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Organizational sociology and organization studies have a long history together, while also sharing a proclivity to self-diagnose crises. Instead of taking these assessments at face value, this paper treats them as an object of study, asking what conditions have fueled them. In the case of organizational sociology, there are indications of a connection between rising levels of discontent and community building: self-identified organizational sociologists have progressively withdrawn from general debates in the discipline and turned their attention to organization studies, which, they suspect, has seen dramatic levels of growth at their expense. Organization studies, on the other hand, are still haunted by “a Faustian bargain”: leaning heavily on the authority of the social sciences, business school faculty were able to facilitate the emergence of a scholarly field of practice dedicated to the study of organizations, which they control. However, in doing so, they also set organization studies on a path of continued dependence on knowledge produced elsewhere: notably, by university disciplines such as sociology.

The accurate valuation of second-hand vessels has become a prominent subject of interest among investors, necessitating regular impairment tests. Previous literature has predominantly concentrated on inferring a vessel's price through parameter estimation but has overlooked the prediction accuracy. With the increasing adoption of machine learning for pricing physical assets, this paper aims to quantify potential factors in a non-parametric manner. Furthermore, it seeks to evaluate whether the devised method can serve as an efficient means of valuation.

This paper proposes a stacking ensemble approach with add-on feedforward neural networks, taking four tree-driven models as base learners. The proposed method is applied to a training dataset collected from public sources. Then, the performance is assessed on the test dataset and compared with a benchmark model, commonly used in previous studies.

The results on the test dataset indicate that the designed method not only outperforms base learners under statistical metrics but also surpasses the benchmark GAM in terms of accuracy. Notably, 73% of the testing points fall within the less-than-10% error range. The designed method can leverage the predictive power of base learners by incrementally adding a small amount of target value through residuals and harnessing feature engineering capability from neural networks.

This paper marks the pioneering use of the stacking ensemble in vessel pricing within the literature. The impressive performance positions it as an efficient desktop valuation tool for market users.

This study explores the integration of corporate reporting by Mitsubishi, a large Japanese company, using a culturally sensitive narrative that combines and reconciles Japanese and Western corporate values in one story.

We use an analytical framework drawing on insights borrowed from narratology and the notion of wrapping – the traditional art of packaging as communication.

We find that Mitsubishi is a survivor company that uses different corporate reporting frameworks during its reporting journey to construct a bespoke narrative of its value creation and cultural values. It emplots narratives to convey a story presenting the impression that Mitsubishi is a Japanese corporation but is compatible with Western neo-liberal ideology, making bad news palatable to its stakeholders and instilling confidence in the future.

Wrapping is a culturally sensitive form of impression management used in the integration of corporate reporting. Therefore, rather than assuming that companies blatantly manipulate their image in corporate reports, we suggest that future research should focus on how narratives are constructed and made sense of, situating them in the context of local culture and traditions.

The findings should interest scholars, report preparers, policymakers, and the IFRS, considering the recent release of the IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards designed to reduce the so-called alphabet soup of corporate reporting. By following Mitsubishi’s journey, we learn how and why the notion of integrated reporting was adopted and integrated with other reporting frameworks to create narratives that together convey a story of a global corporation compliant with Western neoliberal ideology. It highlights how Mitsubishi used integrated reporting to tell its story rather than as a rigid reporting framework, and the same fate may apply to the new IFRS Sustainability Reporting Standards that now include integrated reporting.

The study offers a new perspective on corporate reporting, showing how the local societal discourses of cultural heritage and modernity can shape the journey of the integration of corporate reporting over time.