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This study aims to investigate whether auditors compromise their independence for economically important clients in family business settings.

The authors empirically examine the research question based on China for the years 2011 to 2020. The dependent variable is the auditors’ propensity to issue modified audit opinions, which is a proxy for auditor independence. The authors use relative client audit fees as a proxy for client importance. To address endogeneity issues in the selection of family firms, the authors use the two-stage least squares regression model and, subsequently, the propensity score matching and Hausman firm fixed effect modeling.

This study reveals that the propensity to issue modified audit opinions is positively correlated with client importance. Big-N auditors are more likely to issue modified audit opinions for their economically important family firm clients, whereas such evidence is not found for non-Big-N auditors. Results are consistent and robust to endogeneity test and sensitivity analysis.

This study enriches the literature on auditor independence and the effect of family firms’ ownership structure factors on audit reporting behavior for their economically important clients. Findings may prove useful for managers and practitioners interested in family business.

With the rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence (AI), it is important to consider how young people are making sense of these tools in their everyday lives. Drawing on critical postdigital approaches to learning and literacy, this study aims to center the experiences and perspectives of young people who encounter and experiment with generative AI in their daily writing practices.

This critical case study of one digital platform – Character.ai – brings together an adolescent and adult authorship team to inquire about the intertwining of young people’s playful and critical perspectives when writing on/with digital platforms. Drawing on critical walkthrough methodology (Light et al., 2018), the authors engage digital methods to study how the creative and “fun” uses of AI in youths’ writing lives are situated in broader platform ecologies.

The findings suggest experimentation and pleasure are key aspects of young people’s engagement with generative AI. The authors demonstrate how one platform works to capitalize on these dimensions, even as youth users engage critically and artfully with the platform and develop their digital writing practices.

This study highlights how playful experimentation with generative AI can engage young people both in pleasurable digital writing and in exploration and contemplation of platforms dynamics and structures that shape their and others’ literate activities. Educators can consider young people’s creative uses of these evolving technologies as potential opportunities to develop a critical awareness of how commercial platforms seek to benefit from their users.

This study contributes to the development of a critical and humanist research agenda around generative AI by centering the experiences, perspectives and practices of young people who are underrepresented in the burgeoning research devoted to AI and literacies.

Since the introduction of the outstanding web AI chat system, ChatGPT, it has caused a significant impact in both academia and the business world. Many studies have started to explore its potential applications in various fields. However, there is a lack of research from the perspective of user experience. To fill this theoretical gap and provide a theoretical basis for the operation and design of related services, this study plans to develop a set of evaluation scales for AI chat system user experience and explore the relationship between various factors and user satisfaction.

This study obtained 41 evaluation indicators through literature review and user research. Subsequently, these indicators were used as questionnaire items, combined with satisfaction metrics. A total of 515 questionnaires were distributed, and factor analysis and linear regression were employed to determine the specific elements influencing user experience and the user satisfaction model.

This study found that the factors influencing user experience are usefulness, accuracy, logical inference, interactivity, growth, anthropomorphism, convenience, credibility, ease of use, creativity, and security. Among these factors, only accuracy, anthropomorphism, creativity, and security indirectly influence satisfaction through usefulness, while the rest of the factors have a direct positive impact on user satisfaction.

This study provides constructive suggestions for the design and operation of related services and serves as a reference for future theoretical research in this area.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the link between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the amount of trust customers have in Somali Islamic banks. Furthermore, the role of gender in CSR activities and Islamic bank clientele is evaluated.

Throughout February and March 2022, 410 clients of Islamic banks in Somalia were surveyed using a questionnaire. The partial least squares approach and the structural equation model are applied to examine the data.

Findings indicate that all variables of CSR activities, such as social product, social legal, social needs, social environment and social employees’ responsibility, are influential and significant predictors of trust in Islamic banks in Somalia. Gender inequalities moderate the relationship between social product, social needs, social environment, social employee and trust. Conversely, only social legal responsibility was unaffected by gender differences in Somalia regarding people’s trust in Islamic banks.

A sample from a developing country such as Somalia is useful for shedding light on the outcomes of consumers’ perceptions of and trust in businesses’ CSR in the developing world. Furthermore, this study contributes to knowledge regarding CSR and how it can help the Islamic banking industry. Its findings will be useful to policymakers and regulatory bodies in the banking industry in their efforts to improve CSR.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first empirical investigation of its kind about the understudied relationship among customer trust, CSR efforts and gender in Somalia context. Furthermore, it investigates how gender specifically moderates CSR in the Islamic banking sector in a developing country.

This study examines how assurors make sense of sustainability assurance (SA) work and how interactions with assurance team members and clients shape assurors’ sensemaking and their actual SA work.

To obtain detailed accounts of how SA work occurs on the ground, this study explores three SA engagements by interviewing the main actors involved, both at the client firms and at their Big Four assurance providers.

Individual assurors’ (i.e. partners and other team members) sensemaking of SA work results in the crafting of their logics of action (LoAs), that is, their meanings about the objectives of SA work and how to conduct it. Without organizational socialization, team members may not arrive at shared meanings and deviate from the team-wide assurance approach. To fulfill their objectives for SA work, assurors may engage in socialization with clients or assume a temporary role. Yet, the role negotiations taking place in the shadows of the scope negotiations determine their default role during the engagement.

