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The study aims to determine whether a relationship exists between the potential significance of corporate controversies for stakeholders and how organisations respond to them in their annual and sustainability reports.

This paper employs content analysis on annual and sustainability reports of 48 listed companies from the Refinitiv database. The logit regression was used to estimate the model.

The study revealed that the main factors increasing the probability of a controversial issue being addressed in a corporate report are the controversy’s potential significance, companies’ financial performance and lawsuits.

Our study has three major limitations. These are a relatively small sample of companies and reports, focusing on disclosures made in corporate reports and omitting other channels of communication, for example, social media, and a certain amount of subjectivity in the process of coding information.

Former studies show that corporations face a serious risk of their hypocritical strategies becoming too evident for stakeholder groups. Our findings suggest that the risk is already materialising and may undermine the idea of CSR and sustainability reporting.

Our research focuses on high-profile adverse incidents widely reported in the media, the omission of which from corporate reports seems to constitute a particular case of organised hypocrite. It also demonstrates that companies use an impression management strategy to defuse adverse publicity and that major controversies cause minor ones to be omitted from their reports.

This paper presents a critical examination of the contemporary state of the accounting discipline and poses the question of its future trajectory. The aim of the study is to show that the path to be followed is the one traced by the masters of the discipline, which lies in the wake of the rediscovery of social and moral values and shared value.

Study of the conceptual nature of research topic, that is, the discipline of accounting, in an intertemporal exploration through some selected theoretical constructs.

There is no need for a new accounting science with new paradigms, but only for a recovery of the social and moral values of accounting that have lain dormant during the dusty centuries of human history.

The study does not provide an extensive analysis of the evolution of accounting history.

The recovery of the social and ethical dimension will not only make accounting more attractive to young students but will also have a medium-term impact on the profession, freeing it from the stereotypes of an unexciting and aseptic discipline. This broadening of scope and momentum inspires the engagement of academics, practitioners, experts and policymakers in confronting and proactively addressing the complex challenges that the world faces today, toward the United Nations 2030 Agenda and beyond.

This historical paper’s originality lies in its intertemporal perspective.

Universities in the United Kingdom, like their counterparts globally, are confronting difficulties associated with the well-being of students. The origins of these challenges are complex, exacerbated by various global events. In response, universities are trying to address these growing concerns and the escalating need for student support. Faculty members are often recruited to assist students in navigating academic and personal challenges. The aim of this study was to investigate how the process of student mentoring, by faculty members, could be made more operationally robust to better support student demand, thus yielding greater value for both students and staff.

A qualitative approach was adopted with 19 academic faculty working as mentors within a UK business school who participated in 90-minute semi-structured interviews. Interviews were analysed using an operational (transformation) management framework, with findings categorised under three key headings – inputs, transformations and outputs – to discover how the operational process of mentoring students could be enhanced.

Participants discussed the inputs required to deliver mentoring, the process of transformation and their desired outputs. Findings suggest coordinated and relevant inputs that is, information, environments and technology, coupled with good mentor selection and recruitment improves operational robustness, adding greater value to the student experience by creating more purposeful outputs, thereby benefiting themselves and their students.

The application of an operational (transformation) process framework to analyse faculty mentoring of students is unique, thereby offering new insights into the construction and management of these types of academic support initiatives.

It is crucial to transform current enterprises to greener versions of them to reach the sustainable development goals. The first step of this transformation can be understanding comprehensively environmental performances of enterprises. This study presents a practical analysis for evaluation of factors affecting environmental performance of enterprises to call them as a “dark green.”

For this purpose, a detailed factor search was primarily performed and then the weights of them on environmental performance of the enterprises to support sustainable development were analyzed using fuzzy cognitive map (FCM) that incorporates the casual relationships between factors and represents the dynamics of the complex systems. The FCM was also supported with extended great deluge algorithm (EGDA), which is an evolutionary algorithm with high performance to increase robustness of the study.

The findings indicated that the most influential factors on environmental performance of an activist enterprise are “loyalty to regulations,” “digitalization level,” “tendency to produce environmentally friendly products/services,” “productivity efforts” and “fossil fuel consumption,” respectively. While the first four of them affect the environmental performance positively, fossil fuel consumption affects it negatively.

The results of this study can help companies to prioritize the critical points for their environmental perspectives, observe at which factors they are good or lacking and find where to start improvement.

This study is one of the pioneering studies to investigate the importance of criteria for a dark green business, considering 21 factors from different sources to make a detailed representation of corporate environmental sustainability.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which interdisciplinary (HASS, i.e. non-STEM) factors—in particular, accounting, stakeholder management and accountability—enable, influence and motivate large human exploration ventures, principally in maritime and space fields, utilizing Columbus’s and Chinese explorations of the 1400s as the primary setting.

