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Within the context of public sector accountability, the purpose of this paper is to examine South African state-owned enterprises (SOEs) auditing practices and how they have contributed to mitigating prevalent corporate governance issues in South African SOEs.

This paper utilised a thematic content analysis of archival documents relating to South African SOEs. Firstly, to assess the extent to which the auditing dimension of the corporate governance codes, applicable to South African SOEs, conforms with best practices. Secondly, to determine the extent to which the audit practices of all the 21 South African SOEs listed in Schedule 2 of the Public Finance Management Act, have implemented the identified best audit practices.

The findings suggest that South African SOEs appear to have adopted and implemented best audit practices to enhance the quality of their accountability in relation to their corporate governance practices, as contained in their applicable corporate governance frameworks. However, despite the high levels of conformance, the observation that most South African SOEs continue to fail and require government bailouts, appears to suggest that auditing has no bearing on poor SOE performance, and that other corporate governance factors may be at play.

The discussion and findings in this paper suggest that the auditing practices of South African SOEs are adequate. However, that SOEs in South Africa continue to be loss-making may imply that this has contributed little to mitigating their corporate governance problems. Thus, policymakers and standard setters, including the Institute of Directors South Africa and relevant oversight bodies should pay attention to better developing means by which to curtail fruitless and wasteful expenditures by South African SOEs through improved corporate governance practices.

Most SOEs’ mission statements encourage SOEs to be socially responsible and utilise taxpayers’ monies efficiently and effectively without engaging in fruitless and wasteful expenditure. This study is conceived in this light.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, while acknowledging previous studies, this paper is the first to explore this topic in the context of SOEs and in the context of Africa.

This bibliometric study aims to analyze publication trends, active countries, collaborations, influential citations and thematic evolution in learning analytics (LA) research focused on higher education (HE) during and after the COVID-19 lockdown period.

From the Scopus database, this bibliometric analysis extracts and evaluates 609 scholarly articles on LA in HE starting in 2019. The multidimensional process identifies the scope impacts, advancing the understanding of LA in HE. An analysis of co-citation data uncovers the key influences that have shaped the literature. This study uses the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) theory to suggest future research directions and organizational adaptations to new LA technologies and learner responses to LA-enabled personalized interventions.

Learning analytics are becoming important in the HE environment during and after the COVID-19 lockout. Institutions have used LA to collect socio-technical data from digital platforms, giving them important insights into learning processes and systems. The data gathered through LA has assisted in identifying areas for development, opening the path for improved student success and academic performance evaluation and helping students transition to the workforce.

The study’s concentration on the post-COVID-19 timeframe may lead to paying attention to potential pandemic developments. Nonetheless, the findings provide a thorough picture of LA’s contributions to HE and valuable ideas for future study initiatives. Future research with the SOR framework suggests areas for additional study to maximize LA’s potential in diverse HE situations.

This study adds to the growing corpus of knowledge on learning analytics in HE, especially in light of the COVID-19 lockdown and its aftermath. By using bibliometric analysis, the study provides a complete and evidence-based understanding of how LA has been used to address challenges related to HE. This study uses bibliometric analysis and SOR theory to appraise and map HE learning analytics research. The selected study themes can help scholars, educators and institutions shape their future efforts to improve teaching, learning and support mechanisms through learning analytics.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors influencing the development of social media marketing strategy in an international context. We specifically look at the potential drivers and barriers throughout the social media marketing strategy development process and how cultural differences shape social media marketing strategy decision-making among firms in international markets.

The study is conducted with an inductive research approach involving in-depth interviews with 32 firms from Finland, China and Brazil. Using inductive data analysis, we identify both internal and external factors that drive and hinder the development of firms’ social media marketing strategies. Moreover, we explore the essential elements in social media marketing strategy development based on the key practices observed among these firms, which enables us to conduct a comparative analysis of how cultural values influence the development of social media marketing strategies.

Our findings underscore the importance of both internal (i.e. resources and capabilities) and external (i.e. market-level and country-level) factors that influence the development of social media marketing strategy. Our analysis also unveiled four key practices throughout the social media marketing strategy development process: social selling, content marketing, risk management and relationship management. Additionally, we identified three distinct mindsets regarding firms’ social media selling objectives across companies in the three countries.