Two options are available to help SA statement users gauge the relevance of SA work: either displaying the SA work performed or making it more uniform.

This study theoretically grounds how assurors make sense of SA work and documents how (the lack of) professional socialization, organizational socialization and socialization of frequent interaction partners at the client shape actual SA work. Thereby, it unravels the SA work concealed behind SA statements.

In the modern digital realm, while artificial intelligence (AI) technologies pave the way for unprecedented opportunities, they also give rise to intricate cybersecurity issues, including threats like deepfakes and unanticipated AI-induced risks. This study aims to address the insufficient exploration of AI cybersecurity awareness in the current literature.

Using in-depth surveys across varied sectors (N = 150), the authors analyzed the correlation between the absence of AI risk content in organizational cybersecurity awareness programs and its impact on employee awareness.

A significant AI-risk knowledge void was observed among users: despite frequent interaction with AI tools, a majority remain unaware of specialized AI threats. A pronounced knowledge difference existed between those that are trained in AI risks and those who are not, more apparent among non-technical personnel and sectors managing sensitive information.

This study paves the way for thorough research, allowing for refinement of awareness initiatives tailored to distinct industries.

It is imperative for organizations to emphasize AI risk training, especially among non-technical staff. Industries handling sensitive data should be at the forefront.

Ensuring employees are aware of AI-related threats can lead to a safer digital environment for both organizations and society at large, given the pervasive nature of AI in everyday life.

Unlike most of the papers about AI risks, the authors do not trust subjective data from second hand papers, but use objective authentic data from the authors’ own up-to-date anonymous survey.

This study aims to offer authors’ humble yet unique experiences about developing an undergraduate sociology programme in an increasingly divided city.

In this study, the authors reflect upon the development of a new sociology programme in Hong Kong in which a wide spectrum of expectations from different stakeholders, together with their own sense of mission towards sociology education, have set a very challenging stage.

Developing an undergraduate sociology programme has never been easy, and there is no self-complacence as far as developing a programme that is of both academic and social values.

This paper offers a first-hand account of how sociology educators have developed a new sociology programme in a unique social context.

This paper aims to examine the perspectives of auditors, regulators and financial report preparers on the effects of key audit matters (KAMs) reporting on audit effort, fees, quality and report transparency.

The authors conducted 21 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders (13 Audit Partners, 5 Chief Financial Officers and 3 regulators) and thematically analysed the interviews. They use the frame of “Paradox of Transparency” to explain the findings.

Auditors perceive that the overall quality control of their audits has improved both in the planning and execution stages, and such improvement can mostly be attributed to the coercive pressures from professional bodies and regulators. Nevertheless, audit fee remains unchanged. Auditors disclose industry generic items and descriptions of KAMs, sometimes masking the real problem areas of the clients. Even after improving the performative audit quality, transparency of audit reporting has not improved. Issues that warrant going concern qualifications or audit report modifications are now reported as KAMs. Hence, KAMs reporting might make the audit report less transparent.

Localised audit environments and institutions affect the transparency of KAMs reporting. Without attention to corporate governance and auditors’ independence issues, paradoxically, performative improvement in audit quality (due to the KAMs reporting requirement) does not enhance the transparency of audit reports.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to provide field-level evidence in Bangladesh and other developing countries about the perceptions of auditors, financial report preparers and regulators on the effects of KAMs reporting on audit efforts, fees, quality and report transparency.

The purpose of this paper is to share findings from empirically driven conceptual research into the implications for English teachers of understanding generative AI as a “tool” for writing.

The paper reports early findings from an Australian National Survey of English teachers and interrogates the notion of the AI writer as “tool” through intersectional feminist discursive-material analysis of the metaphorical entailments of the term.

Through this work, the authors have developed the concept of “coloniser tool-thinking” and juxtaposed it with First Nations and feminist understandings of “tools” and “objects” to demonstrate risks to the pursuit of social and planetary justice through understanding generative AI as a tool for English teachers and students.

Bringing together white and First Nations English researchers in dialogue, the paper contributes a unique perspective to challenge widespread and common-sense use of “tool” for generative AI services.

Emotional intelligence (EI) has a profound effect on the performance of tour guides, though past studies on the subject have neglected to examine the effects of EI on neither the overall nor specific pattern of tour guides' performance. This study examines the overall link between four dimensions of EI (self-emotion appraisal [SEA], others' emotion appraisal [OEA], use of emotions [UOEs] and regulation of emotions [ROEs]) and five dimensions of citizenship performance (helping, self-development, initiative, compliance and adaptability), ultimately identifying the relationship between EI factors and each dimension of tour guides' citizenship performance.

The data from 244 Jordanian tour guides were gathered through a quantitative survey. A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and multiple regression analysis were performed to analyze the data.

The results reveal that emotionally intelligent tour guides are more likely to have higher levels of citizenship performance. The most significant factors in determining extra-role behaviors by tour guides are “UOEs” and “others’ emotion appraisal (OEA)”.

This study equips different professional entities in the tour guide industry with useful, contextualized links between EI and citizenship performance. This assists in developing new accreditation policies and business practices to augment tour guides' citizenship professionalism, thereby maximizing their valuable contributions to tourism growth.

This study advances the tourism studies by establishing a new theoretical link between tour guides' EI and citizenship performance. The study also uncovers unique factors of EI that significantly determine tour guides' citizenship behaviors.