Marcia Weidenmier Watson

Senior executives' IT management responsibilities: serious IT-related deficiencies and CEO/CFO turnover

While the information systems scholarly and practice literatures both stress the importance of senior executive engagement with IT management, the recommendations for doing so remain, at best, limited and general. Examining the influence of serious IT-related deficiencies on CEO/CFO turnover within the post-SOX financial reporting context, specific CEO/CFO IT management responsibilities are identified: CEOs are shown to be held accountable for global IT management responsibilities, and CFOs are shown to be held accountable for demand-side IT management responsibilities. Implications for information systems research, management research, and information systems practice are provided.

Understanding Participation: Situational Participation, Intrinsic Involvement, and Influence

Participation is a key concept in budgeting practice and research. While extant literature primarily focuses on the antecedents and modifiers of participation, here we focus on the measurement of participation. Building on theoretical and empirical research on user involvement and influence from the information systems, decision–making, and organizational justice literature, we develop a new theoretical perspective on budgetary participation. This new perspective recognizes the complexity of participation and separates it into three dimensions: situational participation, intrinsic involvement, and influence. We provide evidence of these new insights by testing hypotheses based on the model via results from a survey. Survey results from middle managers indicate that our three separate dimensions of budgetary participation impact motivation and satisfaction in different ways. Specifically, situational participation does not have a direct impact on either motivation or satisfaction; intrinsic involvement impacts both satisfaction and motivation; and influence impacts satisfaction, but does not impact motivation. These new insights can enhance future budgeting research as well as help managers design participative budgeting processes to improve employee motivation and satisfaction to hopefully enhance organizational performance.

Riding the waves of technology through the decades: The relation between industry-level information technology intensity and the cost of equity capital

This paper examines the effect that information technology (IT) investments have on the industry cost of equity capital. We find that industry IT intensity, defined as the relative amount of IT investment to total fixed asset expenditures, is negatively related to the industry cost of equity capital. These results indicate that industries with higher levels of IT investment have lower cost of equity capital. We also find that the relation between IT intensity and cost of equity capital changes over time. Initially, investors viewed IT investments as risky ventures and demanded higher levels of cost of equity (or higher return on their investment) for those industries investing in IT. However, beginning in the 1980s, as IT became more reliable, more cost effective, and had the ability to transform businesses, investors viewed IT Intensity as a positive business strategy with less associated risks and reduced their required cost of equity capital (or lower return on their investment). Extrapolating from our industry results, IT investments allow firms to potentially raise capital at a lower price so they have more assets to employ, indicating that IT investments can be a key factor for business success.

The World Under Siege and the Railroad to Freedom

The African Diaspora began in 1441 and extended into the mid-1800s (Thompson, 1991). Prior to this, the Arabs had made their entry into Africa and established a slave trading post at Zanzibar off the coast of Tanzania in East Africa (UNESCO, 2006). Back in Europe, Prince Henry of Portugal, also called Prince Henry the Navigator, began to sponsor a number of expeditions to Africa (Prince Henry the Navigator, 1894).

To Be Unshackled

In the previous chapter, we explained how true emancipation and decolonization involves a mental realignment with facts instead of repressive ideology. While in Know Thy Self Na’im Akbar recommends that this journey to freedom begins from within, the subsequent stages as he suggests, comes from obtaining and realigning “right knowledge” against miseducation.

Nontraditional Models of Success

In the previous chapter, we explained how minority students in Tucson, Arizona resisted hegemonic forms of curriculum and school practices related to the state’s decision to ban ethnic studies. The controversy regarding the Ethnic Studies Program in the Tucson Unified School District has illustrated how cultural liberation through education can ignite mainstream opposition.

Global and Local Resistance; Memories of the Motherland-Africa, Unshackled

In the previous chapter, we discussed the early formations of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the enslavement of native populations, and the subsequent development of the Underground Railroad as a vehicle of physical liberation. In this chapter, we explore the conditions that ultimately led to the abolition of slavery. We argue that during the period of emancipation, in North America, most African Americans were illiterate, so education was the key to helping them attain true freedom in a racist society and a racialized world.

Journey to Freedom

In my educational journey, I [Greg Wiggan] am still in the first generation of schoolgoers in my immediate family. Globally, in the British colonial system, the British were rather deliberate in denying education to their subjects. This was one of the greatest forms of social control. In this sense, from a very early age I knew that there was something about a true education (as opposed to miseducation) that was powerful and liberating, and that must have been a part of the reason why African descent people where being denied opportunities to learn to read and attend school all around the world.