The comparative approach provides novel insight into firms' international social media marketing strategy. Our proposed conceptual model shows the development process of social media marketing strategy in the international context. The research propositions highlight the role of cultural values and open up new avenues for future research.

This study takes an “entrepreneurship as emancipation” perspective to study entrepreneurs defined as “others” on multiple categories: women entrepreneurs whose ventures are necessity-based, bootstrapped and located in economically impoverished areas (neighborhoods) in two Latin-American countries: Chile and Peru.

The study takes an interpretivist research approach and analyses inductively interviews with women entrepreneurs.

The findings reveal how everyday practices in pursuit of emancipation – while conducted within the existing patriarchal social structure – push the boundaries and contribute to changes in the social system via a variety of outcomes such as intergenerational social mobility, personal fulfilment and strengthening the communities in which the women entrepreneurs operate. Furthermore, while the authors find that in the particular Latin-American context under study, entrepreneuring activities become an emancipatory possibility for the everyday women entrepreneurs, they also highlight a “dark side” of their emancipatory projects.

The study contributes to recent critical studies in entrepreneurship by demonstrating the diversity and importance of the “mundane” activities undertaken by “necessity-based” entrepreneurs, and the significant – yet underappreciated – reach of their ventures’ impact on issues well beyond economic considerations.

This paper aims to explore how accounting is fostering neoliberal citizenship through the participants of Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). More specifically, this paper aims to understand how accounting discourse and the management accounting technique of budgeting, when intertwined with automated administrative processes of the NDIS, are giving rise to a pastoral form of power that directs people’s behaviour toward certain ends.

Publicly available data has been crafted into an autoethnographic case study of one fictitious person’s experiences with the NDIS – Mina. Mina is an amalgam created from material submitted to the Joint Parliamentary Standing Committee on the NDIS. Mina’s experiences are then analysed through the lens of Foucault’s concept of pastoral power to explore how accounting has contributed to marketising and digitising public disability services.

Accounting rhetoric appears to be a central part of rationalising the decision to shift to individualised disability funding. Those receiving payments are treated as self-governable, financially responsible subjects and are therefore expected to have knowledge of management accounting techniques and budgeting. However, NDIS’s strong reliance on the accounting concepts of funds, budgets, cost and price is limiting people’s autonomy and subjecting them to intervention and control.

This paper addresses calls to explore the interplay between accounting and current disability policies. The analysis shows that incorporating accounting into the NDIS’s algorithms serves to conceal the underlying ideology of the programs, subtly driving behaviours towards neoliberal objectives. Further, this research extends the Foucauldian accounting literature by revealing the contribution of accounting to reinforcing the authority of digital pastors in contemporary times.

In this viewpoint article, the authors recognize the increased focus in health systems on co-design for innovation and change. This article explores the role of leaders and mangers in developing and enhancing a culture of trust in their organizations to enable co-design, with the potential to drive innovation and change in healthcare.

Using social science analyses, the authors argue that current co-design literature has limited focus on interactions between senior leaders and managers, and healthcare staff and service users in supporting co-designed innovation and change. The authors draw on social and health science studies of trust to highlight how the value-based co-design process needs to be supported and enhanced. We outline what co-design innovation and change involve in a health system, conceptualize trust and reflect on its importance within the health system, and finally note the role of senior leaders and managers in supporting trust and responsiveness for co-designed innovation and change.

Healthcare needs leaders and managers to embrace co-design that drives innovation now and in the future through people – leading to better healthcare for society at large. As authors we argue that it is now the time to shift our focus on the role of senior managers and leaders to embed co-design into health and social care structures, through creating and nurturing a culture of trust.

Building public trust in the health system and interpersonal trust within the health system is an ongoing process that relies upon personal behavior of managers and senior leaders, organizational practices within the system, as well as political processes that underpin these practices. By implementing managerial, leadership and individual practices on all levels, senior managers and leaders provide a mechanism to increase both trust and responsiveness for co-design that supports innovation and change in the health system.