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The media is described as a fourth estate of the realm due to its ability to frame and shape discussions on governance and provide a stimulus for fighting corruption. But is the media really an effective tool for fighting corruption? This question arises due to the possibility of the media being used for propaganda, biased reporting and media owners’ and journalists’ engagement in corruption. The current study addresses the question by exploring the relationship between the media and corruption from the perspectives of Ghanaian justice and anti-corruption officials.

The study adopts a qualitative approach by interviewing justice and anti-corruption officials across three administrative regions in Ghana.

The results show that while justice officials describe the media as a medium for accusing officials unjustifiably and exaggerating the scale of corruption, anti-corruption officials believe the media helps to fight corruption. In addition to uncovering and exposing public officials’ corruption, the media is also a double-edged sword characterised by intra-vigilance: the media hold “their own” (i.e. journalists fighting corruption) accountable through criticism and exposure of wrongdoings.

The double-edged nature of the media can strengthen and enhance the fight against corruption because anti-corruption actors and journalists will be cautious as misjudgements or errors committed will not be overlooked or concealed by the media. Therefore, anti-corruption agencies in Ghana can collaborate with the media to uncover and expose corruption committed by public officials and even journalists or media owners.

This study is the first in Ghana to explore the relationship between the media and corruption from the perspectives of justice and anti-corruption officials. The approach, frameworks and methodology adopted in this study can be applied in similar studies in other countries on the African continent and beyond.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the practices of information and communication technology (ICT) in modernizing the courts. In this context, this paper focuses on the usage of ICT in the Nepali judiciary system involving both judicial and court administration to automate judicial activities.

A narrative case study was conducted to identify the current status of technology in the judiciary system concerning court automation and administration. The information was gathered from justice, case registration officer, bench officer and admin personnel.

This study shows that technological intervention is made in the Nepali judiciary to automate judicial activities. The judicial activities, such as case registration, case automation, case hearing, the decision of cases and cause list, are of high priority and are managed through case management software. Furthermore, it demands an innovative learning environment within the judiciary to strengthen the capacity of the employees of the judiciary in the field of ICT.

This study anticipates the participant’s perception and practical aspects of technology to modernize the courts to provide better and more effective service to its stakeholders. This study carried out the perceptions of the justice, bench officer, case registration officer and admin personnel. The voice of the other stakeholders was not carried out.

This paper establishes the practical aspects of ICT in modernizing the courts to provide better services to its stakeholders. It also replicates the status of ICT in the Nepali judiciary.

This paper tries to establish the practical implications of ICT along with its importance in the judiciary of Nepal.

The electronic judicial consists of applications supporting cases handling until the court makes a legal decision. The electronic judicial will not only include case administration but also be able to accommodate bailiff's services. At the beginning of Covid-19 pandemic, many bailiff's tasks had to be delayed due to the implementation of movement restrictions and lockdowns, thus hampering the execution process. The impact is that a buildup of cases cannot be completed. The purpose of this paper is to integrate the bailiff's service into the judicial digitalization services so that transparency and accountability in the electronic judicial can be achieved.

The method used is qualitative, with the data collected through in-depth interviews with bailiffs in court. Then it was analyzed through triangulation technique by doing literature studies, discussions and observations.

This study shows that the bailiff's service needs to be developed and integrated into the electronic judicial in Indonesia, which consists of a case tracking information system, e-court and electronic execution supervision.

This research focuses on bailiff services in Indonesia. The bailiff's assistance in Indonesia must be integrated with applications supporting e-court as electronic judicial in Indonesia. This integration will help solve the case faster in court.

This study aims to analyse the mechanism of trust instrument from a Shariah point of view. Analysis of the mechanism would determine the extent to which its implementation can resolve estate planning issues such as frozen estate and the issue of naming beneficiaries under the age of 18.

This is a qualitative study method through library research. To explore the mechanism of trust instrument, an in-depth interview with five participants using purposive sampling and analyses of documents were used. The selection of this sample allows the researcher to obtain specific data in their field of expertise. Therefore, two officers from the Trust Administration Department of Amanah Raya Berhad (ARB) and three Shariah advisors from ARB (MPS ARB) were interviewed to find out the mechanism of trust instrument from the Shariah perspective. The researcher also referred to the trust deed documents, ARB company policies, field case studies such nomination cases and trust accounts, articles and court cases.

The trust instrument meets Shariah requirements even though it is based entirely on the Civil Law. The comprehensive and flexible features of trust deeds can help donors to plan systematically during their lifetime.

This study only focuses on the trust instruments that are currently being implemented in the ARB. Five trust products were analysed to achieve the objectives of the study, namely, the Normal Trust, Safecare and Safecare Premium, Takaful Care, Hibah (literally “gift”) as well as Trust and Declaration of Hibah.

The implementation of trust instrument at an early stage can ensure the property is well managed through a trust deed, guarantee the life of the beloved heirs after the death of the donor and prevent the property from being frozen.

This study comprehensively describes the trust instrument from the Shariah perspective and its implementation mechanism in the industry.

