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Despite the growing body of empirical literature on earnings management in municipal bodies and enterprises on the municipal level, the theoretical foundations often remain limited. This article contributes to filling this research gap by discussing the agency relationships between entities, managers, politicians and the electorate based on the framework of political economy or, more specifically, economic theory of political action. It derives theoretical explanations for earnings management in municipally owned enterprises based on political-economic approaches and provides conceptual guidelines for further theoretical and empirical research in this field.

The article discusses three specific theoretical approaches of political economy (political budget cycles/election cycles, interest fragmentation and partisan ideology) and applies them to the governance structures of municipally owned enterprises. For each of the perspectives, predictions about the use of earnings management and its possible motivations are derived.

The study shows that political budget cycles/election cycles, interest fragmentation and partisan ideology in municipal decision-making bodies can serve as possible explanations as to which extent managers of municipally owned enterprises present manipulated financial statements. All three approaches can help to explain the prevalence of earnings management but lead to different results regarding the methods and aims of earnings management.

As a significant portion of the current literature on earnings management in municipally owned enterprises lacks a theoretical foundation, our article aims to fill this caveat. To do so, we introduce three new conceptual perspectives that explain the prevalence of earnings management in such enterprises and the political-economic environments that are more likely to produce manipulated financial statements.

In the project “Working the way I want” (AWIEW), people with and without disabilities are co-creating a needs assessment tool (NAT) to support participation in the labour market. This tool will include a technological solution at its core and a set of tested new social practices for its successful application in Germany.

The AWIEW project combines several methods and a participatory approach from different disciplines in a transdisciplinary project design. At the micro level, the participatory design approach is used to jointly develop the digital tool with people with disabilities (PWD). At the meso level, semi-structured interviews are used to gather data from different stakeholders in the PWD’ social ecosystem to uncover factors facilitating or hindering the successful transition of PWD to the labour market.

This paper discusses how transdisciplinary results can be incorporated into the development of a tool that supports PWD in navigating their occupational orientation processes. Some preliminary findings are: (a) Vocational orientation for PWD often starts with difficulties in imagining a future job; participative designs need to start from this premise. (b) PWD’ knowledge about the labour market depends on information provided by their social ecosystem; thus, research and design must take this ecosystem into account. (c) Welfare organisations instil a feeling of security and competence within their structures that has to be considered in needs assessment – both as a hindering and an empowering factor.

This paper highlights the importance of combining a digital solution and new practices for a promising approach towards enhancing the participation of PWD in the labour market.

This study aims to explore academic women’s silence from the perspective of social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986), by examining the triadic influences of the individual, environment and behaviour, which impacts their silence. The study examines how women use personal, proxy and collective agency (Bandura, 2018) to reduce silence.

Interviewing 22 academics (20 women, 2 men) at a leading Polish university, this study used the Gioia et al. (2013) method to analyse the interviews, creating first- and second-order codes and final aggregated concepts.

This study finds, from an environmental perspective, that societal-level gendering, which is underpinned by critical social factors and institutional logics that are part of Poland’s culture promoting gender stereotypes and family values influences women’s silence. There is clear evidence for the regression of women’s rights, which compounds women’s silence. These societal-level factors influence a hierarchical, bureaucratic organizational structure, alongside gender segregation. From an individual perspective, reasons for silence include socialization, fear, women’s lack of power, inequality and self-silencing to mitigate harassment or discrimination. Collective agency was a strongly mentioned theme to help reduce silence, which includes implementing training and development initiatives, creating a safe platform to voice concerns, structural transformation and cultural change.

This study contributes to literature regarding women’s silence by exploring reasons for silence through the lens of Bandura’s social cognitive theory and agentic perspective, which demonstrates how silence could be reduced through collective action, in the understudied context of Poland, which highlights how country context intersects with organizational context and individual experience, influencing women’s silence.

This study aims to analyse the motivations and underlying assumptions of decision makers driving the adoption of sustainability-oriented targets in executive compensation (SCTs) to better understand SCTs’ impact on sustainability performance.

