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The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of board secretaries’ characteristics on annual report readability using an original method that evaluates the readability of Chinese characters.

The authors manually collect board secretaries’ characteristics from the China Securities Market and Accounting Research database and obtain annual reports from the China Information website. Ordinary least square regression is applied to evaluate the impact, and then robustness tests and additional regression analyses are conducted.

Board secretaries’ legal-professional expertise, international expertise and role duality improve annual report readability. However, their political connections are negatively associated with it. The effect of expertise (role duality) is more pronounced for firms with lower ex ante litigation risk (board secretaries with equity holdings). Furthermore, higher readability increases the compensation of board secretaries, whereas lower readability increases their turnover. Finally, annual report readability is positively related to firm performance.

The authors only investigate listed firms in China from 2007 to 2017 because of the difficulties of obtaining data and text mining.

The authors provide managerial insights for regulators aiming to establish an effective governance mechanism with Chinese characteristics. First, certain requirements for board secretaries’ expertise can improve annual report readability. Further, firms can consider appointing board members or senior executives as board secretaries to enhance disclosure quality.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to verify the effect of board secretaries’ characteristics on disclosure quality, especially annual report readability. Moreover, this study proposes a novel measure of annual report readability for Chinese texts.

This study aims to examine the core challenges facing company secretaries in a two-tier board context. This study focuses on the key factors contributing to these challenges and how company secretaries can effectively address them.

An analysis of the narratives provided by 291 Dutch company secretaries in response to a series of open-ended questionnaire questions led to insights into the key challenges company secretaries face in their day-to-day work.

Company secretaries perceive a myriad of factors contributing to pressures on their time, the need to work for multiple organizational bodies and the processing of information. They believe process interventions and social interventions are needed to alleviate these issues.

The research highlights the need to deeply study boards from a holistic and systems point of view that recognizes the various actors, such as the company secretary, and their relationships in a boardroom context. Furthermore, the research shows how the two-tier board model may complicate these relational dynamics owing to the formal separation of decision management from decision control.

This study identifies various pragmatic ways to address the core challenges facing company secretaries so as to improve their contributions to decision-making at the apex of organizations.

This study sheds light on an important organizational actor (i.e. the company secretary) that hitherto has received scant attention in the governance literature.

Extensively public concern on “Huge Executive Compensation” makes it urgent to investigate the reasonability of high executive compensation. The purpose of this paper is to explore the effectiveness of compensation contracting based on the specific responsibility of executives. More specifically, this paper is to examine whether high compensation is helpful to mitigate agency problems.

Considering that board secretaries of listed companies are responsible for information disclosure in China, this paper examines the effect of board secretaries’ excess compensation on firms’ disclosure quality using listed company data from 2007 to 2015. The first measure of disclosure quality is based on the disclosure violation behavior of firms, and the second is KV value that represents the extent to which the investors relay on the stock trading volume. To provide additional confidence that the findings are robust, this paper further conducts two indirect tests based on rumors and cost of equity capital.

The results show that board secretaries’ excess compensation is negatively associated with the probability of information disclosure violation and also negatively associated with firms’ KV value, suggesting firms that pay high compensation to their information providers are more likely to provide high-quality disclosures. Besides, this paper further finds that board secretaries’ excess compensation is negatively related to the incidence of rumors, the number of rumors incurred or the cost of equity capital.

Overall, the findings provide support to the efficient contracting of executive compensation, which implies that highly paid board secretaries would be better information providers than those poorly paid.

This paper provides empirical evidence that firms’ disclosure quality can be improved by modifying the compensation contract of information providers. This may indicate a new way to improve the quality of disclosures, so as to mitigate the agency problem.

In spite of the public criticism on executive excess compensation, the high compensation is not always a signal of manipulation, collusion and self-interest. It also can be a signal of individual talents and great efforts. Board secretaries are worth to be highly paid if they can improve firms’ disclosures, thereby reducing the incidence of rumors and reducing the cost of equity capital.

