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This paper offers a way of revivifying classical accounting research in the form of a pragmatist neoclassical programme with a sound epistemological underpinning.

The paper draws on a pragmatist perspective on financial accounting and accounting research springing from John Dewey's theory of inquiry.

Although a pragmatist underpinning does not entail specific methodological prescriptions, it can provide fruitful insights in research design. The paper discusses the structure and content of a research programme drawing on a pragmatist underpinning and sets out proposals for a practical research agenda. Although the agenda is shaped around the topic of identifiable intangibles, much of the paper has substantially wider relevance.

The approach justifies a revival in scholarly research employing classical methods and directed at improving accounting methods and standards.

The approach would promote closer engagement between scholarly accounting and practitioners such as standard-setters, making some contribution to closing the widely acknowledged gap between research and practice.

The paper offers a neoclassical programme of research drawing considerably more extensively on pragmatist philosophy than did theorisation in the classical period.

This research investigates the adoption of the industrial Internet of things (IIoT) in SMEs to achieve and increase organizational performance. With the latest technology, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can create a competitive edge in the market and better serve customers.

Twelve hypotheses are proposed for this study. This study constructed a questionnaire based on technological, organizational, environmental and human perspectives. A survey is conducted on the SMEs of India using the questionnaire.

Eight hypotheses were accepted, and four hypotheses were not supported. The hypotheses rejected are infrastructure, organizational readiness, internal excellence and prior experience. The findings suggested that adopting IIoT in SMEs will increase organizational performance.

This study will be helpful for the manager, top management and policymakers. This study identified the areas SMEs need to work on to adopt the technologies.

In the literature, no article considered IIoT adoption in SME firms as a human factor. Therefore, this study is unique, including human, technological, organizational and environmental factors.

This paper aims to improve the life of the printed circuit boards (PCB) used in computers based on modal analysis by increasing the natural frequency of the PCB assembly.

In this work, through experiments and numerical simulations, an attempt has been made to increase the fundamental natural frequency of the PCB assembly as high as practically achievable so as to minimize the impacts of dynamic loads acting on it. An optimization tool in the finite element software (ANSYS) was used to search the specified design space for the optimal support location of the six fastening screws.

It is observed that by changing the support locations based on the optimization results the fundamental natural frequency can be raised up to 51.1% and the same is validated experimentally.

Manufacturers of PCBs used in computers fix the support locations based on symmetric feature of the board not on the dynamic behavior of the assembly. This work might lead manufacturers to redesign the location of other surface mount components.

This work provides guidelines for PCB manufacturers to finalize their support locating points which will improve the dynamic characteristics of the PCB assembly during its functioning.

This study provides a novel method to improve the life of PCB based on support locations optimization which includes majority of the surface mount components that contributes to the total mass the PCB assembly.

This study aims to empirically investigate the effect of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) convergence on corporate risk disclosure, with a particular emphasis on the quantity and coverage of risk information. The research also conducts economic benefit and cost analysis to investigate the economic implications that may arise from the transition to IFRS reporting.

A content analysis approach is used to measure two broader dimensions of risk disclosure, namely, risk disclosure quantity and risk topic coverage. Furthermore, using firm-fixed effect regression on a sample of 143 Indian-listed companies, this study investigates the variations in these risk disclosure dimensions before (2012–2016) and subsequent to (2017–2021) the convergence with IFRS.

The empirical results of this research demonstrate that IFRS convergence has led to a significant improvement in firms’ risk disclosure across several dimensions. Particularly, during the post-IFRS period, firms’ usage of risk-related words and sentences has considerably surged in MD&A, Notes and whole annual reports. In addition, upon IFRS convergence, firms’ risk descriptions have become more extensive and evenly distributed across risk topic categories. Moreover, the in-depth benefit and cost analysis revealed that firms reporting under IFRS benefit from decreased cost of equity capital, but they also incur a higher cost of audit fees.

This study contributes to the literature in two ways. First, this is the only study, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to conduct a broader examination of the impact of mandatory IFRS convergence on corporate risk disclosure, with a major focus on quantity and coverage of risk information. Second, by conducting economic benefit and cost analysis, this study provides novel insights into the critical role of IFRS risk disclosures toward multiple economic outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between accounting conservatism and pledging of shares by controlling shareholders of a firm to obtain a loan. The pledging of shares by the controlling shareholders of a firm results in alterations to the payoff and risk structure for these shareholders. Since accounting numbers have valuation implications, pledging of shares by a controlling shareholder has an impact on accounting policy choices made by the firm. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of controlling shareholder share pledging to obtain a loan on a specific accounting policy choice, namely, conservatism.

The paper uses a large data set from India comprising 14,786 firm years consisting of 1,570 firms belonging to 58 industries for a period of 11 years (2009–2019). The authors use ordinary least square regression with robust standard errors. The authors conduct robustness checks and the results are consistent across alternative statistical methodologies and alternative measures of the primary dependent and independent variables.

The primary results show that pledging of shares by the controlling shareholders results in higher conditional conservatism and lower unconditional conservatism. Further analysis reveals that the relationship is stronger when the controlling shareholder holds a majority ownership in the firm. Additionally, the results show that for business group affiliated firms, which are unique to developing countries, both the conditional and the unconditional conservatism are incrementally lower when the controlling shareholder pledges the shares. For family firms with a family member as CEO, the conditional conservatism is incrementally higher and the unconditional conservatism is incrementally lower. Finally, the authors show that the results hold when the pledge intensity variable is measured with a one-year lag and finally, the authors show that conditional conservatism is incrementally higher in the year of the increase in the pledge and the year after, but there is no such incremental impact on unconditional conservatism.

The research is limited to the listed firms in India. Since majority of the listed firms are controlled by families and the family firms around the world are heterogeneous the findings of the research may not be applicable to other countries.

