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The media is described as a fourth estate of the realm due to its ability to frame and shape discussions on governance and provide a stimulus for fighting corruption. But is the media really an effective tool for fighting corruption? This question arises due to the possibility of the media being used for propaganda, biased reporting and media owners’ and journalists’ engagement in corruption. The current study addresses the question by exploring the relationship between the media and corruption from the perspectives of Ghanaian justice and anti-corruption officials.

The study adopts a qualitative approach by interviewing justice and anti-corruption officials across three administrative regions in Ghana.

The results show that while justice officials describe the media as a medium for accusing officials unjustifiably and exaggerating the scale of corruption, anti-corruption officials believe the media helps to fight corruption. In addition to uncovering and exposing public officials’ corruption, the media is also a double-edged sword characterised by intra-vigilance: the media hold “their own” (i.e. journalists fighting corruption) accountable through criticism and exposure of wrongdoings.

The double-edged nature of the media can strengthen and enhance the fight against corruption because anti-corruption actors and journalists will be cautious as misjudgements or errors committed will not be overlooked or concealed by the media. Therefore, anti-corruption agencies in Ghana can collaborate with the media to uncover and expose corruption committed by public officials and even journalists or media owners.

This study is the first in Ghana to explore the relationship between the media and corruption from the perspectives of justice and anti-corruption officials. The approach, frameworks and methodology adopted in this study can be applied in similar studies in other countries on the African continent and beyond.

Although the topic of inclusion has become a hot and unavoidable issue for organizations, research on how this topic is being addressed in companies is still almost nonexistent. How do HR managers promote workplace inclusion? The objective of this study is to answer this research question.

The results are based on evidence that emerged during in-depth interviews conducted with 16 human resources professionals from the world of large-scale retail trade, as well as from the analysis of documents and reports produced by the companies in which the interviewed professionals work.

The findings reveal that the promotion of corporate inclusion is not only aimed at satisfying the need for belongingness and uniqueness. It is also aimed at satisfying two other types of human needs, namely, the human need to share and the human need to be impactful. In addition, the results reveal that HR professionals promote workplace inclusion through six initiatives that can be traced to two main ways in which inclusion is conceived.

Even though there is an extensive number of studies aimed at defining and measuring the construct of workplace inclusion, progress has not been made in understanding how HR professionals promote inclusion. This study covers this literature gap by bringing to light the existence of two main meanings associated by HR professionals to workplace inclusion: extensive inclusiveness and narrow inclusiveness.

This study aims to determine experimentally factors affecting the satisfaction of retail stock investors with various investor protection regulatory measures implemented by the Government of India and Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI). Also, an effort has been made to gauge the level of satisfaction of retail equities investors with the laws and guidelines developed by the Indian Government and SEBI for their invested funds.

To accomplish the study’s goals, a well-structured questionnaire was created with the help of a literature review, and copies of it were filled by Punjabi retail equities investors with the aid of stockbrokers, i.e. intermediaries. Amritsar, Jalandhar, Ludhiana and Mohali-area intermediaries were chosen using a random selection procedure. Xerox copies of the questionnaire were given to the intermediaries, who were then asked to collect responses from their clients. Some intermediaries requested the researcher to sit in their offices to collect responses from their clients. Only 373 questionnaires out of 1,000 questionnaires that were provided had been received back. Only 328 copies were correctly filled by the equity investors. To conduct the analysis, 328 copies, which were fully completed, were used as data. The appropriate approaches, such as descriptives, factor analysis and ordinal regression analysis, were used to study the data.

With the aid of factor analysis, four factors have been identified that influence investors’ satisfaction with various investor protection regulatory measures implemented by government and SEBI regulations, including regulations addressing primary and secondary market dealings, rules for investor awareness and protection, rules to prevent company malpractices and laws for corporate governance and investor protection. The impact of these four components on investor satisfaction has been investigated using ordinal regression analysis. The pseudo-R-square statistics for the ordinal regression model demonstrated the model’s capacity for the explanation. The findings suggested that a significant amount of the overall satisfaction score about the various investor protection measures implemented by the government/SEBI has been explained by the regression model.

A study could be conducted to analyse the perspective of various stakeholders towards the disclosures made and norms followed by corporate houses. The current study may be expanded to cover the entire nation because it is only at the state level currently. It might be conceivable to examine how investments made in the retail capital market affect investors in rural areas. The influence of reforms on the functioning of stock markets could potentially be examined through another study. It could be possible to undertake a study on female investors’ knowledge about retail investment trends. The effect of digital stock trading could be examined in India. The effect of technological innovations on capital markets can be studied.

