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Traditional methods of assurance outlined by current professional standards are risk-based models where the emphasis is on the veracity of published data rather than on the rigour of the interpretation or analysis of information provided to users. As such, they are not well suited for expressing an opinion on qualitative, subjective or forward-looking assessments typically included in integrated reports. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to describe an alternate approach to assurance and identifies the initial elements of an “interpretive assurance model”.

The research is exploratory/interpretive. It relies on detailed interviews with experienced auditors and preparers to develop an initial approach for providing some level of assurance over an integrated report.

The research identifies elements of an interpretive assurance model which focusses on providing assurance on the interpretation and analysis of information included in an integrated report rather than on underlying data. These include an examination of the completeness of the explanation of the value creation process provided in an integrated report; the methods used to support management discussion and analysis; and the reasonability of the review process used to ensure the reliability of qualitative, subjective and forward-looking representations contained in an integrated report.

The study is conducted in a South African setting. While limiting the study to a single jurisdiction may be seen as a limitation, local preparers and auditors have had at least five years of experience with the application of an integrated reporting framework and are in a strong position to provide detailed insights.

An interpretive assurance model shifts the focus from objective verification of data using defined test procedures to evaluation of the interpretation and analysis process used to prepare an integrated report. Application of the proposed model will require practitioners and auditing students to be trained extensively in qualitative analytical techniques. The inherent complexity of contemporary business models and the multi-dimensional focus of integrated reports will also result in changes in the composition of audit teams which are currently dominated by experts in financial reporting rather than integrated or strategic business management.

The paper is the first to offer a practical approach for providing assurance over an integrated report. It responds to calls form the International Integrated Reporting Council and International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board for more innovative assurance models for addressing the reporting needs of contemporary organisations.

Community-based social enterprises (CBSEs), a spatially defined subset of social enterprise, are independent, not-for-profit organisations managed by community members and committed to delivering long-term benefits to local people. CBSEs respond to austerity and policy reforms by providing services, jobs and other amenities for residents in deprived communities, thus contributing to neighbourhood regeneration. This paper aims to develop a better understanding of how CBSEs perceive accountability, how they apply it in the management and representation of their business and why.

Nine case studies of CBSEs across three European countries (England, the Netherlands and Sweden) are analysed, using data from semi-structured interviews with initiators, board members and volunteers in CBSEs.

CBSEs shape accountability and representation in response to the needs of local communities and in the wake of day-to-day challenges and opportunities. Apart from financial reporting, CBSEs apply informal strategies of accountability which are highly embedded in their way of working and contingent upon their limited resources.

Although research has shown the complex governance position of CBSEs, their application of accountability to target communities and other stakeholders is unclear. The paper coins the term “adaptive accountability,” reflecting a relational, dialectic approach in which formal, costly accountability methods are only applied to legally required forms of accounting, and informal practices are accepted by funding agencies and governments as valid forms of accountability, assessing CBSEs’ societal value in more open terms.

This paper aims to conceptualize business relationships so as to include in these dimensions of both gift and gratuity, to develop the concept of “bonding value”, and to offer some ideas for the use of this within firms.

The paper analyses the concept of “bonding value”, distinguishing it from the concepts of “exchange value” and “use value” that are normally used in business, and attempts to investigate its practical implications.

The paper shows how evaluating both the relationships within the organization and between firm and stakeholders in terms of “bonding value” can have effects on the economic, organizational and social aspects of a firm's activities.

The paper is a starting point of a possible conceptual path that should be directed toward the theoretical and practical use of “bonding value” in business. It is necessary to support the theoretical considerations with future empirical investigation showing the possibility of practical applications of the concept analysed.

The main implication for business management is the possibility to propose “bonding value” and “gift logic” as new parameters in assessing whether or not a firm has achieved its institutional purposes.

In the past, “bonding value” has been studied mainly from a philosophical and sociological point of view. In this article we try to begin to address this issue specifically from a perspective of business management.

In the stream of works showing the semantic dimension as a core concept of the product innovation (e.g. design driven innovation), the paper aims to present a new business modeling approach driven by design and meanings. Similarly to the concept that the product is not represented only by form and function but also by meaning, the entire business model of a company does not transmit economic and technological value only, but tells a lot of the company from a semantic point of view. The work seeks to point out that companies can focus on the management of meanings to “make sense” of their entire business model moulded in building blocks, and realize what the authors called meaning strategy.

After a detailed overview of the theoretical background grounded in the strategy literature and design one, to support the authors' perspective, an in‐depth study of meaning strategy performed by illycaffè is presented.

The value of the work lies in underlining that the design driven (product) innovation's application can be extended further than only describing successful (product) strategies of design‐intensive manufactures and in the suggestions on how to implement a meaning strategy, creating new meanings not only in the products, but also in the building blocks of a company's business model.

The meaning strategy content and action‐oriented framework proposed and the matrix business model meanings versus building blocks can become tools to communicate the company strategy's pivotal elements and its evolution and they can drive strategists in developing and managing new/existing meanings and building blocks.

The purpose of this paper is to expose the pattern and mechanism of Roman private enterprise as the rudimentary form of capitalistic business.

By means of historical analysis and theoretical reconstruction, the author retraces the background and foundations of business through slave as the initial stage of private enterprise.

A comprehensive view of public and private entrepreneurship at the end of Republic and the beginning of Empire is presented. The riddle of “unnaturally” dear slaves in Rome (as compared with free labor and slaves in other countries of antiquity) is scrutinized. It is shown that “excessively” high demand for them was largely determined by their institutional worth: thanks to dominica potestas, they appeared to be the key organizational resource for expanding private industrial business. The framework of private enterprise securing limited liability for owner and turning “business slave” into a kind of director is brought to light.

