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This article examines whether accountability can contribute to the analysis of effectiveness in grassroots voluntary organizations (GVOs) in France.

Based on recent studies and stakeholder theory, hypotheses are formulated about the negative link between accountability and financial effectiveness and a positive link between accountability and non-financial effectiveness.

The findings show that accountability practices are positive determinants of financial indicators (apart from return on assets [ROA]) and employment of people in difficulty. In contrast, the other non-financial indicators are not explained by accountability practices.

The study points out the complexity and paradoxes surrounding accountability and highlights the risk of insensitivity to it. It thus underlines a specific French situation, close to the risks of myopia linked to accountability. One possible explanation could be the coupling and decoupling mechanisms that allow non-profit organizations (NPOs) to regain power. Given the sometimes-random effects of accountability, producing nuanced theories is necessary, and governance should oscillate between equilibrium and adaptation in the face of stakeholders. Finally, this article introduces the risk of insensitivity of NPOs to accountability (i.e. they act as they wish, regardless of control mechanisms such as accountability).

This study thus reveals governance dilemmas, which could be solved through less formal, more mission-oriented, more creative and therefore heterodox accountability.

The French context of mistrust of certain managerial approaches and the development of codes of governance based on a disciplinary vision are confronted with a growing and critical literature on accountability in NPOs.

This paper aims to critically examine the accounting and information systems literature to understand the changes that are occurring in the management accounting profession. The changes the authors are interested in are linked to technology-driven innovations in managerial decision-making and in organizational structures. In addition, the paper highlights research gaps and opportunities for future research.

The authors adopted a grounded theory literature review method (Wolfswinkel et al., 2013) to achieve the study’s aims.

The authors identified four research themes that describe the changes in the management accounting profession due to technology-driven innovations: structured vs unstructured data, human vs algorithm-driven decision-making, delineated vs blurred functional boundaries and hierarchical vs platform-based organizations. The authors also identified tensions mentioned in the literature for each research theme.

Previous studies display a rather narrow focus on the role of digital technologies in accounting work and new competences that management accountants require in the digital era. By contrast, the authors focus on the broader technology-driven shifts in organizational processes and structures, which vastly change how accounting information is collected, processed and analyzed internally to support managerial decision-making. Hence, the paper focuses on how management accountants can adapt and evolve as their organizations transition toward a digital environment.

This study explores citizen activism in the articulation of a politicised counter-account of Aboriginal rights. It aims to uncover the enabling factors for a successful challenge to established political norms and the obstacles to the fullest expression of a radical imagining.

Laclau and Mouffe's theory of hegemony and discourse is used to frame the movement's success in challenging the prevailing system of urbanised healthcare delivery. Empirical materials were collected through extensive ethnographic fieldwork.

The findings from this longitudinal study identify the factors that predominantly influence the transformational success of an Yaṉangu social movement, such as the institutionalisation of group identity, articulation of a discourse connected to Aboriginal rights to self-determination, demonstration of an alternative imaginary and creation of strong external alliances.

This study offers a rich empirical analysis of counter-accounting in action, drawing on Aboriginal governance traditions of non-confrontational discourse and collective accountability to conceptualise agonistic engagement. These findings contribute to the practical and theoretical construction of democratic accounting and successful citizen activism.

Virtual influencers (VIs), who are fictional characters, have gained popularity in recent years, particularly among Generation Z and millennials. With the hype surrounding VIs, more research is required. Thus, this study aims to examine how Gen Z members and millennials react to VIs used for marketing purposes.

This study follows an exploratory approach. The data were collected from 29 participants (14 male and 15 female) through two focus groups and semi-structured interviews.

The authors found that opinions about VIs were mixed, and two main themes emerged from the study: (1) challenges and potential and (2) decision-making and psychological aspects.

This study broadens the paradigm for analysing the efficacy of VIs. This emerging topic is of relevance for the marketing sector as well as for transdisciplinary research and practice.

Property developers identify the vital role of social media brand engagement (SMBE) in sustaining their businesses in competitive marketplaces, but it remains underexplored. This paper examines how SMBE mediates the effects of firm-generated content (FGC) and user-generated content (UGC) on brand trust, considering the moderating effects of social media influencer endorsement (SMIE) and self-image congruence (SIC) for luxury residential properties (LRPs).

