Jo-Anne Kestel

Homeless Connect, held annually in several Australian cities and fashioned along the lines of similar days in cities such as San Francisco, has now been conducted in Perth for a number of years. As the name suggests, Homeless Connect is designed to reconnect homeless guests, as well as those at risk of homelessness, with government, non-profit and business services, personal care services and social opportunities. The research question being addressed in this paper is: How can the strategies of Homeless Connect impact on the personal agency of those who attend on the day? The findings are based on feedback from guests, service providers and volunteers who contributed to Homeless Connect Perth 2011. The one-stop services approach, as well as affording opportunities for social connection for homeless guests, is critiqued in the context of providing an opportunity to address two of the components of personal agency: knowledge and activation. We propose a model which depicts the contribution of volunteers, organisers and service providers to homeless guests' personal agency via connections and reconnections.

Sullivan suggests that the alternative audit approaches adopted by accounting firms be expressed in terms of “structure” and “judgement”, with a division provided by the degree to which auditor judgement is replaced by structured quantitative algorithms. Cushing and Loebbecke attempt to operationalise this division by examining the guidance provided to practising auditors by their firms. Kinne extends this study by classifying accounting firms as “structured”, “intermediate” or “unstructured” in terms of their audit methodologies. Provides a test of Kinney's classification by examining the tolerance of accounting firms to accounting policy choices which have an income effect in their clients’ financial statements. Argues that those firms with a structured audit approach will manage audit risk through a greater reliance on mechanistic procedures, resulting in a greater tolerance of income manipulation. The results are confirmatory for the period under study, but evidence is provided to suggest that audit firms have subsequently become less diversified in their approach.