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This paper aims to focus on accounting for human rights. It explores the validity of conflicting theoretical perspectives on accounting and their ability to reduce the gap between accounting and accountability for human rights.

This study relies on the notion of topos to develop a pragmatic constructivist perspective on conventional accounting and social accounting with respect to human rights. Applying pragmatic constructivism permits a better understanding and assessment of the ethics underpinning the conventional and social accounting approaches.

The ethics underpinning the topos of conventional accounting offer a reductive explanation of the agency of organizational actors, so inhibiting moral and social responsibility. Furthermore, the calculative logic that dominates this topos promotes a monovocal form of communication (to shareholders) and translates values per se into instrumental values. By contrast, the social accounting topos sheds new light on the role that accounting may play in detecting human rights violations, by focusing more on communication and social values. However, for this topos to be valid, alternative management practices that go beyond voluntary social reporting need to be further developed.

Human rights accountability is an urgent challenge for companies in today’s society. However, scholars have largely disregarded the role of accounting in the process of holding companies accountable for human rights violations. By questioning the relationship between accounting and human rights, this paper takes a first step towards resolving this issue.

The purpose of this paper is to present a brief history of the information society and a research framework addressing the challenges of ensuring that information and communication technologies (ICTs) are applied in ways that are enabling and responsive to the varied contexts in which people live their lives.

Examination of why insights arising from research that is critical of the mainstream vision of the information society are rarely influential in debates on ICT policies, of the outstanding research questions around the promotion of investment in ICTs in support of sustainable development goals, and of the components of an alternative research framework that could be pursued by those concerned with social and technological innovation.

The analysis of policy discussion in this area indicates that there may now be an opportunity to re‐enter some of these debates, particularly those in which it is clear that there are many important issues that are reappearing on the ICT policy agenda. Some of the most difficult issues are highlighted including the need to give greater attention to measures supporting more differentiated information or knowledge societies.

The paper demonstrates that there are signs of learning and an awareness of unequal power relationships among stakeholders in ICT policy debates that may contribute to a shift in priorities towards a more context sensitive research framework that would be of value to those who are preoccupied by efforts to improve the material conditions of people's lives.

The purpose of this paper is to study how young vocational school students in Finland frame themselves and their participation in society and whether they are seen in various media. The explorative research, with n = 213 vocational school and prepatory VALMA students as co-researchers, tells us that young vocational school students use value framing to create understandings of themselves as participants in society and in media. The purpose is this to present the breadth of their thinking and to draw conclusions from the empirical data produced solely by the co-researchers.

Explorative multidisciplinary research was done as co-research with n = 213 vocational school students in Finland. Research includes theoretical background and focuses on empirical qualitative data to further illustrate the explorative nature and results of the study.

The findings of the explorative co-research tell us that young vocational school students use value framing to create understandings of themselves as participants in society and in media. Co-researchers view themselves as missing in traditional media but find freedom on social media. Content from various media is viewed as reliable and trustworthy but also as problematic propaganda based on personal value framing. The relationship with traditional print media is strained because young people feel that media has othered them and continues to frame them negatively. While they look for that entertaining content across the media spectrum, bullying is an ever-present concern.

This study focused only on vocational school students in Finland. A broader sample of young people, or of minorities, could produce profound results on media literacy, relationships and power relations in the society. Also, framings of the various international media would provide content for analysis. More profound analysis of the data shall be done in the next phase of the research.

Study time was limited. More in-depth study will follow. Implications to future research, media consumption and framing should be done with a larger group of researchers and youth.

Social implications towards framing of youth in various media and the transfer of these framing as knowledge in larger society. This includes notions of power of various actors in media and in society at large.

Multidisciplinary explorative co-research on the topic is largely missing from academia. Additionally, the voices of those in the fringes of society is muted, whilst also those youth studying the vocational schools.

The aim of this article is to present the development‐oriented Master's curriculum “Global Studies” (GS) at the University of Graz, Austria, as an example of interdisciplinary academic training with the purpose of fostering inter‐“cultural” understanding. It aims to show that scientific disciplines can be understood as “cultures of cognition” producing own views of realities.

Based on a decade of previous experiences, the communication and assessment functions of e‐learning platforms and e‐journals are used to facilitate stepwise approximations among the various “cultures of understanding”.

Despite severe financial limitations, peer‐oriented planning and lecturing efforts since 2004 have resulted in a bundle of electives and in a new Master's curriculum elaborated cooperatively by the faculties of the legal, economic, historic, cultural, natural and communication sciences at Karl‐Franzens‐University Graz. Both the bundle of electives and the Master's curriculum appear to offer a truly “m:n type” interdisciplinary and intercultural design which assumes various stakeholder‐dependent perspectives of multi‐faceted realities.

The wealth of interdisciplinary and intercultural thought and practice can be best “proceduralised” through dialogue‐oriented educational technologies.

In practical terms, hundreds of students may follow these web‐enhanced curricula that are based on the materialised results of their founders' ethical systems.

This is the first paper that outlines the Global Studies curriculum at Graz University.

We draw on an in-depth investigation into the phenomenon of community radio in India to identify the emergence of an institutional logic in a field. We delineate five stages of emergence, starting with problematization of dominant logics and ending with formation of an institutionally complex field. Further, we highlight how such a process results in organizational forms that reflect ongoing struggles among dominant logics and the emerging logic. We contribute to neoinstitutional studies on the emergence of social objects and also draw the attention of emergence theorists to the contested manner in which emergence takes place in the social world.

