We study the New York City taxi market to examine whether an excise tax hike on cigarettes corresponds to smoker taxi drivers more frequently cheating their customers. Increased cheating could be motivated by both financial pressures and as a reaction to unfair treatment (as surveyed smokers view cigarette tax hikes as quite unfair). We examine this question using detailed ride-level data where we can identify a rare but fraudulent overcharging technique (cheating) and a subsample of taxi drivers who smoke (affected taxpayers, identified via tickets for smoking in a cab). In difference-in-differences regressions we find that following a cigarette tax hike, taxi drivers who smoke are approximately 1.5 times more likely to cheat customers than other drivers. Our findings are strongest in the subsample of smokers with consistently low earnings.

The office has become a large scale organisational phenomenon accommodating large numbers of organisational employees most often housed in open plan and Activity Based Working settings that arguably resemble the new factory. This study examines contemporary Big 4 accounting firm office design innovations and their representation with a view to eliciting their claimed rationales, reflections of historical office design and management thinking, and apparent strategic agendas with respect to office efficiency, client relations and cost control involved in their offering of professional services. In doing so, it also explores the implications that public practice firms' office design may have for auditor independence and audit quality. Informed by Goffman's theories of impression management, the study employs historical and website analysis, finding a predominant firm focus on office efficiency and client relations with an undercurrent of cost reduction and revenue enhancement aspirations. While represented as innovative current office design and work pattern developments, public practice accounting firm office innovations and intentions are found to significantly reflect historical office design and management thinking, with dramaturgical circumspection of floor designs and props oriented towards creating front stage performances predesigned for clients' impression management. Where backstage redesign and frame breaking does not produce desired employee performance changes, some signs of retreating to more traditional floor redesign and territorial marker usage are evident. The study also signals the potential for innovative accounting firm office designs to carry some significant impacts upon audit independence and audit quality.

The increasing dominance of Asian manufacturing firms in the global economy has raised an important issue: whether these firms’ superior manufacturing performance is caused by their management control systems, the national culture of their employees, or the interaction of these two factors. This experimental study provides a direct test of the effects of national culture and management control system on manufacturing performance. The dimension of national culture studied was individualism ( vs collectivism ) because this work-related attribute has been noted as a major difference between Asian and Western cultures. In turn, the focus on cultural individualism motivated a study of two aspects of management controls: work flow interdependence and pay interdependence. The results are consistent with cultural individualism and management controls having independent, but not interactive, effects on manufacturing performance. The potential implications of these findings and suggestions for future research are discussed.

This paper develops an endogenous model of institutional and professional domain change. Traditional accounts of domain change focus attention on how professional expertise is extended to new areas of practice. This form of domain extension is typically both deliberate and contested. However, domain change can also occur in a somewhat quotidian and uncontested fashion when professional expertise is extended intra-organizationally. We analyze the ways in which the domain of accounting expertise is reconstituted in new social media – Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter – in Big 4 accounting firms. Using content analysis and interview data we show how social media professionals, in pursuing their own professional project, generate change in the professional domain of accountancy. Our analysis demonstrates that the institutional work of domain change occurs through three related activities: boundary work, rhetorical work and the construction of the embedded actor.

This study investigates the eAects of national culture on firms’ design of and employees’ preference for management controls. Data for testing two hypotheses are collected from 159 Taiwanese managers working in six each of Japanese-, Taiwanese-, and U.S.-owned, size-matched, computers/electronics firms in Taiwan. Overall, the results are consistent with national culture aAecting these firms’ design of and employees’ preference for seven management controls, though there also are anomalies. These findings are combined with prior research for identifying desirable improvements in research design and method, variable measurement and selection, and, most important, the theoretical foundation for culture-based research on management controls. # 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.