The study analyzes archival data from narrative and interpretational history, including both academic and non-academic sources, that relate to two global historical events, the Columbus and Ming Chinese exploration eras (c. 1400–1500), as a parallel to the modern “Space Race”. Existing studies on pertinent HASS (Humanities and Social Sciences) and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) enablers, influencers and motivators are utilized in the analysis. The authors draw upon the concepts of stakeholder theory and the construct of accountability in their analysis.

Findings suggest that non-STEM considerations—politics, finance, accountability, culture, theology and others—played crucial roles in enabling Western Europe (Columbus) to reach the Americas before China or other global powers, demonstrating the pivotal importance of HASS factors in human advancements and exploration.

In seeking to answer those questions, this study identifies only those factors (HASS or STEM) that may support the success or failure in execution of the exploration and development of a region such as the New World or Space. Moreover, the study has the following limitation. Relative successes, failures, drivers and enablers of exploratory ventures are drawn almost exclusively from the documented historical records of the nations, entities and individuals (China and Europe) who conducted those ventures. A paucity of objective sources in some fields, and the need to set appropriate boundaries for the study, also necessitate such limitation.

It is observable that many of those HASS factors also appear to have been influencers in modern era Space projects. For Apollo and Soyuz, success factors such as the relative economics of USA and USSR, their political ideologies, accountabilities and organizational priorities have clear echoes. What the successful voyages of Columbus and Apollo also have in common is an appetite to take risks for an uncertain return, whether as sponsor or voyager; an understanding of financial management and benefits measurement, and a leadership (Isabella I, John F. Kennedy) possessing a vision, ideology and governmental apparatus to further the venture’s goals.

Whilst various historical studies have examined influences behind the oceangoing explorations of the 1400s and the colonization of the “New World”, this article takes an original approach of analyzing those motivations and other factors collectively, in interdisciplinary terms (HASS and STEM). This approach also has the potential to provide a novel method of examining accountability and performance in modern exploratory ventures, such as crewed space missions.

The authors examine the effect of climate risk on accounting conservatism for a sample of listed companies operating in 26 developing countries.

The authors employ the Climate Risk Index (CRI) developed by Germanwatch to capture the severity of losses due to extreme weather events at the country level. The authors use different approaches to measure firm-level accounting conservatism.

The authors find that greater climate risk leads to a lower level of accounting conservatism. The results hold even after using different estimation methods.

Although the authors' analysis is limited to the period 2007–2016, it could be helpful for standard setters such as International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and International Sustainable Standards Board (ISSB) as they may consider the potential effect of climate risk in their international standards.

The negative impacts of climate risk on the quality of financial reporting as proxied by accounting conservatism could trigger regulators and standard setters to require disclosure of information relating to climate risks and to incorporate climate-related risks in their risk management systems. In addition, for policymakers, incorporating accounting conservatism as a financial quality reporting standard could help promote greater transparency, accuracy and reliability in financial reporting in the context of climate risk.

The authors add to the literature on international differences in accounting conservatism by showing that climate risk significantly affects unconditional and conditional conservatism. The authors' results provide fresh evidence of the dark side of climate change. That is, climate risk is shown to decrease financial reporting quality.

This study aims to explore how science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine (STEMM) graduate students’ experiences with and conceptualizations of racism can more clearly expose the current racial climate across multiple academic institutions.

A mixed-method approach using a single online questionnaire consisting of open-ended and Likert scale questions about their perceptions of the racial climate in their department was completed by 34 graduate students of different races and STEMM disciplines.

Results from this study suggested that graduate students, regardless of race, consistently perceive STEMM as colorblind. The results also suggest that experiencing or witnessing racial discrimination is potentially predictive of perceptions of negative social support. Furthermore, multiracial and international graduate students often face different experiences of discrimination than do other graduate students.

By better understanding STEMM academic climates, higher education institutions can begin to reflect on the social barriers that may limit minoritized students from matriculating in academic STEMM spaces and affect retention.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically analyze the impact of directors’ and officers’ (D&O) liability insurance on enterprise strategic change. It also explores the mediating role of litigation risk, the moderating roles of enterprise science and technology level and precipitation organizational slack between them. In addition, it examines the joint moderating roles of the top management team (TMT) external social network and enterprise science and technology level, and enterprise scale and precipitation organizational slack.

Using the unbalanced panel data of A-share listed companies in the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges of China from 2002 to 2020 as the research sample, this paper uses the ordinary least square method and fixed-effect model to study the relationship between D&O liability insurance and enterprise strategic change. The study also focuses on the mediating mechanism and moderating mechanisms between them.

