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This study aims to review the literature on non-financial information (NFI) assurance including external assurance of sustainability reports (SRA) and integrated reports (IRA). The objectives are as follows: provide an overview of academic research; understand the nature of NFI assurance engagements by organising the literature around the five key elements of an assurance engagement; develop a framework for understanding NFI assurance; and provide directions for future research.

The study undertakes a structured literature review of 179 articles published from 1999 to 2023.

The review identified 324 researchers located in 35 different countries who published 179 articles on SRA and IRA. The researchers, their locations, journals, methods, theories and themes are examined. The literature is structured around the definition of an assurance engagement including a tripartite arrangement, subject matter, a suitable criterion, sufficient appropriate evidence and a written assurance report. A framework for understanding NFI assurance is offered. Avenues for future research, structured around the five elements of an assurance engagement, are presented.

Researchers will benefit from an overview of the literature and guidance on areas for future research. Lecturers can use the findings to develop content for their auditing courses. Reporting managers will benefit from a better understanding of this new form of assurance. Regulators can use this study’s insights to better inform the development of laws and corporate governance codes mandating NFI assurance. Standard setters can use these findings to guide the emergence of the new assurance standards. Assurance practitioners may use this research to inform practice.

The findings may prove useful in addressing capture, which deters NFI assurance from enhancing disclosure credibility and fulfilling its transparency and accountability role. This is to the detriment of the wider society.

The consolidation of the literature around the five key elements of an assurance engagement is unique. The framework devised offers useful insights into the dynamics of assurance generally and NFI assurance more specifically. The study is timely given the new European Union regulations on NFI reporting and assurance and the work of the International Audit and Assurance Standards Board in developing a specialist NFI assurance standard.

Cities were regions ruled by local governments, where people were supposed to live together and provide equal access to sociocultural opportunities. In the 21st century, global warming and overuse of scarce limited resources has made sustainability more examined about for our entire environment, particularly cities. With the rapid increase in the population in the cities, humankind has faced a lot of pollution, destruction, and social inequality. Many regions and countries have started to build new smart cities using technology to overcome crowded life, traffic, and air pollution, improve food production, and use scarce natural resources sustainable. Smart cities also provide residents to improve their quality of life and their health; therefore, eco-gastronomy is related to organic farming and cooking method that minimize the damage to the environment with organic ingredients. For a healthy and quality life, meals made with healthy ingredients are required. Smart cities have also started to implement eco-gastronomy projects by using technology. In this chapter, cities which can be associated with the eco-gastronomy dimension of smart cities such as Gaziantep, Izmir, and Konya from Turkey and Copenhagen were analyzed.

Motivated by the growing and urgent demands for a unified set of internationally accepted, and high-quality environmental, social and governance (hereafter ESG) disclosure standards, this exploratory study aims to propose a roadmap for setting out the proper technical groundwork for global ESG disclosure standards.

An exploratory study is conducted to gain initial understanding and insights into establishing a worldwide set of standards for reporting on sustainability, as this topic has not been extensively studied. This study examines the viewpoints of various stakeholders, including sustainability practitioners, academics and organizations focused on ESG issues, to generate knowledge that is more solid than knowledge produced when one group of stakeholders work alone.

The results revealed that there is an ongoing and incompatible debate regarding several conceptual and practical challenges for setting a unified set of ESG disclosure standards.

The study results provide multidimensional insights for regulatory parties and standard-setters to develop a high-quality package of global ESG reporting standards. This, in turn, enables different groups of stakeholders to understand the firm’s impact on the environment, society and economy.

Research into this timely and relevant global issue is considered an appealing area of study and deserves significant attention. Thereby, working on this topic merits remarkable attention. Furthermore, this exploratory article provides valuable and informative suggestions for creating a unified and high-quality set of internationally accepted sustainability reporting standards.

The purpose of this essay is to explore the opportunities and challenges that early-career researchers (ECRs) face when they seek to contribute to academic knowledge production through research activities “other than” those directly focused on making progress with their own, to-be-published, research papers in a context associated with the “publish or perish” (PoP) mentality.

Drawing broadly on the notion of technologies of humility (Jasanoff, 2003), this reflective essay develops upon the experiences of the authors in organizing and participating in a series of nine workshops undertaken between June 2013 and April 2021, as well as the arduous process of writing this paper itself. Retrospective accounts, workshop materials, email exchanges and surveys of workshop participants provide the key data sources for the analysis presented in the paper.

The paper shows how the organization of the workshops is intertwined with the building of a small community of ECRs and exploration of how to address the perceived limitations of a “gap-spotting” approach to developing research ideas and questions. The analysis foregrounds how the workshops provide a seemingly valuable research experience that is not without contradictions. Workshop participation reveals tensions between engagement in activities “other than” working on papers for publication and institutionalized pressures to produce publication outputs, between the (weak) perceived status of ECRs in the field and the aspiration to make a scholarly contribution, and between the desire to develop a personally satisfying intellectual journey and the pressure to respond to requirements that allow access to a wider community of scholars.

Our analysis contributes to debates about the ways in which seemingly valuable outputs are produced in academia despite a pervasive “publish or perish” mentality. The analysis also shows how reflexive writing can help to better understand the opportunities and challenges of pursuing activities that might be considered “unproductive” because they are not directly related to to-be-published papers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how hierarchical accountability can be enacted and accounting control systems mobilized in a way that promotes a sense of felt responsibility.