Around 516 high-income homebuyers in Vietnam who shared information about LRP on social media were targeted to test the research model empirically. The primary data collected from paper-based surveys were analysed using SPSS 26 and AMOS 24.

Results indicate that FGC and UGC positively impact SMBE and consequently significantly affect brand trust. Further, results confirm the moderating roles of SMIE and SIC in the effects of FGC and UGC on SMBE.

Data and sample size were limited to meet the generalisation from different nations and cross cultures.

The authors' findings suggest that marketers should apply the authors' integrated SMBE model to strengthen brand–consumer interactions and increase their sales revenue.

This study is the first in its application of the uses and gratifications theory and self-congruence theory to investigate how SMBE mediates the relationship between FGC and brand trust as well as between UGC and brand trust. Noticeably, this study makes a novel contribution as the first to quantitatively explore the moderating effects of SMIE and SIC in the authors' research model.

This paper offers an empirical overview of European emergency managers' institutional arrangements and guidelines for using social media in risk and crisis communication.

The authors collected and analysed material including publicly accessible relevant legal acts, policy documents, official guidelines, and press reports in eight European countries – Germany, Italy, Belgium, Sweden, Hungary, Finland, Norway, and Estonia. Additionally, the authors carried out 95 interviews with emergency managers in the eight countries between September 2019 and February 2020.

The authors found that emergency management institutions' social media usage is rarely centrally controlled and social media crisis communication was regulated with the same guidelines as crisis communication on traditional media. Considering this study's findings against the backdrop of existing research and practice, the authors find support for a “mixed arrangement” model by which centralised policies work in tandem with decentralised practices on an ad hoc basis.

Comparative insights about institutional arrangements and procedural guidelines on social media crisis communication in the studied countries could inform the future policies concerning social media use in other emergency management systems.

This study includes novel, cross-national comparative data on the institutional arrangements and guidelines for using social media in emergency management in the context of Europe.

This study aims to explore to what extent stakeholder engagement affects the sustainability reporting (SR) process and if it succeeds in facilitating the encounter between demand and supply of accountability, as well as the main challenges of this practice, by focusing on a crucial and under-investigated public sector area, the judicial system.

The study adopts an action research (AR) approach. Specifically, it focuses on a specific phase (i.e. stakeholder engagement) of the broader project that was carried on from 2019 in an Italian Public Prosecutor’s Office. Data were collected from multiple sources, i.e. written notes and reports gathered during meetings, the survey administered to stakeholders and the published sustainability reports.

Stakeholder engagement may be a valuable and effective tool for improving the level of accountability, as it increases the responsiveness of SR to the informative needs of stakeholders. However, the study also highlights some critical points that must be addressed to exploit this fully. Among these is the need to act upstream of the process by working on an accounting system that goes beyond the economic dynamics and can effectively answer the accountability demand.

The study contributes to theoretical and empirical knowledge by exploring a topic and a public sphere still limited investigated, i.e. the stakeholder engagement in sustainability in the judicial sector. The AR approach also presents some originality points, as it is low widespread in management and accounting literature.

Information opacity in donation crowdfunding activities has constrained the healthy development of China’s public welfare activities. Addressing the trust crisis and enhancing public engagement warrants further investigation. This study aims to uncover the moderating effect of activity transparency by utilizing data from 1,029 donation crowdfunding projects on the Sina Weibo Public Welfare Social Platform. In this way, we seek to elucidate the impact of donation crowdfunding events on fundraising ability.

This study selects text complexity, number of supporters, creator experience, and social capital as explanatory variables; innovatively selects the number of updates of online crowdfunding activities and total reading volume as moderating variables; selects the number of shares of crowdfunding activities as a mediating variable; and constructs a moderated mediation multiple regression model for fundraising ability.

Our findings indicate that independent variables, such as text complexity, number of supporters, and social capital, can significantly affect the dependent variable, fundraising ability. However, creator experience does not influence fundraising ability. Furthermore, social interaction has a mediating effect, whereas activity transparency has a reverse moderating effect. These results indicate that social interaction can enhance the fundraising ability of donation crowdfunding events. However, with an increase in information transparency, the fundraising ability of social media decreases.