This paper is the first research to examine the effectiveness of compensation contracting based on information providers’ disclosure responsibility in the Chinese context. It documents a positive relation between board secretaries’ excess compensation and corporate disclosure quality.

An Act to consolidate, with certain exceptions, the provisions of the Local Employment Acts 1960 to 1971. [10th February 1972]

The paper aims to investigate how the governance practices of public-sector entities (PSEs) in Tanzania are shaped by competing institutional logics and strategies used to manage the logics.

In the paper, empirical evidence was gathered through documentary sources, non-participant observations and in-depth interviews with members of boards of directors (BoDs), chief executive officers (CEOs), internal and external auditors, senior executives and ministry officials. The data were analyzed using thematic and pattern-matching approaches.

The paper shows that bureaucratic and market logics co-exist and variations in governance practices within and across categories of PSEs. These are reflected in CEO appointments, multiple roles of CEOs, board member appointments, board composition, multiple board membership, board roles and evaluation of board performance. External audits also foster market logic in governance practices. The two competing logics are managed by actors through selective coupling, compromise, decoupling and compartmentalization. Despite competing logics, the bureaucratic logic remains dominant and is largely responsible for variations between the underlying logics and governance practices.

The findings suggest that public-sector reforms in emerging economies (EEs) must account for the fact that governance practices in PSEs are shaped by different institutional logics embedded in socioeconomic, political and organizational contexts and their corresponding management strategies.

Few previous studies explicitly report relationships between institutional logics and the governance practices of PSEs in EEs. The current study is one of few empirical studies to connect competing institutional logics and the associated management strategies, as well as governance practices in EEs in the context of public-sector reforms.

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the formal and informal governance mechanisms of state-owned enterprises operating in a post-transitional economy of Poland.

The study combines legal analysis of Polish regulations in force, review of literature on the Poland’s institutional legacy, and a statistical analysis, based on a data set of 204 management board members, 180 external supervisory board members, and 114 state officials supervising Polish SOEs in 2011.

Legally designed relationships among the management board, supervisory board, and the state treasury, represented by the minister and ministry officials, constitute the key formal governance mechanisms in Polish SOEs. They are, however, complemented by relationships between SOEs and their stakeholders and distorted by other informal phenomena, including informal noninstitutional behavior, mechanisms grounded in cognitive and normative institutions, and perception of the relationship structure by the actors themselves. As a result, key corporate governance actors differ in their perception of governance influences upon SOEs.

This study contributes to policymaking by helping authorities gain a better understanding of the governance challenges in SOEs.

This paper is one of the first and few empirical studies investigating the issue of formal and informal governance mechanisms in SOEs in post-transitional economies of CEE.

The Secretary of State after approving proposals submitted by the Hotel and Catering Industry Training Board for the imposition of a further levy on employers in the hotel and catering industry and in exercise of his powers under section 4 of the Industrial Training Act 1964 and of all other powers enabling him in that behalf hereby makes the following Order:—

The discussion on the incorporation of the collective agreement into the individual contract of employment has treated so far direct incorporation and its various facets, implied and express incorporation, the multiplicity within the hierarchy of individual agreements, what may or may not be incorporated, and so on.

The Secretary of State after approving proposals submitted by the Distributive Industry Training Board for the imposition of a further levy on employers in the distributive industry and in exercise of his powers under section 4 of the Industrial Training Act 1964 and of all other powers enabling him in that behalf hereby makes the following Order:—

The Secretary of State after approving proposals submitted by the Cotton and Allied Textiles Industry Training Board for the imposition of a further levy on employers in the cotton and allied textiles industry and in exercise of powers conferred by section 4 of the Industrial Training Act 1964 as amended by paragraph 2(2) of Part 1 of Schedule 2 to the Employment and Training Act 1973, and of all other powers enabling him in that behalf hereby makes the following Order:—