The results of this research allow historians to retrace the origins of modern private enterprise to classical antiquity, while economists and managers get an opportunity to better understand its nature and organizational status of those owning and managing it.

Leaders and executives can draw from the paper an object lesson of how, remaining within the existing political system, legal regulation and economic traditions, to make a radical innovation whose true meaning and social potential are so immense and far-reaching that get evident only many centuries later. The findings and conclusions the author comes to may be used in educational courses on economics, entrepreneurship, management, business history and so on.

An instructive model of conciliation of interests is scrutinized. “Directors” – those organizing and managing a business but not owning it – were, as well as workers, recruited by coercion and legal regimentation of their relations with proprietors. The polarization of their institutional roles was at the bottom of private enterprise from the very outset. The state created incentives for initiative and competent business men in subjection to well-offs to work hard, on one hand, and made their masters to use these incentives to public and their own profits. The benefits of all parties were taken into account, though, of course, not to the same degree. Thereby, a kind of social compromise embodied in a novel institution was attained to.

This paper is the first to demonstrate in relief the background and framework of Roman private enterprise as well as the functions and organizational status of its “director.”

This study, based on stakeholder theory, aims to analyse the factors that can affect the level of visual disclosure in the context of integrated reporting (IR), which represents the last frontier of corporate disclosure.

This study develops an innovative measure to measure the level of visual disclosure of integrated reports that takes into account the use and degree of integration of images and graphs. Furthermore, to test the hypotheses, this study uses a regression model on a sample of 134 international companies that published an integrated report in 2018.

The results show that firm size, firm profitability and industry environmental sensitivity positively affect the level of visual disclosure of the integrated reports.

To our knowledge, this is the first study that examines visual disclosure in the IR context. It also extends the field of application of the stakeholder theory, still little used to explain visual disclosure strategies, and increases knowledge on the determinants of IR.

This study aims to analyse the role that the chief executive officer (CEO) has on integrated reporting (IR) adoption and whether this role is moderated by incentives to promote corporate transparency, including information asymmetry problems and financial constraints. IR represents the last frontier of corporate disclosure and aims to represent, through the annual integrated report, the ability of an organization to create value over time.

This study is based on 10,819 observations (an unbalanced data panel of 1,588 firms for the period 2009–2017). A logistic regression model is used to examine the association between CEO power and disclosure of an integrated report.

The results show that CEOs with greater power oppose the disclosure of integrated information, and this behaviour is not modified by firms’ incentives. Furthermore, greater growth opportunities increase CEO opposition to disclosing integrated information on the creation of value, perhaps as a consequence of the possible use of it by competitors.

This study contributes to the existing literature. First, it expands the scientific debate on the topic of IR. Second, it extends the application field of agency theory, which is seldom used to explain the phenomena related to IR.

This study aims to comprehensively inspect the impact of blockchain technology in the context of globalization, focusing on the most influential research works, scientific production by countries, commonly used keywords, trending topics and the conceptual and intellectual structure of this field.

A bibliometric analysis was conducted in R Studio, involving the review and scrutiny of 194 research papers indexed in the Scopus database. This analytical approach allowed for a systematic examination of the literature and the identification of key patterns and trends in blockchain and globalization research.

The analysis revealed the most influential research contributions, highlighted countries with significant scientific production, identified frequently used keywords and unveiled emerging trends and areas of focus in the field of blockchain and digitization. Additionally, the study explores prospective research directions.

This research provides insights into the current state of blockchain and globalization research, offering valuable information for scholars, policymakers and industry professionals. The recognized themes provide a systematic structure for upcoming inquiries, directing studies toward vital domains like supply chain management and sustainable development. Moreover, the analysis emphasizes the significance of interdisciplinary collaboration and provides practical insights, enabling businesses and policymakers to enhance transparency, counteract fraud and adjust to the digital era for societal and economic advancement.

The study contributes to the prevailing literature by steering a comprehensive analysis of the interplay between blockchain technology and globalization, shedding light on influential works and emerging trends. It adds value by providing a structured overview of the field's intellectual landscape.

A distinction must be drawn between a dismissal on the one hand, and on the other a repudiation of a contract of employment as a result of a breach of a fundamental term of that contract. When such a repudiation has been accepted by the innocent party then a termination of employment takes place. Such termination does not constitute dismissal (see London v. James Laidlaw & Sons Ltd (1974) IRLR 136 and Gannon v. J. C. Firth (1976) IRLR 415 EAT).

Business model innovation (BMI) constitutes a priority for managers across industries, but it represents a notoriously difficult innovation, with several challenges, many of which are cognitive in nature. The received literature has variously suggested that one way to overcome challenges to BMI, including cognitive ones, and support the cognitive tasks is using visual representations. Against this background, we aim at offering a contribution to the emerging line of inquiry at the nexus between business models (BMs), cognition and visual representations. Specifically, we develop a new method for visual representation of the BM in support of simplification of the cognitive effort and neutralisation of cognitive barriers. The resulting representation – a network-based representation, anchored on the activity-system perspective and offering complementarity and centrality/periphery measures – allows to visually represent an existing BM as a network (nodes and linkages) of interdependent activities and to express information related to the degree of centrality/periphery of single activities (nodes) with respect to the rest of a BM configuration. This information, we argue, is potentially very valuable in supporting the cognitive tasks involved in business model reconfiguration (BMR). We guide the reader to progressively appreciate how the development of the proposed method for visual representation is anchored to two main characteristics of BMR, namely the discovery-driven nature of BMR and the path-dependent nature of BMR. We offer initial insights on the cognitive value of such a type of representation in relationship to the simplification of the cognitive effort and the neutralisation of cognitive barriers in BMR.