Flinders University

About: Flinders University is a education organization based out in Adelaide, South Australia, Australia. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Health care. The organization has 12033 authors who have published 32831 publications receiving 973172 citations. The organization is also known as: Flinders University of South Australia.

The edge of legitimacy: voluntary social and environmental reporting in Rothmans' 1956 - 1999 annual reports

Abstract: Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the voluntary social and environmental disclosures made in the annual reports of Rothmans Ltd between the years of 1955 and 1999. The first part of the paper focuses on defining legitimacy theory as it has been used in accounting research, extending the current model of legitimacy that predominates, and discussing the potential of a resource‐based approach to testing the theory.Design/methodology/approach – A qualitative and quantitative approach to analysing annual report disclosures is presented, and this is one of the few studies to operationalise the variables under study as measures of resource flows.Findings – The paper considers legitimacy theory in light of disclosures made by Rothmans. An initial analysis provides qualitative examples of expected attempts to legitimatise the corporation given the threat posed by the smoking and health debate. Further analysis conducted using a quantitative measure of resource flows controlled by one stakeholder gr...

Contrasting responses of water use efficiency to drought across global terrestrial ecosystems

Abstract: Drought is an intermittent disturbance of the water cycle that profoundly affects the terrestrial carbon cycle. However, the response of the coupled water and carbon cycles to drought and the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Here we provide the first global synthesis of the drought effect on ecosystem water use efficiency (WUE = gross primary production (GPP)/evapotranspiration (ET)). Using two observational WUE datasets (i.e., eddy-covariance measurements at 95 sites (526 site-years) and global gridded diagnostic modelling based on existing observation and a data-adaptive machine learning approach), we find a contrasting response of WUE to drought between arid (WUE increases with drought) and semi-arid/sub-humid ecosystems (WUE decreases with drought), which is attributed to different sensitivities of ecosystem processes to changes in hydro-climatic conditions. WUE variability in arid ecosystems is primarily controlled by physical processes (i.e., evaporation), whereas WUE variability in semi-arid/sub-humid regions is mostly regulated by biological processes (i.e., assimilation). We also find that shifts in hydro-climatic conditions over years would intensify the drought effect on WUE. Our findings suggest that future drought events, when coupled with an increase in climate variability, will bring further threats to semi-arid/sub-humid ecosystems and potentially result in biome reorganization, starting with low-productivity and high water-sensitivity grassland.

Children's sociable and aggressive behaviour with peers: A comparison of the US and Australia, and contributions of temperament and parenting styles

Abstract: Links between both temperament and parenting, and children's sociable and aggressive behaviour with peers (physical and relational), were examined. The research was undertaken in two Western cultur...