The originality of this research is in clarifying the internal factors affecting fundraising ability through induction, making bold assumptions, and focusing on how social media’s effective interaction and activity transparency will affect public welfare crowdfunding fundraising ability.

This paper aims to explore current trends in how companies disclose climate-related risks and opportunities in their financial statements. As part of the authors’ analysis, they examine: whether forward-looking assumptions and judgements are typically considered in reporting climate-related risks/opportunities; whether there are differences in the reporting practices of firms in carbon-intensive industries versus non-carbon-intensive industries; and whether negative media reports have an influence on the levels of disclosure a firm makes.

The authors chose content analysis as their methodology and examined the financial statements published by firms listed on the UK’s FTSE 100 between 2016 and 2020. This analysis is framed by Suchman’s three dimensions of legitimacy, being pragmatic, cognitive and moral.

Climate-related disclosures in the notes and financial accounts of these firms did increase over the period. Yet, overall, the level the disclosures was inadequate and the quality was inconsistent. From this, the authors conclude that pragmatic legitimacy is not a particularly strong driving factor in compelling organisations to disclose climate-related information. The firms in carbon-intensive industries do provide greater levels of disclosure, including both qualitative and quantitative (monetary) content, which is consistent with cognitive legitimacy. However, from a moral legitimacy perspective, this study finds that firms did not adapt responsively to negative media coverage as a way of reflecting their accountability to broader public norms and values. Overall, this analysis suggests that regulatory enforcement and a systematic reporting framework with adequate guidance is going to be critical to developing transparent climate-related reporting in future.

This paper contributes to existing studies on climate-related disclosures, which have mainly examined the ‘front-half’ of annual reports. Conversely, this study aims to shed light on these practices in the “back-half” of these reports, exploring the underlying reasons for reporting climate-related risks and opportunities in financial accounts. The authors’ insights into the current disclosure practices make a theoretical contribution to the literature. Practitioners can also draw on these insights to improve how they report on climate-related risks and opportunities in their financial statements.

Today, with the increasing involvement of the environment and human beings business units, paying attention to fulfilling social responsibility obligations while making a profit has become increasingly necessary for achieving sustainable development goals. Attention to profit by organizations should not be without regard to their social and environmental performance. Social responsibility accounting (SRA) is an approach that can pay more attention to the social and environmental performance of companies, but it has many barriers. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify barriers to SRA implementation and provide strategies to overcome these barriers.

In this study, the authors identify barriers to social responsibility accounting implementation and provide strategies to overcome these barriers. By literature review, 12 barriers and seven strategies were identified and approved using the opinions of six academic experts. Interpretive structural modeling (ISM) has been used to identify significant barriers and find textual relationships between them. The fuzzy technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) method has been used to identify and rank strategies for overcoming these barriers. This study was undertaken in Iran (an emerging market). The data has been gathered from 18 experts selected using purposive sampling and included CEOs of the organization, senior accountants and active researchers well familiar with the field of social responsibility accounting.

Based on the results of this study, the cultural differences barrier was introduced as the primary and underlying barrier of the social responsibility accounting barriers model. At the next level, barriers such as “lack of public awareness of the importance of social responsibility accounting, lack of social responsibility accounting implementation regulations and organization size” are significant barriers to social responsibility accounting implementation. Removing these barriers will help remove other barriers in this direction. In addition, the results of the TOPSIS method showed that “mandatory regulations, the introduction of guidelines and social responsibility accounting standards,” “regulatory developments and government incentive schemes to implement social responsibility accounting,” as well as “increasing public awareness of the benefits of social responsibility accounting” are some of the essential social responsibility accounting implementation strategies.

The findings of the study have implications for both professional accounting bodies for developing the necessary standards and for policymakers for adopting policies that facilitate the implementation of social responsibility accounting to achieve sustainability.

This paper creates a new perspective on the practical implementation of social responsibility accounting, closely related to improving environmental performance and increasing social welfare through improving sustainability.

Experts believe that the strategies mentioned above will be very effective and helpful in removing the barriers of the lower level of the model. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, for the first time, this study develops a model of social responsibility accounting barriers and ranks the most critical implementation strategies.