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Companies vary in their attitudes toward regulatory (ethics) risk. The purpose of this study is to assess how regulatory risk‐averse, risk neutral and risk seeking companies employ distinct managerial risk and slack accumulation strategies and differ in their auditor scores and bankruptcy risk.

The authors test their hypotheses using the GAO‐assembled database of financial restatements that allows contrasting voluntary restaters (firms that restated without being prompted either by external auditors or the SEC) and forced restaters (firms requested to restate by the SEC or external auditors). The paper uses logistic regression for comparing different groups of firms to test the hypotheses.

The results of the data analysis mostly supported the hypotheses. The findings suggest that a firm's attitude towards regulatory risk is associated with organizational slack (available and potential), risk (managerial and organizational), and auditor's rating.

Some limitations of the study are: use of cross sectional data does not allow testing causal effects, relying on GAO office for categorizing firms in different regulatory category introduces the possibility of bias in analysis, and use of only North American firms in the sample limits the generalizability of the findings.

Firms' attitudes toward regulatory risk and their respective risk and slack management strategies could be used to detect fraud early on before such firms transgress from the realm of legality to borderline legality and illegality.

Some contributions of the study are: it shows that a firm's fraud tendency or regulatory risk behavior is associated with the type of slack accumulated and available in the firm, regulatory risk‐averse companies take less managerial and bankruptcy risks, and earn higher evaluations from auditors, it demonstrates that regulatory risk‐averse companies differ from regulatory risk neutral companies.

In 2002 when we began reviewing papers for possible inclusion in Advances in Gender Research volume 7: Gender Perspectives on Health and Medicine: Key Themes, and Volume 8: Gender Perspectives on Health and Medicine: Reproduction and Sexuality, the popular press was full of headlines about Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) (for references and extended and detailed discussion by researchers and physicians see the editorial by Ronald C. Hamdy, MD, FRCP, FACP (2002) and the letters to the editor (Mikhail, 2003) in the Southern Journal of Medicine).

This paper aims to offer an Australian perspective on the recent crisis of confidence in corporate governance and its legislative and regulatory aftermath. It is informative because Australia's experience is directly comparable with that of the USA but its professional and regulatory traditions are much less prescriptive.

The author dissects the corporate scandal of recent years and analyses the several issues which have arisen. Problem elements, once identified, are evaluated separately, followed by an examination of the responses in each country. The main value of the paper lies in the separation and categorisation of these issues. For clarity, the author groups them as technical, political and cultural and uses these three labels to distinguish between problems which are the responsibility of the accounting profession, the responsibility of regulatory agencies, and those faced by managers individually. There is brief mention of some other groups, like suppliers of professional business services, who have also fallen under critical scrutiny. At the same time, other groups associated with contemporary financial scandal are omitted for lack of space.

The paper includes some observed contrasts between the consequences of scandal in the two jurisdictions and ends with a number of personal judgements.

It is hoped that the judgements made in this paper may offer food for thought and some guidance for those seeking to advance best practice in this important but delicate area.

Leadership is as widely used as it is misused and misunderstood. This paper seeks to argue that in an educational context it is important not only to revisit and reframe conceptions of leadership but also to see it as having an essentially subversive purpose. The paper aims to dicuss subversion in an intellectual, moral and political sense, as a sacred mission to confront the “noble lies” of politicians, the superficiality of the designer culture and the line of least resistance opted for by overworked and demoralised teachers.

The empirical base for this paper is a seven‐country three‐years study entitled Leadership for Learning which brought together staff from 24 schools in seven countries to explore the connections between learning and leadership and to arrive at some common understanding which could be tested in practice across national and linguistic boundaries.

While recognising the unique contexts and differing cultural traditions as diverse as those of Australia and Austria, the USA and Greece, engaging in an international discourse through face‐to‐face workshops, virtual conferencing and exchange visits led one to five key principles held in common.

The paper offers intriguing and insightful discussion into the subject of leadership as a subversive activity.

Presents a pilot study on the frequency and seriousness of role conflict among 152 advertising professionals carried out in autumn 1993 in Norway. Other questions dealt with our reactions to such conflicts, and what the respondents would expect from a “beaware code” as an aid to conflict solution. Conflicts related to professional quality standards, personal ethics, environment, clients and consumers were reported as most frequent and most serious. Almost half of the respondents claimed they would speak up in such cases. About one‐third of the respondents said they would probably ask their peers; one‐third said they would ask more experienced colleagues or superiors, whereas one‐quarter would seek advice from their private network. Concludes by suggesting future research foci and design triangulation, especially by using qualitative strategies as a next step.

The two main objectives of this project were to advance knowledge about the way corruption and related offences are structured and operate in society and to draw inferences on the efficiency and efficacy of the judicial authorities in handling reported offences with the ultimate goal of improving and effecting control policies.

In this research note the authors attempt to explore the relevance of judicial materials. The authors developed an analytical framework to extract information from court case decisions and analysed 838 court cases on corruption and related offences in Portuguese first instance courts for the period 2004–2008 to map the distribution of corruption and related offences, understand the anatomy of corruption as a criminal offence and learn from the judicial system's capacity to investigate, prosecute and trial reported occurrences.

Most corruption cases took place in the major metropolitan areas, involved municipalities as passive agents and construction companies as active agents and had to do with urban sprawl and land management policies. Court data also allowed the authors to gauge the areas or sectors of activity more exposed to corruption risks. Generally speaking, these tend to be those areas or sectors characterized by high levels of informality and clientelism, high profitability ratios deriving from political decisions, unbalanced supply-demand of decisional goods and services, disorganised and fragmented regulation, low levels of transparency and insufficient or misguided supervision.