The study has implications for policy-making and monitoring of the pledging by the controlling shareholders. It also helps the investors in making investment decisions with respect to family firms in India.

The study is unique as it focuses on the relationship between pledging of shares by the controlling shareholders and its impact on accounting conservatism. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research integrating these two aspects.

The current era is characterized by hyperturbulence, population growth, attention to food security, the need to identify sustainable strategies to reduce pollution and poverty, and the disparity between developed and undeveloped economies. These circumstances force a global paradigm shift based on sustainable practices and processes that put people and the environment at the core of each activity, contributing to sustainable, social, and economic development and promoting well-being in the community.

In this spirit, a strong impulse can derive from the practices of Green Technology, considered here as that set of processes aimed at eco-sustainability that acquire undisputed relevance, especially for emerging economies.

This chapter focuses on the role that Green technology practices exert in generating local well-being in the world's fifth-largest country: Brazil. Dynamic growth and effective social policies lifted millions of people out of poverty in the 2000s, even if socio-economic development varies widely across the country. Brazil is a leading global agricultural, minerals, and oil producer. The natural environment represents the primary source of Brazil's development that deserves to be protected and push firms and citizens to find new sustainable solutions based on green policies. Drawing inspiration from a Brazilian case study, this chapter proposes a set of building blocks that foster sustainable business practices in emerging countries.

The chapter is organized as follows: the first part introduces the concept of green technology practices; the second highlights the opportunities of green technologies; the third focuses on a single case study.

The purpose of this paper is to carry out a detailed analysis of two port converter fed by Solar and wind sources during different operational modes by small signal modelling. The converter is fully characterized and simulated using Matlab/Simulink. The voltage and current waveforms along with their corresponding expressions describing the converter operation are presented in detail. Then the DC-averaged equivalent topology is derived using circuit averaging technique. A complete derivation of the power stage transfer functions relevant to the capacitor voltage loop, such as capacitor voltage to solar voltage and inductor current to wind input voltage is obtained.

Stability analysis is used to analyze the small deviations around the steady-state operating point which helps in modeling the closed loop converter parameters. This paper presents the analysis, modeling and control of two port Cuk-buck converter topology.

Based on the results, a control strategy is designed to manage the energy flow within the system. A lab-level prototype for Cuk-buck converter with PWM controller is implemented and tested under various input conditions to study the performance of the converter during seasonal changes. The simulation and experimental results showed that effective operation and control strategy of the hybrid power supply system managed to be achieved alongside its feasible outputs.

This analysis can be extended to all power electronic converters and will be useful for the design of controllers.

An appropriate control design plays a key role in enhancing the overall performance of the system. Hence, this paper is intended to present in detail the small signal modeling of the Cuk-buck converter along with the control design for all the switching modes.

Though this type of converter topology has been discussed widely in literature, very scarce literature is available related to modeling and control design of the converter. A state-space averaging model of the converter followed by a type-II compensator design is described, and prototype design and experimental results are also presented.

The purpose of this study is to augment the perceived service quality (PSQ) dimensions as well as evaluate the effects of pandemic susceptibility and severity by appending crucial enablers of customer satisfaction (CS) in the restaurant industry (RI).

The top 10 restaurants from Mumbai and Kolkata were selected based on the Conde Nast Traveller Magazine List, 2020. The study used a cross-sectional design to collect responses from 840 respondents across the two major metropolitans of India after the second wave of COVID-19 by employing a structured questionnaire. The proffered hypotheses in this study were validated using factor analysis and structural equation modelling (SEM) techniques.

This research espies pivotal facilitators of CS and customers' perceived value (CPV). The results divulge that food quality (FQ) and tangibility dimensions markedly enhance CS while the FQ and digital technologies (DT) dimensions augment CPV in Indian restaurants. The study asserts that CPV acts as a partial mediator between FQ and DT on the one hand and CS on the other. In addition, perceived pandemic susceptibility (PPSU) and perceived pandemic severity (PPSE) moderate the association between CPV and CS in restaurants.

This study exemplifies the critical enablers of CS and CPV that may invigorate restaurant owners, managers and policymakers to prioritize the identified dimensions to aggrandize CS and CPV quotients.

The study enriches the literature by assimilating DT and CPV dimensions in a comprehensive theoretical framework. The research is unique in attempting to unfurl the moderating effects of PPSU and PPSE in the RI.

Renal failure is an end-stage consequence after persistent hyperglycemia during diabetic nephropathy (DN), and the etiology of DN has been linked to oxidative stress. The purpose of this research was to determine the beneficial synergistic effects of S-Allyl Cysteine (SAC) and Taurine (TAU) on oxidative damage in the kidneys of type 2 diabetic rats induced by hyperglycemia.

Experimental diabetes was developed by administering intraperitoneal single dose of streptozotocin (STZ; 65 mg/kg) with nicotinamide (NA; 230 mg/kg) in adult rats. Diabetic and control rats were treated with SAC (150 mg/kg), TAU (200 mg/kg) or SAC and TAU combination (75 + 100 mg/kg) for four weeks. The estimation of body weight, fasting blood glucose (FBG), oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT), oxidative stress markers along with kidney histopathology was done to investigate the antidiabetic potential of SAC/TAU in the NA/STZ diabetic group.

The following results were obtained for the therapeutic efficacy of SAC/TAU: decrease in blood glucose level, decreased level of thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS) and increased levels of GSH, glutathione-s-transferase (GST) and catalase (CAT). SAC/TAU significantly modulated diabetes-induced histological changes in the kidney of rats.

SAC/TAU combination therapy modulated the oxidative stress markers in the kidney in diabetic rat model and also prevented oxidative damage as observed through histopathological findings.