The authors find that D&O liability insurance has an “incentive effect,” which can significantly promote enterprise strategic change. Litigation risk plays a partial mediating role between D&O liability insurance and enterprise strategic change. Enterprise science and technology level and precipitation organizational slack negatively moderate the relationship between D&O liability insurance and enterprise strategic change. TMT external social network and enterprise science and technology level, and enterprise-scale and precipitation organizational slack have joint moderating effects on the relationship between D&O liability insurance and enterprise strategic change.

This paper confirms the “incentive effect hypothesis” of the impact of D&O liability insurance on enterprise strategic change, which not only broadens the research perspective of enterprise strategic management but also further expands the research scope of D&O liability insurance. Besides, this paper thoroughly explores the influencing mechanisms between D&O liability insurance and enterprise strategic change, providing incremental contributions to the research literature in the field of enterprise risk management and corporate governance. The findings have practical guiding significance for expanding the coverage of D&O liability insurance, promoting the implementation of strategic changes and improving the level of corporate governance of Chinese enterprises.

This paper aims to examine the effect of three types of health-related claims (health, nutrition and ingredient) and product healthiness on situational skepticism toward the claims that appear on the front-of-package of food products. The effect of situational skepticism on the purchase intention of the product is further examined.

Two experimental studies were conducted with a 3 (health-related claims: health claim vs nutrition claim vs ingredient claim) × 2 (product healthiness: healthy vs unhealthy) between-subjects factorial design. Study 1 investigates the effects within a single product category (Biscuits) and Study 2 the effects across product categories (Salad and Pizza).

The results demonstrate that situational skepticism is the highest for health claims, followed by nutrition claims and the least for ingredient claims. In addition, situational skepticism is higher for claims appearing on unhealthy products vis-à-vis healthy ones. Finally, situational skepticism mediates the relationship between claim type, product healthiness and product purchase intention.

This study contributes to the field of nutrition labeling by advancing research on information processing of nutrition labels through the lens of the persuasion knowledge model (Friestad and Wright, 1994). Specifically, this study contributes to a nuanced understanding of claim formats on how the language properties of the claim – its vagueness, specificity and verifiability – can affect consumer perception. This study finds that higher specificity, verifiability and lower vagueness of ingredient claims lead to lower skepticism and hence higher purchase intention.

Furthermore, this study incrementally contributes to the ongoing discussion about the claim–carrier combination by showing that health-related claims are better perceived on healthy compared to unhealthy products. Hence, managers should avoid health washing, as this can backfire and cause harm to the reputation of the firm.

From a public policy point of view, this study makes a case for strong monitoring and regulations of ingredient claims, as consumers believe these claims easily and hence can be misled by false ingredient claims made by unethical marketers.

The scope of research on skepticism has largely been limited to examining a general individual tendency of being suspicious (i.e. dispositional skepticism) in health-related claims as well as other areas of marketing. In this research, the authors extend the scope by examining how specific types of claims (health vs nutrition vs ingredient) and product healthiness jointly impact consumer skepticism, i.e. situational skepticism.

The present study aims to investigate the impact of corporate governance proxies by ownership structure and firm-specific characteristics, i.e. firm size, leverage, growth opportunities, previous year dividend, firm risk, profitability, and liquidity on dividend behavior of the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) listed firms.

Final sample of the study consists of 140 PSX-listed firms. The study covers a period of six years, starting from 2015 to 2020. Dividend payout dummy, dividend payout ratio, and dividend yield were used to assess the dividend behavior of the sample firms. The appropriate regression procedures (logistic, probit, ordinary least square (OLS), and fixed effect regression) are used to test the study hypothesis. To check the robustness of the result, a system GMM estimation technique is also used in the present study.

The study reveals that institutional ownership, foreign ownership, and individual ownership have a significant positive whereas managerial ownership has a significant negative impact on the dividend decision of sample firms. Among firm-specific characteristics, it was found that liquidity, profitability, and the previous year's dividend were significantly positive, while growth opportunities were significantly inversely associated with dividend payout decisions of PSX-listed firms.

This study sheds light on the relationship between dividend policy, ownership structure, and firm-specific factors in the context of an emerging market like Pakistan. The study's findings have important implications for managers, minority shareholders, lawmakers, and investors looking for guidance on the dividend policy of publicly-traded non-financial firms.

The literature lacks studies that together analyze the ownership characteristics and firm-specific variables on dividend decisions, particularly in the context of developing economies. The current study aims to fill this gap.