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The extant literature posits several claims about the equitable resources allocation through compliance in public procurement management. Notwithstanding, there are hardly any empirical studies that explore the link between the causes and extent of compliance on one hand and value for money (VfM) on the other hand. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the efficacy of public procurement laws in ensuring VfM in a developing country context.

The study employs a qualitative case study approach involving three local government agencies in Ghana. Purposive and stratified random sampling strategies were used in selecting respondents who were interviewed through focused group discussions, semi-structured and open-ended questionnaires. The study utilizes an interpretivist/constructivist paradigm which allows for the co-creation of knowledge and subjectivity in knowledge acquisition.

The study finds that the presence of a legal and regulatory framework does not ipso facto guarantee compliance and VfM. Additionally, a possible reason why even reported cases of compliance do not translate into VfM is that evidence of compliance, especially in a developing country setting, is often a façade.

Public procurement entities in developing countries stand little chance of achieving accountability and VfM gains if they continue to rely on compliance as a micro-management tool.

The paper challenges the dominant assumptions in the public procurement management discourse by drawing attention to the quality of reported compliance and its implication for VfM.

Motivated by claims that the International Integrated Reporting Framework (IRF) can be used to comply with Directive 2014/95/EU (the EU Directive) on non-financial and diversity disclosure, the purpose of this study is to examine whether companies can comply with corporate reporting laws using de facto standards or frameworks.

The authors adopted an interpretivist approach to research along with current regulatory studies that aim to investigate business compliance with the law using private sector standards. To support the authors’ arguments, publicly available secondary data sources were used, including newsletters, press releases and websites, reports from key players within the accounting profession, public documents issued by the European Commission and data from corporatergister.com.

To become a de facto standard or framework, a private standard-setter requires the support of corporate regulators to mandate it in a specific national jurisdiction. The de facto standard-setter requires a powerful coalition of actors who can influence the policymakers to allow its adoption and diffusion at a national level to become mandated. Without regulatory support, it is difficult for a private and voluntary reporting standard or framework to be adopted and diffused. Moreover, the authors report that the <IRF> preferences stock market capitalism over sustainability because it privileges organisational sustainability over social and environmental sustainability, emphasises value creation over holding organisations accountable for their impact on society and the environment and privileges the entitlements of providers of financial capital over other stakeholders.

The authors question the suitability of the goals of both the <IRF> and the EU Directive during and after the COVID-19 crisis. The planned changes to both need rethinking as we head into uncharted waters. Moreover, the authors believe that the people cannot afford any more reporting façades.

The authors offer a critical analysis of the link between the <IRF> and the EU Directive and how the <IRF> can be used to comply with the EU Directive. By questioning the relevance of the compliance question, the authors advance a critique about the relevance of these and other legal and de facto frameworks, particularly considering the more pressing needs that must be met to address the economic, social and environmental implications of the COVID-19 crisis.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the international community efforts through the OECD and the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) in confronting tax evasion and money laundering (ML).

The paper is based on the confrontation of OECD's and FAFT's results with data produced by the World Bank and Transparency International.

The G20 has speeded up the fight against tax evasion. There is no dilemma between confronting tax evasion or organized crime/terrorist ML but a potential crowding out effect and a risk of facade compliance. Corruption and poor governance have regional aspects but generate money for global laundering. The OECD is impressive in countering tax evasion. Its listing is not universal and gives satisfaction to jurisdictions having bad corruption/governance indicators. The FATF's record is striking but governance remains an issue as well as fair cooperation, and the ML and terrorist financing (TF) threat is evolving. New risks include tax evasion know‐how, facade compliance, rising bad banks and financial centres in poorly governed jurisdictions. There is a destabilizing effect in the competition and linkage between weakly and highly compliant institutions and jurisdictions. The misuse of the financial sector has a bright future as long as poor governance continues to affect jurisdictions.

The paper is a call to practitioners, professionals and policy makers for keeping the momentum on ML and taking into account governance indicators.

The paper puts a parallel between the actions of the international community on tax evasion and ML and confronts official results with relevant assessments on corruption and governance.

The purpose of this research is to study how compliance evaluation becomes performed in practice. Compliance evaluation is a common practice among organizations that need to evaluate their posture against a set of criteria (e.g. a standard, legislative framework and “best practices”). The results of these evaluations have significant importance for organizations, especially in the context of information security and continuity. The author argues that how these evaluations become performed is not merely a “social” activity but shaped by the materiality of the evaluation criteria

The authors adopt a sociomaterial practice-based view to study the compliance evaluation through in situ participant observations from compliance evaluation workshops to evaluate organizational compliance against a information security and business continuity criteria. The empirical material was analyzed to construct vignettes that serve to illustrate the practice of compliance evaluation.

The research analysis shows how the information security and business continuity criteria themselves partake in the compliance evaluations by operating through (ventriloqually) the evaluators on three strata: the material, the textual and the structural. The author also provides a conceptualization of a hybrid agency.

This research contributes to lack of studies on the organizational-level compliance. Further, the research is an original contribution to information security and business continuity management by focusing on the practices of compliance evaluation. Further, the research has theoretical novelty by adopting the ventriloqual agency as a hybrid agency to study the sociomateriality of a phenomenon.

This paper aims to investigate the prevalence of corruption in Ghana to understand how and why it has turned public procurement into a mere money-making scheme instead of a means to provide needed public goods and services.

The study focuses on Ghana as a case study and mobilizes the monetization of politics lenses. Data are collected via interviews with key officials across the procurement sector (including the government, donors and civil society), documents, documentaries and news articles.

The findings suggest that the increasing costs of elections and political financing coupled with the costs of vote-buying, which has become informally institutionalized, intensify corruption practices and, consequently, turns public procurement into a mere source of cash for political ends. Political appointments and legalized loopholes facilitate this by helping to nullify the safeguard accounting and other control institutions are designed to provide. Likewise, enduring poverty and rising inequality “force” citizens into a vote-buying culture which distorts democratic premises that may drive out unscrupulous politicians; thus, perpetuating capture schemes. Civil society's efforts to remedy these have had little success, and corruption and inequality remain rife.

The main practical implication of the study lies in the need for a gradual demonetization of elections, and the consideration of the fundamental function of public procurement as a policy instrument embedded in economic, social, cultural and environmental plans. Additionally, given the connectedness of the various corruption issues raised, a comprehensive system-based approach in dealing with them would be more effective than a piecemeal approach targeting each issue/problem in isolation.

While extant literature has examined the issue of endemic corruption in developing countries using state capture, few have attempted to explain why it remains enduring, particularly in public procurement. This study, therefore, contributes to the literature on corruption and state capture theoretically and empirically by drawing on monetization of politics from political science to explain why corruption and state capture endure in certain contexts (with Ghana as an illustrative example) which reduce public procurement to a cash-milking scheme.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how resort managers respond to employment legislation (Law No. 02/2008).

The qualitative case study data from seven self-contained tourist resorts in the Maldives were used to investigate the managerial responses to employment legislation.

Resort managers’ responses ranged from passive compliance to active resistance, with decoupling through opportunism as the dominant strategy used to circumvent the legislation. Some human resource management (HRM) practices emerged from resort managers’ interactions with external stakeholders and employees. Strategic responses and HRM practices were driven by a search for legitimacy or efficiency and sometimes both. The findings show that there are differences between strategic responses and HRM practices by organisational subfield, local resorts and international hotel chains. The resorts’ market orientation also influenced resort managers’ responses and HRM practices.

The findings of this paper have limitations because it was limited to a single industry/sector and to a particular piece of legislation. However, it demonstrates the complexity of the relationship between institutional context and HRM.

This paper shows that responding to employment legislation entails a high level of interplay between the institutional environment and HR actors, and between stakeholders (e.g. employees) and HR actors. It demonstrates the difficulty of reconciling institutional requirements with the preferences of different stakeholders and organisational interests. HR actors actively make sense of institutional requirements and modify HRM practices to accommodate stakeholders’ varying perspectives and preferences. This suggests that in countries such as the Maldives, uneven institutional coverage (e.g. incomplete employment legislation) allows room for organisations to innovate – for better or worse.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue and outline its major themes and challenges, their relevance and the research opportunities the field presents.

The paper reviews prior literature and outlines the need to view public procurement as a policy tool to introduce the contributions to this special issue.

Public procurement has been consistently used to further public policies in a wide range of fields. The collection of articles in this special issue contributes to a broader understanding of the role and potential of public procurement in delivering desired policy outcomes in society. The articles show that public procurement largely has strategic aspirations, and its potential to deliver on wider societal issues is attractive to policy makers. The issues raised in this collection of articles, however, also demonstrate that public procurement often lacks strategic maturity and critical issues, notably around how to demonstrate and evaluate its impact and “success”.

This paper aims to stimulate interdisciplinary research into the role of public procurement as a policy tool and its ability to achieve public value.

This paper discusses theoretical and empirical findings that highlight the importance of public procurement for achieving public value. The special issue examines the interdisciplinary literature on public procurement and shows how it is being used to achieve public value.

Some studies show that improvisation is a source of change, whereas others show that it is a source of stability. The purpose of this paper is to specify the factors which set the boundary between improvised change and improvised stability.

The paper draws on two published studies and contrasts their findings to analyze the extent to which improvisation leads to organizational change or organizational stability.

The paper suggests that the most innovative instances of improvisation reproduce some features of everyday experience. The extent to which an improvisation is a source of stability or a source of change depends on the dynamics of variation, selection and retention therein.

Future research needs to add empirical flesh to this theoretical skeleton to push research on organizational improvisation beyond the study of its causes and into further research on its consequences.

The paper deals with the paradox of making sense about two apparently opposing streams of research on improvisation.

This paper aims to investigate the actions and activities undertaken by public managers of a local government to institutionalise an externally mandated performance measurement and management (PMM) system in a developing country.

A qualitative case study of one of the best-ranked early adopters of PMM in a local government in Indonesia was undertaken, with interviews with public officers at various organisational levels, along with an extensive documentary review. An institutional work perspective was used to explain the types of work undertaken to institutionalise PMM at the organisation.

The PMM change was shown to be centralised and directed from the top and facilitated by other public officers. The Mayors’ instrumental and political view of PMM as a tool for efficiency and societal legitimacy enabled the adoption of PMM. The political and cultural work of the Mayor and the key officers involved constructing new rules pertaining to PMM, specifically in dealing with resource allocation and its associated sanctions and rewards, which encouraged more substantive implementation. The substantive implementation of PMM had a significant influence on the norms and values of the local government.

The case organisation is the local government of a relatively medium-sized city. Therefore, it may be easier to achieve tighter control and coordination as compared to the local government of other larger cities.

The paper highlights the interrelated nature of institutional work in the creation and disruption of institutions. In addition, the three main types of institutional work, i.e. political, cultural and technical work, are not mutually exclusive. The paper also indicates the processes involved in the implementation of PMM, which unfolds from the establishment of a policy, its impact, and the role of the actors in the process.

This chapter aims to present the development of education in the South-East European (SEE) countries, which took place under strong influence of the European Union (EU) education policy. This is examined irrespective of the different relationships these countries have with the EU. Some of these are Member States, and others are candidate or partner countries. The chapter opens with the explanation of the concept of SEE, and it is processed with a discussion on the concept of Europeanization in the education field. The concept refers to the process of forming a common education policy in the EU. This is also transferred to non-EU European countries. The third subchapter synthetizes and evaluates the main characteristics and challenges of the education in the SEE countries from the perspective of common European policy goals.