Kent Business School

Volunteering and dive tourism is a rapidly expanding sector of tourism globally and is actively promoted as part of volunteering and volunteer tourism policy by the UK and other governments. Dive tourism is rapidly growing in Malaysia and it regularly hosts conventional leisure-based dive tourists to its world-class dive sites as well as those volunteering for scientific monitoring purposes such as engaging in activities such as the Reef Check programme. However, few disabled divers appear to participate in diving in Malaysia, and specifically, do not seem to be participating in volunteering and dive tourism.

Following the development of the New Right Agenda, Conservative Governments in Britain introduced incrementally an extensive privatization programme. This paper focuses on the failure of the last privatization of the Conservatives: British Energy, the company established to run the eight most modern nuclear power stations. A key argument used to justify the privatization of British Energy is analyzed, that of the transfer of risk from the state to the private sector. The privatization led to the apparent transfer to the company of three interrelated risks: downsizing risk; market risk; nuclear liabilities risk. New Labour's rescue of British Energy confirmed the reality, which was that residual responsibility for risk, especially the nuclear liabilities risk, remained with government. Despite the company's collapse the Labour Government sought a market-based outcome, and in 2008 British Energy was sold to EDF, the French state-owned energy company. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the failure of risk transfer for public policy.

This note reports a small-scale survey of disclosures of free cash flow (whether described as such or not), examines one particularly complex disclosure as a case study of free cash flow calculation, and comments on the policy implications of the empirical findings.

The objective of this paper is to appraise the UK regulatory framework by focusing on the statutory ®nancial audit and its role in testing companies' (non-)compliance with a new ®nancial reporting standard (FRS1). The analysis is based on a large-scale survey of the cash¯ow statements required by FRS1 in company accounts along with the audit reports of each company. The survey reveals that signi®cant variations in the standard format for cash ow statements were allowed without any audit comment. The study concludes by raising causes for concern about the UK regulatory framework, and arguing that the objective of FRS1 was not fully achieved because of the wide variations in the standard format produced by companies. It suggests that a solution to the concerns raised is to increase the use of comments in audit reports by restoring the`emphasis of matter' principle.

This paper compares five methods for pruning decision trees, developed from sets of examples. When used with uncertain rather than deterministic data, decision-tree induction involves three main stages-creating a complete tree able to classify all the training examples, pruning this tree to give statistical reliability, and processing the pruned tree to improve understandability. This paper concerns the second stage-pruning. It presents empirical comparisons of the five methods across several domains. The results show that three methods-critical value, error complexity and reduced error-perform well, while the other two may cause problems. They also show that there is no significant interaction between the creation and pruning methods.

The paper begins by pointing out the diversity of philosophical positions within information systems, and the range of reactions to this diversity. It then discusses problems within the underlying philosophies of science, particularly positivism and interpretivism. With this as a background, the paper proposes critical realism as an underpinning philosophy that has the potential to overcome both sets of difficulties. The theoretical arguments are practically illustrated by critiques of (positivist) statistical analysis and (interpretivist) soft systems methodology.

This paper provides a review and evaluation of the use of problem structuring methods (PSMs) in practice. It starts by describing the origins of PSMs, the type of problem situation for which they are suitable, and the characteristics of some leading methods. An overview of the practice of PSMs is provided from a number of angles, including case studies and surveys of applications. A number of issues in the application of PSMs are discussed, in particular an account of the debate about evaluation of the success of PSMs; the selection of an appropriate method; multimethodology; and a variety of aspects of the maintenance of relationships with the client organisation(s). Finally, some possible future developments are suggested, especially through productive interactions with similar or related practices.

One approach to induction is to develop a decision tree from a set of examples. When used with noisy rather than deterministic data, the method involves three main stages -creating a complete tree able to classify all the examples, pruning this tree to give statistical reliability, and processing the pruned tree to improve understandability. This paper is concerned with the first stage -tree creationwhich relies on a measure for "goodness of split," that is, how well the attributes discriminate between classes. Some problems encountered at this stage are missing data and multi-valued attributes. The paper considers a number of different measures and experimentally examines their behavior in four domains. The results show that the choice of measure affects the size of a tree but not its accuracy, which remains the same even when attributes are selected randomly.

In recent years the predilection for Systems/OR practice to be underpinned by a single methodology has been called into question, and reports on multimethodology projects are now filtering through into the literature. This paper takes a closer look at mnltimethodology. It outlines a number of different possibilities for combining methodologies, and considers why such a development might be desirable for more effective practice, in particular by focusing upon how it can deal more effectively with the richness of the real world and better assist through the various intervention stages. The paper outlines some of the philosophical, cultural and cognitive feasibility issues that multimethodology raises. It then describes a framework that can attend to the relative strengths of different methodologies and provide a basis for constructing multimethodology designs. Finally it presents a systematic way of decomposing methodologies to identify detachable elements, and the paper concludes by outlining aspects of an agenda for further research that emerges out of the discussion. © 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd