA who had completed a test of naturalistic action, along with a battery of tests assessing praxis, attention allocation and control, reasoning, and language abilities to determine which of these capacities contribute uniquely to naturalistic action impairments. Using a regularized regression method, we found that naturalistic action impairments are predicted by both praxis deficits (hand posture sequencing and gesture recognition), as well as attention allocation and control deficits (orienting and dividing attention), along with language comprehension ability and age. Using support vector regression-lesion symptom mapping (SVR-LSM), we also demonstrated that naturalistic action impairments are associated with lesions to posterior middle temporal gyrus and anterior inferior parietal lobule - regions known to be implicated in praxis; as well the middle frontal gyrus that has been implicated in both praxis and attention allocation and control. Taken together, these findings support the hypothesis that naturalistic action impairments in LCVA are a consequence of apraxia as well as deficits in attention allocation and control.

Clitic Third in Hittite: Variation and Development

The paper deals with one of clitic third orders in Hittite that involves later than the expected second position of the clitic -(m)a, a contrastive conjunction and discourse marker, otherwise a standard second position clitic. -(m)a is delayed beyond its common second position by clause connectives, subordinators and conjunctions with varying obligatoriness: it is obligatory with clause connectives and optional with subordinators and conjunctions. This study explores in detail the variation with subordinators and conjunctions and it argues that clitic third order in this context is an innovation. In explaining how clitic third order was triggered in this context the etymological hypothesis of Eichner (1971, 1981) is combined with the prosodic explanation of clitic third of Kloekhorst (2014) against an alternative account of Sideltsev (2019).

Present records of the Past Hypothesis

A striking feature of our world is that we only seem to have records of the past. To explain this ‘record asymmetry’, Albert and Loewer claim that the Past Hypothesis induces a narrow probability density over the world’s possible past macrohistories, but not its future macrohistories. Because we’re indirectly acquainted with this low-entropy initial macrostate, our observations of records allow us to exploit the associated narrow density to infer the past. I will argue that Albert and Loewer cannot make sense of why this probabilistic structure exists without falling back on the very records they wish to explain. To avoid this circularity, I offer an alternative account: the ‘fork asymmetry’ explains the record asymmetry, and this in turn explains the narrow density—not vice versa.

Beyond ‘Infodemic’: Complexity, Knowledge and Populism in COVID-19 Crisis Governance

ABSTRACT The concept of the ‘infodemic’ has become a popular explanation for the rejection of anti-COVID-19 crisis governance measures. In this paper, we argue that infodemic is an inherent property of society under free institutions misused to pursue an epistemically vicious political epistemology. Furthermore, we provide an alternative account of political epistemology of COVID-19 governance and popular resistance to it. Namely, we argue that 1) pandemics represent a complex problem, and some level of resistance to governance which restricts liberties while informed by ongoing scientific and political learning processes is inevitable, and 2) the resistance is exacerbated by the history of technocratization of governance and the exclusionary socio-economic inequalities which condition political and epistemic deficiencies easily exploitable by the political entrepreneurs of right-wing populism, particularly under the conditions of social media which gamifies public discourse. Thus, we argue, the correct response to the cultures of rejection of anti-COVID-19 measures is to change the underlying political and economic conditions and not to limit speech or restrict franchise as the infodemic diagnosis suggests.