The framework for analysis is replicable in other contexts with minor adjustments. The major limitation is access to court decisions/narratives. This project was developed in partnership with the Portuguese Public Prosecutor's Office. This has facilitated access to those materials. For those wishing to use the database, the major limitation is that it covers only the period 2004–2008.

The court narratives confirm that in cases where the complaint is complemented by documentary, audio, video and photographic evidences collected by special investigative means the subsequent production of proof in court is more effective. The data also suggests that cases reported from inside the organisation where the offence takes place are likelier to reach the trial phase, thus reinforcing the need for diversifying and strengthening reporting mechanisms and procedures and the guarantees to those who are willing to collaborate with the auditing and investigative authorities.

The authors contend that court cases of corruption and related offences yield important and useful policy-oriented information that should not be overlooked by decision-makers when upgrading their efforts to fight corruption.

This research note introduces a novel dataset on corruption court cases in Portugal. The policy significance of this dataset is threefold: (1) it provides decision-makers a more detailed mapping of the volume and distribution of corruption and related offences across the country than that provided by standard judicial statistics; (2) it fosters knowledge on key sociological aspects of the corrupt fact, thus helping decision-makers to understand better the type of actors, objectives, contexts, resources and exchanges involved and (3) it helps to understand the dynamics of judicial proceedings and how certain procedural and institutional features impact on outcomes.

Legal intermediation is an emerging theoretical concept developed to grasp the importance of the process and actors who contribute to legal endogenization, in particular in the field of economic activities and work governed by various public regulations. This chapter proposes to extend the analytical category of legal intermediary to all actors who, even if they are not legal professionals, deal on a daily basis with legal categories and provisions. In order to deepen our understanding of these actors and their contribution to how organizations frame legality, this chapter investigates four examples of legal intermediaries who are not legal professionals. Based on field surveys conducted over the past 15 years in France on employment policy, industrial relations, occupational health and safety regulation, and forensic economics, I make three contributions. First, the cases show the diversity of legal intermediaries and their growing and increasingly reflexive roles in our complex economies. Second, while they are not legal professionals per se, to different degrees, these legal intermediaries assume roles similar to those of legal professionals such as legislators, judges, lawyers, inspectors, cops, and even clerks. Finally, depending on their level of legitimacy and power, I show how legal intermediaries take part in the process of legal endogenization and how they more broadly frame ordinary legality.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship of weaknesses in IT‐related internal controls to companies' overall financial performance and health.

The study examines four accounting measures: liquidity, solvency, profitability, and market value. During the four‐year period of 2004‐2007, the authors identified companies that reported at least one material IT weakness and matched them with a similar set of companies with no reported material weaknesses. Additionally, for a subset of the companies in which a good match could be identified, a second data set was developed for comparison of companies reporting only material non‐IT weaknesses.

As expected, companies reporting IT weaknesses experienced less of an ability to pay short‐term and long‐term debts, earned lower profits, and possessed lower market value than companies with no weaknesses. Companies reporting IT weaknesses experienced worse financial performance and health than companies with non‐IT weaknesses.

At the time of this study, most foreign registrants listed on US stock exchanges had not completed and filed their initial SOX 404 assessment with the SEC. Furthermore, small public companies (i.e. under a $75 million market capitalization) were not required to comply with 404 reporting requirements at the time of this study. In addition, Compustat provides information only on publicly traded companies.

The current study builds on IT governance research in two key ways. First, academia and industry must move past the discussion of IT governance design to examine the performance of IT governance efforts (i.e. effectiveness of controls audited by an independent third party) in relation to key financial performance and health indicators. Second, this study uses more objective measures of IT governance than were available in the past (i.e. the internal control and financial data reported in companies' audited financial statements). The results provide insight into the relationship of IT governance to overall financial well‐being.

This paper aims to provide an update to the risk management literature, as it compiles a survey of 65 recent theoretical and empirical studies on the topic.

This is a survey paper that summarizes recent theoretical and empirical research regarding the relationship between risk management and firm value.

Recent empirical evidence provides support for theoretical propositions in the literature that risk management increases firm value and returns, while reducing return and cash flow volatility. The results are largely consistent with early findings, and there have been significant empirical advances that address concerns regarding the endogeneity of risk management practices relative to corporate financial decisions. The literature has become broader and deeper, as there are now studies with larger sample sizes across more industries and geographic areas.

Firms that use sound risk management practices obtain higher valuations, achieve better financial performance and experience diminished costs of financial distress. Recent research has emerged regarding enterprise risk management and its potential for value creation and risk reduction.

The paper provides a new compilation and synthesis of recent theoretical and empirical research in risk management that addresses many of the limitations of prior research.

This case study aims to present a viable solution to how organizations can adapt and customize the ISO 31000:2009 enterprise risk management framework to suits its needs and requirements.

Approach used for this case study is via adopting Six Sigma DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control phases) methodology.

Key finding is the importance of stakeholders’ feedbacks which are taken into consideration during the designing of the new customized enterprise risk management framework, integrated with all supporting processes, tools and resources.

The ISO 31000:2009 enterprise risk management framework dictates that it is not a one-size-fits-all. Rather, organizations who wish to adapt this framework need to customize accordingly, but there is no indication on how organizations can do it. This case study presents a viable solution to this challenge.