Search results

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) recently relaunched Nigeria’s cashless policy initiative which seeks to reduce financial crime and tax avoidance, decrease cash dependency, advance the adoption of digital financial services (DFS), decrease the risks to the payment system and foster financial inclusion. This study aims to identify the unique challenges of going cashless in Nigeria, particularly in terms of infrastructural, exclusionary and cost implications of the policy on the average citizens.

The author applies a doctrinal research methodology to identify and reflect on key challenges of the cashless policy from the economic, regulatory and transactional perspectives.

The cashless policy initiative in Nigeria heralds value for financial integrity, financial policy regulation and user convenience. The mode of introduction, however, ushers in significant challenges and hardly considers Nigeria’s inadequate payment infrastructure, persistent financial exclusion, low levels of financial and digital literacy and capability, high cost of using DFS and pervasive proclivity for cash. As Nigerians adjust albeit inconveniently to the policy, the CBN can ameliorate the hardship by strengthening the payment infrastructure, particularly for digital payments, fostering consumer trust by safeguarding user funds and enabling consumer preferences.

Research materials include the national regulator’s policy documents and newspaper articles that have not been published in formal reports but non-the-less adequately mirror the policy intention of the CBN and the lived experiences of Nigerians.

This study identifies the practical steps and regulatory measures that the CBN can take to improve acceptance and meaningful and sustainable adoption of the cashless policy by the majority of Nigerians.

The recommendations that are proffered provide some rich insights to inform regulatory direction for the CBN to seamlessly phase-in the cashless policy and consequently drive down financial exclusion in Nigeria.

This study contributes to the policy discussion around the introduction of the cashless Nigeria project. The doctrinal research method highlights the policy intentions of the regulator in juxtaposition with lived experiences of Nigerians. This study offers recommendations to bolster financial inclusion, stability and integrity.

This study examines how assurors make sense of sustainability assurance (SA) work and how interactions with assurance team members and clients shape assurors’ sensemaking and their actual SA work.

To obtain detailed accounts of how SA work occurs on the ground, this study explores three SA engagements by interviewing the main actors involved, both at the client firms and at their Big Four assurance providers.

Individual assurors’ (i.e. partners and other team members) sensemaking of SA work results in the crafting of their logics of action (LoAs), that is, their meanings about the objectives of SA work and how to conduct it. Without organizational socialization, team members may not arrive at shared meanings and deviate from the team-wide assurance approach. To fulfill their objectives for SA work, assurors may engage in socialization with clients or assume a temporary role. Yet, the role negotiations taking place in the shadows of the scope negotiations determine their default role during the engagement.

Two options are available to help SA statement users gauge the relevance of SA work: either displaying the SA work performed or making it more uniform.

This study theoretically grounds how assurors make sense of SA work and documents how (the lack of) professional socialization, organizational socialization and socialization of frequent interaction partners at the client shape actual SA work. Thereby, it unravels the SA work concealed behind SA statements.

This chapter examines the internationalisation of public higher education in Brazil using the theoretical triptych of internationalisation as developed by leading scholars in the field: internationalisation at home (IaH), internationalisation abroad (IA), and internationalisation at a distance (IaD). This framework – while rooted in knowledge, systems, and scholarship from researchers and institutions in the Global North – is a constructive tool for categorising and understanding internationalisation at Brazil’s higher education institutions (HEIs) when coupled with an exploration of the history, context, policy, and dynamics of internationalisation efforts. The chapter then summarises and underscores recent and important scholarship by Brazilian researchers and others in the Global South that describes the history of the nation’s internationalisation efforts. It also critiques the powerful influence that Global North-centred objectives and priorities for internationalisation have on the process at Brazilian HEIs. Following a discussion of the theoretical framework and relevant literature, the chapter provides a case study of internationalisation efforts and initiatives of an elite public university, the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG). Content analysis of UFMG’s website and publicly available reports and data demonstrates a high level of institutional internationalisation that has unfolded in recent years, stimulated by federal funding and guided by a strategic framework developed within the Ministry of Education. An analysis of UFMG’s mission, partnerships and programmes finds that the institution serves as an example of internationalisation in Brazil’s public higher education context, as its programmes and initiatives exemplify the overarching objectives of internationalisation in Brazilian higher education.

In the mid-2000s, the operator of New York City’s mass transit network committed more than a half-billion dollars to military contractor Lockheed Martin for a security technology capable, in part, of inferring threats based on analysis of data streams, of developing response strategies, and taking automated action toward alerts and calamities in light of evolving circumstances. The project was a failure. This chapter explores the conceptualization and development of this technology – rooted in cybernetics – and compares its conceptual underpinnings with some situated problems of awareness, communication, coordination, and action in emergencies as they unfold in one of the busiest transport systems in the world, the New York subway. The author shows how the technology, with all the theatrical trappings of a “legitimate” security solution, was apparently conceived without a grounded understanding of actual use-cases, and the degree to which the complex interactions which give rise to subway emergency can be anticipated in – and therefore managed through – a technological system. As a case-study, the chapter illustrates the pitfalls of deploying technology against problems which are not well-defined in the first place, to the neglect of investments against much more fundamental problems – such as inadequate communication systems, and unstable relationships with emergency response agencies – which might offer guaranteed benefits, and indeed lay a firm groundwork for future deployment of more ambitious technology.

This study aimed to evaluate the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool for knowledge synthesis, the production of written content and the delivery of coaching conversations.

The research employed the use of experts to evaluate the outputs from ChatGPT's AI tool in blind tests to review the accuracy and value of outcomes for written content and for coaching conversations.

The results from these tasks indicate that there is a significant gap between comparative search tools such as Google Scholar, specialist online discovery tools (EBSCO and PsycNet) and GPT-4's performance. GPT-4 lacks the accuracy and detail which can be found through other tools, although the material produced has strong face validity. It argues organisations, academic institutions and training providers should put in place policies regarding the use of such tools, and professional bodies should amend ethical codes of practice to reduce the risks of false claims being used in published work.

This is the first research paper to evaluate the current potential of generative AI tools for research, knowledge curation and coaching conversations.

This study, a theoretical article, aims to introduce new institutionalism as a framework through which business and management researchers can explore the significance of artificial intelligence (AI) in organizations. Although the new institutional theory is a fully established research program, the neo-institutional literature on AI is almost non-existent. There is, therefore, a need to develop a deeper understanding of AI as both the product of institutional forces and as an institutional force in its own right.

The authors follow the top-down approach. Accordingly, the authors first briefly describe the new institutionalism, trace its historical development and introduce its fundamental concepts: institutional legitimacy, environment and isomorphism. Then, the authors use those as the basis for the queries to perform a scoping review on the institutional role of AI in organizations.

The findings reveal that a comprehensive theory on AI is largely absent from business and management literature. The new institutionalism is only one of many possible theoretical perspectives (both contextually novel and insightful) from which researchers can study AI in organizational settings.

The authors use the insights from new institutionalism to illustrate how a particular social theory can fit into the larger theoretical framework for AI in organizations. The authors also formulate four broad research questions to guide researchers interested in studying the institutional significance of AI. Finally, the authors include a section providing concrete examples of how to study AI-related institutional dynamics in business and management.