Civics and ethics, and a little business acumen

Citation

Evans, S. (2010), "Civics and ethics, and a little business acumen", Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Vol. 23 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/aaaj.2010.05923baa.001

Civics and ethics, and a little business acumen

Article Type: Literature and insights From: Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Volume 23, Issue 2

Although the GFC tornado has ripped through many people’s lives, some are shaking off the dust and hoping to get back to a normal life. (All right, notwithstanding the bent of the previous issue’s editorial, that extended metaphor does contain an example of one of those gorgeous little usefuls, a piece of regional jargon, and an acronym to boot. In the antipodes, “GFC” means global financial crisis.) Given that Australia seems to have weathered that economic storm reasonably well, many political and business leaders in this country seem overly smug, assuming it is slowly whirling off into the distance, as if the relative lack of damage was solely due to their own prudent wisdom. If this conclusion seems improbable, rest assured that the next wave of risk-takers is already in training, with an approach to the ethics of business enterprise that may seem familiar.

In the 2008 CPA Australia “Plan your own enterprise” competition, school children entered business proposals into a national competition. Of particular note were the winners in the group category. Two 15-year old schoolboys devised Stress-Free Scoring, which I will let journalist Glenda Korporaal (2008) describes:

It is pitched at busy parents, who are obliged to provide a scorer each week for their children’s Friday night games in representative basketball, where the competition levels are high and scoring must be accurate.

The boys’ idea was for a business that would get youths who are already at the courts, having finished their games, to do the scoring for the parents for $10 a game.

Their business teacher … says the school of only 300 students has also just won a civics award from the Constitutional Education Foundation of Australia as a result of a mini-parliament she set up after learning about a similar program at a school in Sydney.

See, all you need is an opportunity to bring together people where there is a coincidence of wants, as my first economics lecturer used to say – in this case, parents who can buy their way out of an obligation and teenagers who need to pay off their mobile phone bills – and everyone will be happy. I like the fact that their teacher associates this business initiative with the school’s emphasis on civics, that is, learning how one’s system of government should operate. Maybe the two boys did not go ahead with their business concept (I can’t find it on Google) because they realised that getting into politics was a better way to pursue their goals. After all, that is where understanding the psychology of milking public demand is at a real premium.

And speaking of work, Maggie Butt’s poem in this issue tackles the way that work can often seem to define and control us. In “Pros and cons”, she eventually turns this about to show the positive side of our employment. In his own poem, “Adam, Inc.”, James Hazelton offers us what might be seen as the very first example of entrepreneurialism when Adam sets up business and does a very big deal.

Acknowledgements

AAAJ welcomes submissions of both research papers and creative writing. Creative writing in the form of poetry and short prose pieces is edited for the Literature and Insights section only and does not undergo the refereeing procedures required for all research papers published in the main body of AAAJ.

Steve EvansLiterary Editor