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Chair - Alan Mayper |
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Chair's Welcome to the Mid-Year Meeting I am thrilled to welcome you to the FIRST annual mid-year meeting of the Public Interest Section and to the Academy of Accounting Historians Research Conference. None of us was sure the meeting would come off or not, but due to the hard work of two special individuals, our meeting will be a success. Thank you so much Parveen Gupta and Dan Jensen, without them we would not be here! Now, if I am not actually able to attend the meeting, it is not due to my lack of interest, but the cancer, I am going to beat, can be a nemesis at times. Nevertheless, the illness has allowed me time to think and reflect over the past several months. I will share some of those reflections with you today. What does the public interest mean to me? In the past, the meaning took on specific issues. The public interest is ethics and the profession; ethics and education; symbolism versus real change; change the American Accounting Association; and etc,. All these issues may influence the public interest but none of them has meaning as to what public interest is. My own conclusion is that public interest is synonymous with “quality of life”. When we serve the public interest, we should be improving the quality of life. To me this would imply there are many avenues (and paradigms) to examining the public interest. There can easily be more than one solution. This calls for tolerance, openness, and a willingness to learn. This is what I hope our Mid-year meeting is all about. I wish you a wonderful meeting and I hope you leave the meeting thinking about how the meeting has affected the quality of life. Thank you and welcome. Alan ********************************CHAIR’S REPORT—SUMMER 2007Well, here I go again. It is that time to write a report and sharing my thoughts (oh oh, I can’t go down that road now, can I?). I want to let all of you know the activities our section has been involved with and encourage you to become involved (in any little way you wish). First, I want to thank Ann Watkins for her wonderful job as Vice-chair (Ann chose not to be re-nominated due to family priorities). Ann’s hard work enabled the syllabus project to became a reality (please look at these in the syllabi section of this website). Additionally Ann began the process of using our website as an outlet for academic recruiting. Thank you Ann for your dedication to the section and we look forward to working with you again in the near future. In our affirmation of the nominating committee’s nominees, John Thornton was affirmed as our new Vice-Chair and Michele Chwastiak was re-affirmed as our secretary-treasurer. Congratulations, but condolences with being stuck working with yours truly! YES, we are going to have a mid-year meeting in 2008! It will be a joint meeting with the Academy of Accounting Historians
and Parveen Gupta is our coordinator for the meeting. More information will be forthcoming about the meeting in Chicago at the AAA Annual meeting. The Accounting Exemplar Award Committee selected Lynn Turner, former SEC Chief Accountant for the 2007 Exemplar Award. Congratulations Lynn! We will be presenting the award to Lynn at the Exemplar Luncheon in Chicago, following the Professional and Ethics Symposium (Sunday August 5). I hope you will be able to join us at the luncheon. Now, to the future. I anticipate we will continue our prior projects in the upcoming year. Hence, if you have new syllabi, which relate to the public interest, please share them with us. Send them to John Thornton at jthornt@tricity.wsu.edu . John will organize the syllabi and forward them to Brett for posting to our website. I hope you will respond to the call for papers for our midyear meeting (the call will be out shortly). There are two new areas I want to discuss. First, each of you has been involved in activities that relate to the Public Interest. Please share your stories and ideas with us. Story telling is a wonderful thing. We need to have a forum of ideas to give examples to each other on how each of us can be involved. Send you stories and ideas to Brett_Wilkinson@baylor.edu , our webmaster who will post them to our website. Please, please share. Next, the AAA is developing a strategic plan for the future. Where will the organization be when it becomes 100 years old in 2015 (I no doubt will be tottering by then, but hopefully some teetering as well)? The AAA is considering the following mission statement:
The executive committee, and soon the council, will be reviewing the mission and proposed vision statements (which I have not included) on each of the above areas; they also will propose specific states and goals for the organization. Our section needs to think about this. What is the role of the AAA and the academic community? I believe we need to give the mission and a strategic plan a strong public interest perspective. We need to allow for independent voices and means to give transparency to issues that concern our profession. Serving society is not only the role of our section, but must be an integral mission of the Association. All voices need to be heard in civil discourse. When available, I will circulate the drafts of the strategic plan and anticipate you will provide feedback in our attempt to influence the final project. Finally, I look forward to meeting you in Chicago. Our annual business meeting will be held at 4:30 on the Monday of the conference. Please refer to the program for the location. All our reports will be posted to the website; therefore, we will not be bringing hard copies to Chicago. Do let me hear from you! My e-mail address is Mayper@unt.edu . See you soon. All the best, Alan
Course Syllabi Project In the interest of facilitating members with course development and generating ideas for teaching our Chair, Alan Mayper conceived the course syllabi project. In the fall of 2006 we put out a call to the general AAA membership for course syllabi. We began receiving syllabi related to the public interest, ethics, corporate governance, social, environmental as well as other topics related to the public interest. We have received 23 course syllabi to date, and hope that faculty will continue to contribute. These syllabi have been posted on the Public Interest website with many thanks to Brett Wilkinson. They can be retrieved through the following link http://aaahq.org/PublicInterest/syllabi.html. Placement Project We are considering a second project aimed at providing a placement service for AAA faculty through the Public Interest web site. It is still in the preliminary stages, and Brett Wilkinson and I are working on the webpage layout and its technical functionality. We hope to make it possible for members of the AAA to post their resumes on this site. In addition to providing a much needed service, we believe that it will raise the visibility of the section by providing more exposure to the general AAA membership.
Public Interest Section Cash Flow - June, 2007 Public Interest Section Cash Flow - April, 2007
During the last year, at the direction of Alan, I started exploring the possibility of organizing/starting a mid-year conference for the Public Interest Section. After some exploration, it became clear that we need to kick-off this initiative jointly with some other entity to ensure that the Section will breakeven. We have finally settled on partnering with the Academy of Accounting Historians. Since that decision, Dan Jensen and I have been working together to make this a reality. We have tentatively agreed to hold the joint conference in early 2008 April at a location that is convenient to all. AAA has agreed to help us organize the event just as it does with other sections. The incoming President, Gary Previtz and Tracy Sutherland support the idea. The tentative Call for papers has been drafted and is being finalized. We just received from the AAA a proposal to select a location. Before the 2008 Annual Conference in Chicago, our goal is to finalize the Call and the location with dates so that we can announce the conference and solicit papers.
The Membership Committee has generated a few ideas for increasing the Section’s membership. Our first idea is to tout all the projects the Section is involved in to current members to keep them as members (our planned mid-year meeting, the journal, the ethics symposium, and the syllabus project). Second, we plan to specifically target colleagues who have participated in the ethics symposium (submitters, reviewers, or attendees) who are not current members of the Section. This seems like a potentially receptive audience. Alan also included a plug for the Section in his invitation to the entire AAA for the accounting exemplar lunch. If you have any suggestions, please send them to me at ajf14@psu.edu.
The section liaison is responsible for obtaining reviews for public interest papers submitted to the AAA meeting, making editorial decisions regarding public interest paper presentations, designing the public interest sections sessions at the AAA, and selecting moderators and discussants for the sessions. The section received 52 paper submissions, and 2 panel presentation submissions 52 Reviewers had volunteered. Based on the nature of the submissions, I also solicited approximately 12 additional reviewers because their particular expertise was a good match for a particular paper submission. I am please to report that all 12 agreed to review for the section Each paper and panel submission was sent to two reviewers, who provided their recommendation to me, and comments for the paper author(s). Based on some formula that is rather opaque to me, the AAA assigned 18 session to the public interest section. Based on the recommendations of the reviewers, I then created the 18 sessions, which consist of 2 panel sessions, and 16 traditional paper sessions (which allows for 48 papers to be presented). Based on the reviewers’ recommendation to accept, I then populated the 16 paper sessions, attempt to ensure that each paper within a session had a common theme. Most of the paper sessions have 3 papers. Due to reviewers’ recommendations not to accept, and thematic consistency in each session, there are a few sessions with only two papers. A separate discussant was originally assigned to each paper to be presented. Because some of the discussant volunteers had time conflicts, or determined that they would be unable to attend the meeting, I had to find alternative discussants for some papers. I attempted to fill these discussant slots with other colleagues with area expertise. In a few cases, I asked discussants of other papers in the session to discuss more than one paper per session (because I knew they would not have a time conflict). As such, a few sessions have one discussant for multiple papers. I also assigned 16 moderators to the paper sessions. Twelve of these moderators confirmed. Unfortunately, the AAA computer system for keeping track of these things “unconfirmed” virtually all of the originally-confirmed moderators in late May. I endeavored (based on my rather limited record-keeping) to recreate which moderators had confirmed and not confirmed. The AAA decided to confirm any moderator who had not specifically declined. So, as a result, I fear there may be a few session for which a moderator will not present him or herself. If you are in such a session, I apologize for the lack of a moderator. If you were assigned to moderate, and unable to make the session, I again apologize. I wish to thank all involved in the process, including reviewers, discussants and moderators, and wish my successor good luck with next year’s meeting.
The Accounting Exemplar Committee, chaired by Tim Louwers (James Madison University), was composed of Andrew Bailey (University of Illinois), Jeff Everett (University of Calgary), Judy Rayburn (University of Minnesota), and Bob Sack (University of Virginia). We put out several calls for nominations (through both the AAA and the PIS) and received a total of 11 nominations for this year’s award. Given the importance of the Award, an early committee decision was to make sure that the committee reached a consensus on the award winner(s). The consequence of this decision was that any one member had the right to effectively veto any candidate. We next ranked each of the candidates on a scale of 1-10. The compiled rankings provided a basis for further discussions. While the committee’s compiled rankings indicated that each of the candidates was worthy of the award (each candidate’s average rating exceeded 5.0), ratings varied dramatically across candidates. However, one candidate was rated consistently highly by all the committee members. The committee further discussed the possibility of giving out more than one award this year, but decided, based upon the discussions and ratings, to present the award only one award this year. This year’s Accounting Exemplar Award will be presented to Lynn E. Turner. Given the number of highly qualified candidates, a decision was made to reconsider the remaining 10 candidates in next year deliberations. The committee believes that changes in committee composition and/or circumstances might lead to recognition of deserving candidates in future years. On a personal note, I was extremely pleased by the composition of the committee which contained two previous AAA Presidents (Bailey, Rayburn) and, more importantly, a previously recognized Accounting Exemplar (Sack). Despite conducting our extensive deliberations over the Internet, responses were thoughtful and timely, and a consensus decision was arrived at amicably.
Several developments have taken place in the last 12 months. First, the a new website was designed and launched, and has been consistently updated over the course of the year. The goal of the website is to keep members informed of current developments within the section, and to make available information about the section to the broader AAA community. Second, an electronic web-based newsletter has been implemented to replace the former print newsletter. The goal of the electronic newsletter is to inform section members of current public interest focused issues and related section news. The electronic form was chosen in order to reduce the administrative burden of the former print version. Many thanks to Sarah Stanwick for her previous commitment and service as the newsletter editor. Members who would like an announcement included on the newsletter webpage are invited to email details to the webmaster. Several projects are ongoing. In conjunction with Ann Watkins, the syllabi project has been launched, making available public interest focused syllabi to section members. A faculty placement service is currently being designed and should be included on the website by Spring 2008.
Data from: __January 2006___to __December 2006___ Manuscript Service 2003 2004 2005 2006 a. In process at start of year (Note A) ___31___ __27____ __31____ __17____ b. All Original Submissions (Note B) _26___ __35____ __28____ __18____ 1. Total available for evaluation ____57___ __62____ ___59____ ___35____
2. Less Editorial Reviews [Note C] ___4__ ___3_____ ___2____ ___3____
c. Accept//Reject __22__ ___28___ ___40___ ___23___ d. In process at end of year [Note D] __27__ ___31___ ___17___ ___12___ ___________________________________________________________ Acceptance Rate Submitted Accepted Rejected Number Year* Number Number % Number % InProcess % 2003 __26_____ __4___ _7% _26___ 46% __27___ 47% 2004 _ 35_____ __4___ _7% _24___ 41% __31___ 52% 2005 __28_____ __6___ 10% _34___ 60% __17___ 30% 2006 __21_____ __7___ 20% _16___ 46% __12___ 34%
PAGE COUNT Main Section Papers _79__ _89__ __87_ _105_ Short Papers/Research Reports _____ _____ _____ _____ Editorials: [Commissioned Communications/Letters _____ _____ _____ _____ Advertising _____ _____ _____ _____ Other: [Book Reviews] _____ _____ _____ _____ Total Pages _79__ _89__ _87__ _134_
ITEM COUNT - TABLE OF CONTENTSMain Section Papers __4__ _4___ __4__ __6__ Short Papers/Research Reports _____ _____ _____ _____ Editorials:[Commissioned Communications/Letters _____ _____ _____ _____ Advertising _____ _____ _____ _____ Other: [Book Reviews] _____ _____ _____ _____
Total Number of Items _____4__ __4__ __4__ __9__
OTHER: Data on processing time and Production Cycle
[From Time of Letter to Referee to Editor Action based on Referee Comments] Year lst Round Review 2nd Round Review 3rd Round Review 2003 ____90________ ____87________ ____30_________ 2004 ____62________ ____72________ ____14_________ 2005 ____79________ ____108_______ ____43_________ 2006 ____39________ _____48_______ ____78_________
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