This research was conducted to understand how vulnerable communities used social media (SM) tools to face the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Affected by the lack of information and the absence of effective public policies, residents from slums in the city of Rio de Janeiro displayed new and unexpected uses to SM tools to tackle the health and socio-economic impacts of the pandemic.

The research methodology consisted of a qualitative, exploratory study, combining a series of in-depth interviews with the analysis of various posts, containing videos and texts, extracted from SM during the first six months of the pandemic. The data were collected in the context of 10 different communities in Rio de Janeiro city.

In the context of the pandemic, people combined different uses of SM not only to inform themselves and communicate with others but also to articulate and execute fundraising and food donation strategies within vulnerable communities. Accordingly, this SM use is characterized by improvisation, learning by doing and building resilience, which are all constructs related to the concept of bricolage. Users had no specific SM knowledge, and adjusted these technological tools to emergent new activities in practice, which is characteristic of sociomaterial process. In addition to emphasizing the importance of context for the emergence of the phenomenon, this work also highlights reliability, validity and authority as characteristics related to the citizen-led participation approach that was observed.

Future research can develop approaches based on pandemic sociomaterial bricolage (PSB) aspects, which could guide governments and practitioners on building innovative solutions for the use of SM by the population, especially in emergency situations.

This study proposes a framework, termed PSB, to represent SM usage promoted by the pandemic context, which emerged from the triangulation of empirical data and an analysis based on the concepts of bricolage and sociomateriality.

Experiential learning focuses on learners, their activities, experiences, and how they process and reflect upon them. Experiential learning about sustainable development in general and about Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in particular has to consider specific challenges of sustainable development, such as interdisciplinarity, trade-offs, conflicts of interests, ambiguities, as well as the need for critical thinking, creativity, and communication skills. Although experiential learning offers a broad range of benefits, well-documented course designs are rare, especially in business education. The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to present a course design that we have implemented more than 50 times over the last 10 years. By providing insights into the course design, its main components, and the experiences we have gathered from it, we hope to inspire and motivate other educators to apply similar methods of experiential learning in relation to the SDGs in business education. The modular course concept consists of a kickoff meeting, three thematic trainings, three academic assignments, and two days of simulation games, role-playing, group exercises, and several rounds of reflection and evaluation. In the following sections, we describe the core elements of our course design, provide insights into success conditions and potential pitfalls, explain how the course can be adapted and replicated, and discuss the requirements for experiential learning.

This paper aims to explore how management control systems (MCS) of an operating company (Delta Lanka) of a multinational corporation (MNC) is shaped through the interplay between external institutional influences via global prescriptions stemming from the parent company culture and localisation needs as suited to cultural context of the operating company through the agency of practice level actors.

Theoretically, the paper draws upon institutional theory, more specifically the notions of external institutions and agency of practice level actors, while methodologically, it adopts the single-site case study approach under the qualitative tradition.

The findings suggest that given the complex setting of being encountered with multiple cultural ramifications, MCS of Delta Lanka encompasses compulsory elements instigated by the parent company, and non-compulsory elements as attuned to the realities of the local culture of the operating company. The authors show how imposed practices in the institutional environment by the parent company (homogeneity) interact with agentic aspects of actors in the operating company giving rise to practice variation (heterogeneity) in the adoption of controls at the local level.

The paper offers insights on how practicing managers in operating companies of MNCs could formulate control systems by striking a balance between multiple cultural considerations (of the parent and operating company). This would be a lesson for managers of other firms (especially MNCs).

By bringing together multitude of cultural dimensions relating to the parent company and operating company into a single study in the area of management control, this paper adds to the burgeoning literature on the interplay between external institutions, agency of actors, culture and MCS. It also contributes to the on-going debate on MCS research taking a post-Hofstede orientation while extending the use of institutional theory in management accounting research in MNCs.

The purpose of this paper is to better understand agenda setting by international human rights organizations in the online environment and at the same time contribute to agenda‐setting theory. The role of non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) in the area of human rights is clarified, and agenda setting and related concepts are discussed.

The study focuses on how attention is drawn to human rights issues in online communication by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International. A content analysis of online forums of HRW and Amnesty International was conducted by monitoring their web sites and Facebook and Twitter pages over a period of three months. In addition, two expert interviews with representatives of Amnesty Finland were conducted to better understand how the organization's online communication activities relate to its policies in drawing attention to human rights.

Based on this study, drawing attention to human rights issues is a goal that leads to active online communication. NGOs aim at attracting attention to their issues online by initiating a dialogue via online forums and motivating the public to participate in activities that may influence the media and the political agenda. The existing agenda‐setting research tends to emphasize the role of journalists in setting the public agenda, and mentions NGOs primarily as a source for journalists and as a political player. The online environment shows, however, that these NGOs mostly aim at setting the public agenda to create social change, while the media and political agenda are also not forgotten.

This study suggests that the interdependence of the media, public and political agendas is more complex than has thus far been considered in agenda‐setting theory, especially in the current online environment. It investigates online agenda setting by two international NGOs, but does not discuss the role of the media or the public at large in their relationship with these NGOs. As this study has a limited time frame, a content analysis over a longer period and interviews with representatives of a wider variety of NGOs could be a next step. Future research could also compare the online communication of NGOs with that of profit organisations.

The findings show how agenda setting is supported by intricate multi‐platform activities in the present‐day online environment by the organizations studied in order to initiate a dialogue on societal issues. This suggests that in the online environment, the media, public and political agendas are becoming increasingly interrelated and within this triangle the public agenda seems to be gaining further in importance.

The impact that NGOs have on today's society is growing, and hence studying their online agenda setting is valuable from the perspective of corporate communication. International NGOs early on recognised the value of online communication.