This research would be extremely useful to regulators in developing policies to protect retail equities investors. Investors are required to be safeguarded and protected to deal freely in the securities market, so they should be given more freedom in terms of investor protection measures. Stock exchanges should have the potential to bring about technological advancements in trading to protect investors from any kind of financial loss. Since the government has the power to create rules and regulations to strengthen investor protection. So, this research will be extremely useful to the government.

This work has societal ramifications. Because when adequate rules and regulations are in place to safeguard investors, they will be able to invest freely. Companies will use capital wisely and profitably. Companies should undertake tasks towards corporate social responsibility out of profits because corporate houses are part and parcel of society only.

Many investors may lack the necessary expertise to make sound financial judgments. They might not be aware of the entire risk-reward profile of various investment options. However, they must know various investor protection measures taken by the Government of India & Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) to safeguard their interests. Investors must be well-informed on the precautions to take while dealing with market intermediaries, as well as in the stock market.

This study aims to examine how the legitimacy of internal auditing is reconstructed during enterprise resource planning (ERP)-driven technological change.

The study is based on the comparative analysis of internal auditing and its transformation due to ERP implementations at two case firms operating in the food sector in Egypt – one a major Egyptian multinational corporation (MNC) and the other a major domestic company (DC).

Internal auditors (IAs) at MNC saw ERP implementation as an opportunity to reconstruct the legitimacy of internal auditing work by engaging and partnering with actors involved with the ERP change. In doing so, the IAs acquired system certifications and provided line functions and external auditors with data-driven business insights. The “practical coping mechanism” adopted by the IAs led to the acceptance (and legitimacy) of their work. In contrast, IAs at DC adopted a purposeful strategy of disengaging, blaming and rejecting since they were skeptical of the top management team's (TMT's) sincerity. The “disinterestedness” led to the loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the stakeholders.

The article offers two contributions. First, it extends the literature by highlighting a spectrum of behavior displayed by IAs (coping with impending issues vs strategic purposefulness) during ERP-driven technological change. Second, the article contributes to the literature on legitimacy by highlighting four intertwined micro-processes – participating, socializing, learning and role-forging – that contribute to reconstructing the legitimacy of internal auditing.

The paper investigates whether political geography, as measured by the degree of alignment of state politicians with the party of the USA President, has an impact on corporate fraud convictions.

Prior research shows that the degree of alignment between state politicians and the president's political party is positively correlated with measures of earnings management for firms headquartered in the state. Political alignment is conducive to earnings management because it affects a firm's information and enforcement environment by increasing policy risk and promoting lenient regulatory oversight. The paper posits that this environment is also conducive to corporate fraud and tests this hypothesis using pooled ordinary least squares (OLS) and panel regressions with annual state-level data for 2003–2018.

The paper documents a positive and statistically significant relationship between political alignment and corporate fraud conviction rates by state.

The conclusions are tempered by data limitations. First, the conviction data are available at the state level only. Second, the true level of fraud is inherently unobservable and the conviction data may not reflect the actual number of frauds that are committed.

Fraud examiners might benefit from considering the role of political connectedness in determining fraud risk. Although additional research is needed before making concrete recommendations, the initial indications clearly point to political connections as a potential concern.

The findings build on evidence that political connections influence earnings management. Rather than focusing on direct measures of connectedness, such as lobbying expenditures, the paper examines a plausibly exogenous measure: political geography.

The purpose of this study is to extend the Fraud Diamond Theory to celebrity Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) and investigate their post-Initial Public Offering (IPO) stock market performance.

After obtaining a sample of celebrity SPACs from the Spacresearch.com database, fraud risk characteristics were obtained from Lexis Nexus searches. Buy and hold abnormal returns were calculated for celebrity SPACs versus a small-cap equity benchmark for time intervals after IPO, and multiple regression analysis was performed to examine the relationship between fraud risk features and post-IPO returns.

Celebrity SPACs exhibit Fraud Diamond characteristics and significantly underperform a small-cap stock portfolio on a risk-adjusted basis after IPO.

This study only examines celebrity SPACs that conducted IPOs on the NYSE and NASDAQ/AMEX and does not include those that are traded on the Over the Counter Bulletin Board (OTCBB).

Celebrity endorsement of SPAC vehicles attracts investors who may not be properly informed regarding the risk characteristics of SPACs. Accordingly, investors should be warned that celebrity SPACs underperform a small-cap equity portfolio and exhibit significant elements of fraud risk.

The use of celebrity endorsement as a marketing device to attract investment in SPACs has regulatory implications.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to examine the fraud risk characteristics and post-IPO performance of celebrity SPACs.

