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In 2000, Cañibano et al. published a literature review entitled “Accounting for Intangibles: A Literature Review”. This paper revisits the conclusions drawn in that paper. We also discuss the intervening developments in scholarly research, standard setting and practice over the past 20+ years to outline the future challenges for research into accounting for intangibles.

We conducted a literature review to identify past developments and link the findings to current accounting standard-setting developments to inform our view of the future.

Current intangibles accounting practices are conservative and unlikely to change. Accounting standard setters are more interested in how companies report and disclose the value of intangibles rather than changing how they are determined. Standard setters are also interested in accounting for new forms of digital assets and reporting economic, social, governance and sustainability issues and how these link to financial outcomes. The IFRS has released complementary sustainability accounting standards for disclosing value creation in response to the latter. Therefore, the topic of intangibles stretches beyond merely how intangibles create value but how they are also part of a firm’s overall risk and value creation profile.

There is much room academically, practically, and from a social perspective to influence the future of accounting for intangibles. Accounting standard setters and alternative standards, such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and European Union non-financial and sustainability reporting directives, are competing complementary initiatives.

Our results reveal a window of opportunity for accounting scholars to research and influence how intangibles and other non-financial and sustainability accounting will progress based on current developments.

This study investigates the implementation of a sustainable circular business model from an accounting perspective. Its goal is to understand if and how decision- makers use management accounting systems, and what changes are needed if these systems are to support the transition toward a circular economy.

Dialogic accounting theory frames the case study of six companies that built a value network to develop and implement an innovative packaging solution consistent with circular economy principles. Content analysis was utilised to investigate the accounting tools used.

The findings indicate that circular solutions generate new organisational configurations based on value networks. Interestingly, managers’ decision-making process largely bypassed the accounting function; they relied on informal accounting and life cycle analysis, which stimulated a multi-stakeholder dialogue in a life cycle perspective.

The research provides theoretical and practical insights into the capability of management accounting systems to support companies seeking circular solutions.

The authors offer implications for accounting practice, chief financial officers (CFOs) and accounting educators, suggesting that a dialogic approach may support value retention of resources, materials and products, as required by the circular economy.

The research contributes to the debate about the role of accounting in sustainability, specifically the need for connecting for resource efficiency at the corporate level with the rationalisation of resource use within planetary boundaries.

The study contributes to the limited research into the role of management accounting in a company’s transition to circular business models. Dialogic accounting theory frames exploration of how accounting may evolve to help businesses become accountable to all stakeholders, including the environment.

This paper aims to offer the first known synthesis of peer-reviewed literature on trade-based money laundering (TBML). Given the topic is in its nascent stage yet gaining prominence across scholarship and practice, this foundation is pertinent for future TBML research.

A systematic literature review was undertaken with a formulaic search string. Both qualitative (thematic) and quantitative (meta) analysis methods were used to illustrate the findings.

The systematic literature review, using qualitative and quantitative synthesis, led to a thematic categorization of extant TBML literature into four categories: TBML risk assessment, TBML detection, the role of professionals and understanding of TBML. Due to the limited number of studies, insights that can be drawn from the extant literature on the best way to combat TBML are also limited.

As the first systematic literature review on TBML, this study identified that the existing TBML literature has focused on increasing the understanding of the phenomenon in terms of its definition and mechanisms, detection, linkage with other crimes, such as organized crime and terrorism financing, and risk assessment frameworks. The originality of these findings lies in identifying areas future researchers might explore to broaden the academic literature.

The research aims to provide a longitudinal case study to understand how digital transformation can be embedded in municipal reporting frameworks. The central role of such technology becomes increasingly evident as citizens demand greater transparency and engagement between them and governing institutions.

Utilising a longitudinal case study methodology, the research focusses on Turin’s Integrated Popular Financial Report (IPFR) as a lens through which to evaluate the broader implications of digital transformation on governmental transparency and operational efficiency.

Digital tools, notably sentiment analysis, offer promising avenues for enhancing governmental efficacy and citizenry participation. However, persistent challenges highlight the inadequacy of traditional, inflexible reporting structures to cater to dynamic informational demands.

Embracing digital tools is an imperative for contemporary public administrators, promoting streamlined communication and dismantling bureaucratic obstructions, all while catering to the evolving demands of an informed citizenry.

Different from previous studies that primarily emphasised technology’s role within budgeting, this research uniquely positions itself by spotlighting the transformative implications of digital tools during the reporting phase. It champions the profound value of fostering bottom-up dialogues, heralding a paradigmatic shift towards co-creative public management dynamics.

In this paper we investigate why the process of structural change in Brazil was growth accelerating before 1980 and why it was growth reducing after this year.

We investigate the causes of this change in behavior using the shift-share decomposition method.

The results indicate that in the first period there were high productivity gains as result of improvement in economic fundamentals such as the quality of capital and of labor and innovations. In this way, reallocation of workers between sectors, that is part of the process of structural change, was an inducer of economic growth. However, after 1980, mainly between 1991 and 2011, sectors that achieved productivity gains did so by reducing labor, which was absorbed by sectors with poor performance in terms of productivity growth. Furthermore, factors such as the deindustrialization that developed countries have been undergoing, the international situation, the stage of Brazilian economic development and its possible premature deindustrialization contributed to a growth reducing structural change.