Through a qualitative approach, 15 in-depth interviews are conducted in a two-tier governance setting. Participants include management and supervisory board members, compensation consultants and other stakeholders involved in proxy voting.

SCT implementation is primarily determined by meeting shareholders’ expectations rather than those of other stakeholders. Decision makers react in a differentiated way to increased expectations by implementing either primarily symbolic or substantive measures and encounter different implementation challenges like insufficient data quality and a lack of experience within supervisory boards, both of which potentially contribute to decoupling.

The study offers valuable insights for companies in designing SCTs and emphasises the significance of addressing decoupling to effectively enhance sustainability performance through SCTs and provides a foundation for future studies aimed at analysing this phenomenon.

Using a neo-institutional theory lens, this study marks one of the first interview-based investigations to distinguish between symbolic and substantial SCTs. It delves deeply into the role of decoupling and the associated challenges, offering fresh perspectives within the under-researched framework of a two-tier corporate governance structure. Moreover, this study aims to meticulously capture the real-world design practices and implementation processes of SCTs through experts, an aspect that was emphasised as a limitation in previous studies.

Just transition is a fundamental concept for supply chain management but neither discipline pays attention to the other and little is known about how supply chains can be orchestrated as socioecological systems to manage these transitions. Building from a wide range of just transition examples, this paper explores just transition to understand how to move beyond instrumental supply chain practices to supply chains functioning in harmony with the planet and its people.

Building from a systematic review of 72 papers, the paper identifies just transition examples while interpreting them through the theoretical lens of supply chain management, providing valuable insights to help research and practice understand how to achieve low-carbon economies through supply chain management in environmentally and socially just ways.

The paper defines, elaborates, and extends the just transition construct by developing a transition taxonomy with two key dimensions. The purpose dimension (profit or shared outcomes) and the governance dimension (government-/industry-led versus civil society-involved), generating four transition archetypes. Most transitions projects are framed around the Euro- and US-centric, capitalist standards of development, leading to coloniality as well as economic and cultural depletion of communities. Framing just transition in accordance with context-specific plural values, the paper provides an alternative perspective to the extractive transition concept. This can guide supply chain management to decarbonise economies and societies by considering the rights of nature, communities and individuals.

Introducing just transition into the supply chain management domain, this paper unifies the various conceptualisations of just transition into a holistic understanding, providing a new foundation for supply chain management research.

This paper makes a conceptual contribution by intersecting two strands of literature (return to work following health issues and industrial relations) to facilitate our understanding of the potential role of social dialogue in supporting return to work (RTW) following the diagnosis of a chronic illness. It conceptualises the levels and channels through which various actors and their interactions may play a role in RTW facilitation within the actor-centred institutional framework.

The paper uses an exploratory design based mainly on desk research but is also informed by roundtable discussions done in six countries as part of a larger project.

The conceptual and analytical framework (CAF) is developed to explain how various actors interact together in ways shaped by the RTW policy framework and the industrial relations systems, resulting in a continuum of RTW facilitation situations.

There is limited research on return-to-work policies following diagnosis of chronic illness from a comprehensive actor-oriented perspective. The existing literature usually focusses on just one stakeholder, overlooking the role of social dialogue actors. By bridging the two streams of literature and incorporating all potential actors and their interactions in a unitary model, the proposed framework provides a valuable tool to further discuss how successful RTW after a diagnosis of chronic illness can be facilitated.

Tourism and hospitality employment have long faced widely recognised challenges with regard to employment, its workforce and the workplace environment, issues that have been addressed by generations of policymakers and practitioners without evident success or solution. These wicked problems are frequently characterised by inherent paradoxes and, therefore, accepting the tenets of paradox theory provides the basis for recognising the need to accept contradictions as a reality which a search for solutions will not resolve. This chapter presents six examples of wicked problems in tourism and hospitality employment, which are underpinned by paradoxes as proxies for the much wider range of intractable problems that beset policy-making and practice in this vital area of tourism and hospitality. The chapter concludes by suggesting ways in which wicked problems can be accommodated, and stakeholders can learn to understand and live with paradoxes.