There is emerging evidence in the accounting literature that investors react negatively to corporate greenwashing. But does that hold for all investors, or do different types of investors react differently? This paper aims to study retail investors’ responses to media reports on corporate greenwashing and how these responses depend upon the investors’ social value orientation. The authors argue that media reporting on corporate greenwashing negatively affects the rationale for allocating funds to firms engaging in greenwashing. The authors also expect this reaction to be stronger for prosocial investors compared to proself investors.

The authors conduct an online experiment with 229 participants representing retail investors in the German-speaking countries.

The results show that retail investors who received media reports on deceptive disclosure invest more funds in the company that does not engage in greenwashing (and less in the firm that engages in greenwashing) than investors who did not receive these reports. The authors’ results provide novel evidence that this effect primarily holds for investors with a prosocial value orientation. Finally, the authors’ data show that lower trust in the firm that engages in greenwashing partially mediates the effect of media reports on investor choices.

The authors provide unique evidence how different types of investors react to media reports on greenwashing. The authors find that moral motives, rather than risk-return considerations, drive investor responses to greenwashing. Overall, these findings support the important function of the media as an intermediary in stock market participation and highlight the pivotal role of individual traits in investors’ responses to greenwashing.

New public management (NPM) has transformed the public sector auditing context, although in quite different ways. Further, investigations into NPM’s impact on public sector auditors and audit institutions have been largely unconnected, with the exception of the critical examination of performance audits. We investigate the question of how public sector auditors’ roles and activities have changed as a result of NPM and later reforms.

We examine and synthesise public sector audit research examining reforms since the year 2000. The research presented considers changes to external and internal public sector audits as well as the development of public sector audit institutions – known as supreme audit institutions (SAIs).

Considerable changes have occurred. Many were influenced by NPM, but others have evolved from the eco-system of accounting, auditing and public sector management. External auditors have responded to an increase in demand for accountability. Additional management and governance techniques have been introduced from the private sector, such as internal auditing and audit committees. NPM has also led to conflicting trends, particularly when governments introduced competition to public sector auditing by contracting out but then chose to centralise to improve accountability. There is also greater international influence now through bodies like the International Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI) and similar regional bodies.

NPM reforms and the eco-system have impacted public sector auditing. Sustainability reporting is emerging as an area requiring more auditing attention; auditors also need to continue to develop better ways to communicate with citizens. Further, research into auditing in non-Western nations and emerging technologies is also required, especially where it provides learnings around more valuable audit practices. Empirical evidence is required of the strengths and weaknesses of SAIs’ structural variety.

This article explores the synergy between journalism studies and computer science in the context of observing online news. By establishing web applications of online media observatories as research tools, researchers can employ various analytical approaches to gain valuable insights into online news discourse and production.

Drawing eight months of data (01.08.2022–30.04.2023) from the Labservatory’s web application, i.e. over 250,000 news items, the article demonstrates how some of this web application’s main functionalities may be useful in implementing (1) news flow analysis, (2) news topic distribution analysis and (3) media discourse analysis.

The capabilities provided by this web application, (1) to simultaneously analyse the daily news production of ten media outlets with varying features, (2) to rapidly collect a large volume of news items, (3) to identify the news categories as classified by the media themselves, (4) to present the results of the search in relevance order and (5) to automatically generate a search report, highlight the significance of this interdisciplinary collaboration for implementing comprehensive analyses of online news.

The article concludes by emphasising the importance of continuing this joint effort, as it opens new avenues for further research and provides a deeper grasp of the intricate relationship between journalism, technology and society in the digital era. The Labservatory also contributes to society since it may be used by the broader public for immediate access to more pluralistic information and thus for promoting both news media literacy and news media accountability.

Due to contemporary threats to democracy, the topic is highly prominent in news and social discourse. The Library and Information Science (LIS) field writes about democracy frequently and it is a core concept underwriting many common library practices, but it lacks a working definition of modern democracy. This article supplies a minimal definition of democracy specifically for LIS, and expands the concept to encompass a more empirically accurate concept of library roles in democratic societies that includes the sociology of democracy where libraries arguable play a more significant role.

There is an unpacking of library assumptions about operating in democratic societies, an empirical survey of the conditions of modern democracy, and a baseline theoretical description of democratic functioning as it currently exists.

A minimal definition of modern democracy situates library practices – and in some ways minimizes them. However, the role of culture – the sociology that democracy presumes – comes to prominence when the civil society role of libraries and the conditions of successful democratic functioning are examined.

There is now a minimal definition of democracy for LIS with this effort, but it needs expansion. In that sense, LIS is a leading example of the undertheorized role of the sociology that democracy presumes.