Our differential to the matter is applying the shift-share methodology without combining any of the ten sectors analyzed, adopting a slightly different time frame than similar studies and presenting the shift-share results in a graphically manner in addition to the traditional numbers. By representing graphically how much each of the ten sectors is contributing to the structural change in the economy we are emphasizing the specificities of each of these sectors instead of just considering the aggregated view like manufacturing industry versus other industries or modern services versus traditional services.

The purpose of this multi-voiced paper is to propose a prosocial paradigm for the field of performance management and management control systems. This new paradigm suggests cultivating prosocial behaviour and prosocial groups in organizations to simultaneously achieve the objectives of economic performance and sustainability.

The authors share a common concern about the future of humanity and nature. They challenge the influential assumption of economic man from neoclassical economic theory and build on evolutionary science and the core design principles of prosocial groups to develop a prosocial paradigm.

Findings are based on the premise of the prosocial paradigm that self-interested behaviour may outperform prosocial behaviour within a group but that prosocial groups outperform groups dominated by self-interest. The authors explore various dimensions of performance management from the prosocial perspective in the private and public sectors.

The authors call for theoretical, conceptual and empirical research that explores the prosocial paradigm. They invite any approach, including positivist, interpretive and critical research, as well as those using qualitative, quantitative and interventionist methods.

This paper offers implications from the prosocial paradigm for practitioners, particularly for executives and managers, policymakers and educators.

Adoption of the prosocial paradigm in research and practice shapes what the authors call the prosocial market economy. This is an aspired cultural evolution that functions with market competition yet systematically strengthens prosociality as a cultural norm in organizations, markets and society at large.

This study is motivated to provide a theoretically informed, data-driven assessment of the consequences associated with the participation of non-human bots in social accountability movements; specifically, the anti-inequality/anti-corporate #OccupyWallStreet conversation stream on Twitter.

A latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling approach as well as XGBoost machine learning algorithms are applied to a dataset of 9.2 million #OccupyWallStreet tweets in order to analyze not only how the speech patterns of bots differ from other participants but also how bot participation impacts the trajectory of the aggregate social accountability conversation stream. The authors consider two research questions: (1) do bots speak differently than non-bots and (2) does bot participation influence the conversation stream.

The results indicate that bots do speak differently than non-bots and that bots exert both weak form and strong form influence. Bots also steadily become more prevalent. At the same time, the results show that bots also learn from and adapt their speaking patterns to emphasize the topics that are important to non-bots and that non-bots continue to speak about their initial topics.

These findings help improve understanding of the consequences of bot participation within social media-based democratic dialogic processes. The analyses also raise important questions about the increasing importance of apparently nonhuman actors within different spheres of social life.

The current study is the first, to the authors’ knowledge, that uses a theoretically informed Big Data approach to simultaneously consider the micro details and aggregate consequences of bot participation within social media-based dialogic social accountability processes.

This study aims to explore what and how digital innovation, as a knowledge-based and multi-dimensional process, can be used to increase the accountability of public and private sector organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Taking an interpretivist approach, qualitative research is designed around Strong Structuration Theory (SST). A content analysis of relevant documents and semi-structured interviews focusing on the relationships between digital innovation and accountability in extraordinary times is conducted.

The results show the existence of digital innovation barriers and facilitators that can have an impact on accountability during extraordinary times. The research highlights how managers of public organizations focus largely on the social dimension of knowledge (i.e., competencies shaped by collective culture), while managers of private organizations focus mainly on the human dimension of knowledge (i.e., skills gained through learning by doing).

The paper enriches the accountability literature by historicizing SST for extraordinary times and by utilizing a multiple-dimensional approach to digital innovation. Also, the work underlines specific strategies organizations could usefully adopt to improve accountability through digital innovation in the public and private sectors during extraordinary times.

This article emphasizes the crucial integration of technological components with knowledge. In particular, the digital innovation is considered as a strong synergy of human and social dimensions that compels organizations toward enhanced accountability, particularly in the face of extraordinary challenges.

Optimal application and commitment toward financial management practices enhance organization performance. This study aims to assess the influence of financial management practices on organizational performance of small- and medium-scale enterprises.

Data were collected from 45 small-sized and 72 medium-sized firms. Data supported the hypothesized relationships. Construct reliability and validity were established through confirmatory factor analysis. The conceptual model and hypotheses were evaluated by using structural equation modeling.

The results indicate that working capital significantly influenced organizational performance. Capital budget management significantly influenced organizational performance. A non-significant influence of asset management on organizational performance was observed.

The generalizability of the findings will be constrained due to the research’s SMEs focus and cross-sectional data.

The study’s findings will serve as valuable pointers for stakeholders and decision-makers of SMEs in the development of well-articulated and proactive financial management systems to ensure competitiveness, sustainability, viability and financial competences.

The study adds to the corpus of literature by evidencing empirically that financial management practices significantly influenced SMEs’ performance.