The paper draws on interviews, shadowing and observations to explore the implementation of a strategy for “increasing accountability” in a Norwegian Oil Company. The case provided an opportunity to explore the dynamics of hierarchical accountability and felt responsibility, and in particular Roberts (2009) concept of “intelligent accountability”, in an empirical context.

The case study explores how the strategy of increasing accountability at OilCo was enacted around three operational issues; the control of costs, roles and relationships in the complex matrix structure, and the operation of the management system. It traces how the long history of Beyond Budgeting practices and philosophy in OilCo resulted both in an explicit recognition of the incompleteness of accounting numbers, and trust-based practices which avoided many of the dysfunctional individual and organizational effects typically associated with the exercise of hierarchical control.

The paper explores empirically how OilCo’s embrace of Beyond Budgeting practices and philosophy had created the conditions under which a more intelligent form of accountability could emerge. As a European case study, it calls into question the Anglo-American tradition of accounting research which suggests that externally imposed accountability within a hierarchy mitigates against employees’ felt responsibility.

The concept of environmental diplomacy appears associated with events (conventions) promoted between states and transnational organisations to discuss aspects related to regulating the use of natural resources and regulating pollution. In this study, the authors intend to highlight the contribution brought to environmental diplomacy by leading television figure David Attenborough and his focus on the destruction of biodiversity by humans (the problem). It is intended to analyse the frames of his public interventions, comparing them with the prevailing frames in the UNFCCC policies.

A predominantly inductive method of qualitative and interpretative nature is used. In epistemological terms, the framing analysis stems from a social constructivist perspective. A theoretical model for frame analysis was defined by combining the frameworks proposed by Entman (1993) and Semetko and Valkenburg (2000) and considering previous studies (Anholt, 2015; Seelig, 2019). Analysis scrutinised a two-fold corpus comprising articles regarding actions and statements by David Attenborough published in The Guardian between 2018 and 2020, and the UN's legal framework for climate change.

The most prominent frames regarding climate crisis in transnational policies are responsibilities. Attenborough's calls for action highlight the frames of “morality”, “responsibilities” and “problems”. However, it is necessary to make a distinction between the discourse used in transnational treaties and that by Attenborough. In the former, discourse is more technical and impersonal, presented in a structure of legal diplomas and barely accessible to the public. In contrast, Attenborough's speech is more emotional, appealing and sometimes dramatic. His message is transmitted straightforwardly to the public in a pedagogical, personal tone.

The choice of high-profile personalities like David Attenborough as ambassadors has implications in the visibility of the environmental cause, and in the multiplication of initiatives that denounce environmental degradation.

This study explores and analyses the narrative construct regarding climate change as carried out by a trusted and respected media voice. The authors intend to contribute to understanding the amplification role of public figures in controversial issues and diplomatic matters. The main contribution of this study is to highlight the strategic nature of the choice of SDA by political powers to voice the drama of climate emergency.

A vast amount of research has been carried out to help us understand the main factors influencing mergers and acquisitions (M&A) performance. Although the existing body of knowledge focuses mainly on macro-level factors, there is an increasing interest from scholars and practitioners in understanding the micro-foundational factors occurring at individual and team levels. This chapter focuses on the importance of emotions – a central facet in individual reactions to workplace events – in M&A processes. To this end, the authors carried out a multi-phased search for articles on micro-foundations in M&A settings published by Business and Management (B/M) and Organizational Behavior and Psychology (O/P) journals. The authors reviewed 41 papers and used the circumplex model to identify and categorize 19 themes related to individual emotions involved in M&A processes in terms of positive/negative valence and high/low activation. The findings show that scholars mainly assume a risk mitigation perspective and focus on themes related to change resistance (negative emotions with high activation) by providing prescriptions on how negative emotions could be mitigated to avoid eroding acquisition performance. Hence, the authors suggest that (a) there should be more efforts to integrate different streams of literature, namely between the strategic and operational/behavioral areas of knowledge and (b) future research should focus on understanding how positive emotions like change proactivity (positive emotions with high activation) might be essential to enhance acquisition performance.

The purpose of this study is to understand the strategic roles of service customer equity (SCE) and innovation protection on firm performance (FP).

Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test the proposed model. The authors tested the model using managerial data from two countries: USA and India.

The findings of this study indicated positive direct impacts of service innovation (SI) on FP and positive indirect impacts via SCE in both samples. SI and SCE impacts on FP were both stronger in the US samples. However, the effect of SI on SCE is stronger in India than in the USA. This study also identified moderating impacts of service innovation protection (SIP) on the relationship between SI and FP in the Indian sample and between SI and SCE in the US sample.

Although there is scholarly research in SI and its impact on FP, there are no studies the authors identified that discuss the moderating effect of SIP. The authors studied the moderating effect of SIP because (1) it is crucial for industries to maintain a competitive advantage in the marketplace, (2) it protects industries investment in research and development and (3) it also protects industries intellectual property, such as trademark, copyrights and patents. There are two key contributions of this study: (a) investigating the effect of SCE between SI and FP and (b) investigating the moderating effect of SIP using managerial data from two countries (USA vs India).

The authors focus on using Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a lens through which to analyze the holistic welfare development of Black male student-athletes, namely their identity development and overall college and career readiness. The authors contend that if structured and delivered well with the appropriate supports, athletics can be more of a mobilizing mechanism for Black males versus an exploitive one. Specifically, athletic identity does not have to be exclusive, but rather one aspect of the student-athletes' multidimensional sense of self. To this end, the authors outline specific research, practice, and policy recommendations that address the unique challenges of Black male student-athletes in K-16.