This study aims to explore to what extent stakeholder engagement affects the sustainability reporting (SR) process and if it succeeds in facilitating the encounter between demand and supply of accountability, as well as the main challenges of this practice, by focusing on a crucial and under-investigated public sector area, the judicial system.

The study adopts an action research (AR) approach. Specifically, it focuses on a specific phase (i.e. stakeholder engagement) of the broader project that was carried on from 2019 in an Italian Public Prosecutor’s Office. Data were collected from multiple sources, i.e. written notes and reports gathered during meetings, the survey administered to stakeholders and the published sustainability reports.

Stakeholder engagement may be a valuable and effective tool for improving the level of accountability, as it increases the responsiveness of SR to the informative needs of stakeholders. However, the study also highlights some critical points that must be addressed to exploit this fully. Among these is the need to act upstream of the process by working on an accounting system that goes beyond the economic dynamics and can effectively answer the accountability demand.

The study contributes to theoretical and empirical knowledge by exploring a topic and a public sphere still limited investigated, i.e. the stakeholder engagement in sustainability in the judicial sector. The AR approach also presents some originality points, as it is low widespread in management and accounting literature.

This study aims to examine nurses’ motivation for leadership and explore important challenges nurses face in leadership positions.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 nurses in leading positions. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data.

Nurse leaders are recruited from clinical settings, and the transition process from clinical nurse to leader is demanding. Their motivation for leadership seems to be in human values and caring for others. Lack of strategic focus might be a challenge. Nurses in leadership positions emphasize the importance of good relationships with the staff and require an increased focus on strategic leadership.

Studies have revealed the frustration associated with the role of a nursing leader. According to an evaluation of a clinical leadership development programme, nurses were found to be inadequately prepared for their roles. They had not experienced positive role models, they felt overwhelmed and they regarded colleagues and nursing management structures as unsupportive. There is a need for further research into effective measures to strengthen nurse managers.

The role of leaders has changed over time. There are now increasing requirements and objectives with regard to laws, action plans, improvement projects and cost-effectiveness. A nurse leader has both many tasks and great responsibility. Good leadership relies on skilled nurse leaders meeting statutory requirements in patient care and delivering good quality and patient-safe services. Engaging in process-oriented guidance, such as mentoring, is one way to become more aware of oneself as a professional leader (Mathena, 2002).

By identifying and understanding the specific challenges that nurse leaders face, this study can contribute to the development of interventions and strategies to improve leadership practices, thereby enhancing organizational effectiveness.

This paper aims to examine the current quality of work-life (QWL) situation and the effectiveness of labor laws for promoting QWL in the context of Nepalese workplaces.

It uses a descriptive-interpretative-qualitative approach to analyze the responses. Information is gathered through discussions with 85 higher- and middle-level managers of large and medium-sized organizations.

The majority of Nepalese organizations accept safe and healthy working conditions, social relevance of work-life, social integration in the work organization, and work and total life space as the key aspects of QWL. They have become even more critical as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, they face challenges in providing employees with opportunities for continued growth and security, immediate opportunity to use and develop human capacities, adequate and fair compensation and constitutionalism in the work organization. QWL-related provisions in Labour Act, 2017, play a vital role in promoting the QWL situation. The QWL programs offer many benefits to employees’ private and working lives. The lack of such programs would undoubtedly have negative consequences for Nepalese companies. Compliance with labor laws will promote a better QWL situation at Nepalese workplaces.

Only managerial perspectives are considered for examining the current situation of QWL and the effectiveness of QWL-related provisions of the Labour Act, 2017. It excludes the views of union leaders.

This paper indicates that labor laws’ QWL-related provisions are effective. It also provides several policy measures for promoting a better QWL in Nepalese workplaces.

This study presents QWL-related legal provisions and the actual situation at the workplaces of Nepal. It also presents the key aspects of QWL in the context of Nepal.