This chapter discusses the extension of legal equality between male and female citizens in four states in North Africa – Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco and Algeria – through one specific lens: A married woman's legal capacity to initiate and obtain divorce without the husband's consent. Building on the works of Stein Rokkan and Reinhard Bendix on the expansion of citizenship to the ‘lower classes’, it is argued that amendments in divorce law by introducing in-court divorce for women, in addition to out-of-court divorce, is a significant institutional change that extends legal equality between men and women. The introduction of in-court divorce expands female citizenship by bolstering woman's juridical autonomy and capacity in state law. Changes in divorce laws are thus part of state centralization by means of standardizing rules that regulate family law through public administrative institutions rather than religious organizations. Two questions are addressed: First, how did amendments in divorce laws occur after independence? Second, in which ways did women's bolstered legal capacity in divorce have a spill over effect on reforms in other patriarchal state laws? Based on observations on sequences of change in four states in North Africa, it is argued that amendments that equalize between men and women in divorce should be seen as a key driver for reforms in other state laws, that reduce legal inequality between male and female citizens. In all four states, women's citizenship was extended in nationality law and criminal law after amendments in divorce law gave women unilateral legal power to exit a marital relationship.

Knowledge-intensive public organizations (KIPOs henceforth) rely heavily on knowledge as the primary resource to provide public services. This study deals with a specific kind of KIPO in the judiciary system: the courts. The paper aims to explore the court’s managerial and organisational change resulting from the national recovery and resilience plan (NRRP) reform in response to Covid-19, focussing on how this neglected KIPO responds to change, either by showing acts of resistance or undergoing a hybridisation process.

The paper adopts a qualitative research design, developing an explorative case study to investigate the process of a court’s managerial and organisational change caused by NRRP reform and to shed light on how this neglected KIPO reacts to change, showing resistance acts and developing the hybridisation process. Thirty-one interviews in six months have been conducted with the three main actors in Courts: judges, clerks and trial clerks.

The paper shows that in this understudied KIPO, judges fiercely resist the managerial logic that decades of reforms have been trying to impose. The recent introduction of an office for speeding up trials (Ufficio Per il Processo (UPP)) was initially opposed. Then, the resistance strategy changed, and judges started to benefit from UPP delegating repetitive and low-value tasks while retaining their core activities. Clerks approached the reform with a more positive attitude, seeing in UPP the mechanism to bridge the distance between them and the judges.

Considering their relevance to society, courts must be more addressed in KIPOs' studies. This paper allows the reader to enter such KIPO and understand its peculiar features. Secondly, the article helps to understand micropractices of resistance that may hinder the effectiveness of managerial reforms.

The aim of this study is to empirically explore and analyze the concrete tasks of output measurement and the inherent challenges related to these tasks in a traditional and autonomous professional public work setting – the judicial system.

The analysis of the tasks is based on a categorization of general performance measurement motives (control-motivate-learn) and main stakeholder levels (society-organization-professionals). The analysis is exploratory and conducted as an empirical content analysis on materials and reports produced in two performance improvement projects conducted in European justice organizations.

The identified main tasks in the different categories are related to managing resources, controlling performance deviations, and encouraging improvement and development of performance. Based on the results, key improvement areas connected to output measurement in professional public organizations are connected to the improvement of objectivity and fairness in budgeting and work allocation practices, improvement of output measures' versatility and informativeness to highlight motivational and learning purposes, improvement of professional self-management in setting output targets and producing outputs, as well as improvement of organizational learning from the output measurement.

The paper presents empirically founded practical examples of challenges and improvement opportunities related to the tasks of output measurement in professional public organization.

This paper fulfils an identified need to study how general performance management motives realize as concrete tasks of output measurement in justice organizations.

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) often lack adequate accounting systems and may even fail because of accounting inefficiencies. Indeed, accounting can mitigate the course of a crisis and support a troubled SME’s turnaround. Its impact on reorganization success, however, has scarcely been researched so far. Therefore, this paper aims to examine the effects of several accounting parameters, namely, the quality of accounting systems, quality of early warning systems, formal planning, the standard of financial accounting and reorganization planning on the short- and long-term success of court-supervised reorganization.

The impact of accounting on reorganization success is investigated in a sample of all SME bankruptcy cases with ten or more employees (n = 117) in Upper Austria in 2012 including data for short-term survival (in 2016) and long-term survival (in 2019).

This study found evidence that the general quality of accounting systems, the quality of early warning systems and written reorganization plans positively influence the outcomes of the analyzed court-supervised reorganizations of SMEs. In particular, the existence of a reorganization plan significantly increases the short- and long-term reorganization success by ensuring the efficient and effective use of resources in the reorganization process.

This study should increase the awareness of SMEs’ owner managers, consultants, creditors and legislators for the importance of accounting in the context of reorganization. The fact that the effect of accounting on reorganization success is less pronounced in the long-term view indicates the necessity of increasing the strategic focus in SMEs’ accounting instruments.

This study provides new evidence on the impact of specific accounting parameters on the short- and long-term success of the court-supervised reorganization of SMEs. Furthermore, this study points out the high relevance of reorganization plans for SMEs.

This study aims to identify the inputs from zakat administrators and experts needed for more efficient and effective zakat revenue generation.

Face-to-face interviews with zakat executives, administrators and experts are conducted to collect data.

The findings show three components of input required in the zakat transformation: environment, resources and history. The environmental component comprises five sub-components: companies, banks, zakat recipients, individual zakat payers and the legislative, while the resource sub-components comprise tangible and intangible resources. For history, two components, namely, achievements and challenges, need to be taken into account by the zakat administration.

This study’s main implication is that the components proposed in this study can serve as the basis for developing new strategies for improving zakat collection and distribution management to achieve a more efficient and effective level.

This study will be helpful for policymakers, especially zakat authorities, on how to enhance their administration.

The model developed in this study will help the zakat administration to reform and enhance zakat compliance and zakat revenue generation.