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Despite cultural dimensions being included in hundreds of business and management research studies, there have been relatively few studies in public-sector accounting that include the use of cultural dimensions. It is posited that national cultural variables impact the institutions, which, in turn, have an influence on public-sector budgeting. The study aims to contribute to the literature by examining these relations in 31 countries.

These relationships are empirically evaluated by structural equation modeling using measures of national culture from Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) study and Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGIs) measures named institutions from the World Bank. Furthermore, measures of public-sector budgeting are evaluated in which public-sector budgeting is classified according to the legislative power of the purse and budget transparency.

Generally, findings reveal that institutions mediate the relationship among national cultural variables and budgeting at the national level. By that means, budgeting in a given nation is linked to the nation's supporting institutions which, in turn, are influenced by the national culture of those who maintain them. Particularly, power distance and uncertainty avoidance impact budgeting through the full mediation of institutions.

The World Bank's database used for the institutions contained over 200 countries (Kaufmann et al., 2007); the GLOBE cultural database (House et al., 2004) contained data for 62 societies; the public-sector budgeting (Qi and Mensah, 2011) included power of the purse and budgeting transparency country scores for 49 countries and the datasets comprised 31 nations, mostly from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. While smaller than we would have preferred, the size is consistent with other international studies (for instance: Waldman et al., 2006; Kwok and Tadesse, 2006).

The findings of the paper suggest that any plan to improve a nation's budgeting should consider the links between budgeting, supporting institutions and the culture of those that run them. The formal adoption of new methods and standards by supporting institutions may not be enough without accompanying efforts to transform national culture.

The theoretical contribution of the paper is discussed further in the paper.

There is a dearth of research that investigates the impact of national culture on budgeting and management indexes in the public sector across developing countries. Limited studies in accounting and management have explained the role of national culture in shaping organisational and individual values. It is posited that national cultural variables impact budget transparency and performance management. This study contributes to the literature by examining these relations in 16 developing countries.

Adopting an unbalanced timing framework, the current paper seeks to fulfill this gap and applies four cultural dimensions from the GLOBE study (House et al., 2004) as explanatory variables to investigate whether national culture is associated with budget transparency and performance management or not, particularly in the context of developing countries. The paper uses budget transparency as the first dependent variable, based on the OECD database from Qi and Mensah (2011), along with performance management as the second dependent variable, from the BTI Project (2016), according to the leadership's political performance management.

Generally, the empirical findings reveal a minimal relation among GLOBE cultural variables with budget transparency and performance management. Particularly, the empirical findings indicate that only performance orientation has a significant relation with budget transparency and performance management.

The findings of this paper suggest that any plan to improve a nation's budget transparency should consider the links between budgeting, performance management and the culture of those that run them.

The formal adoption of new methods by performance management may not be enough without accompanying efforts to transform performance orientation as an index of national culture.

After graduation, many female accountants tend to ordinarily have professional work experience to obtain an ideal position in the career; but under the influence of both internal (in the profession) and external (in life) adverse conditions, the application of their potential talent would be failed and they cannot utilize their abilities to progress in the career. Relevant studies in this field are in developed countries with minimal attention to females in other countries. This study contributes to the literature by examining the case in a developing country–Iran.

A mixed-method study was undertaken to gather data by a postal questionnaire distributed in 2016–2017 and structured interviews with females who assuredly have working experience in the corporate finance department of firms listed in the Tehran Stock Exchange.

It is concluded that the primary issue affecting the career vision of women is to achieve a better working environment. This issue admittedly can be considered as a reason for women to change their employer. The salaries and benefits are also the least important to them. Most women prefer to work in the educational part because of flexible working hours, and they broadly obtain almost no desire to work in the field of tax and cost accounting.

When answering the questionnaire or during the interviews, women are supposed to think about events that happened in the past, so it is recognized that they may selectively remember such events and interpret them with reference to the intervening events and the values that they hold at the time of the data collection. Moreover, all selected respondents may be naturally influenced by a desire to provide socially acceptable answers. Accordingly, the inherent limitations of the results are acknowledged. However, the prime focus of this paper is to consider and give voice to the female experience, which may or may not replicate the experience of their male counterparts.

This paper contributes meaningfully to the debate on the issues affecting the career vision of women and may result in their departure.

The impact of the dual work–life burden of women on career progression is assessed which contributes to the extant literature on the career progression of women in the context of developing countries such as Iran.

The purpose of the paper is to investigate the extent to which a model based on financial and non-financial variables predicts auditors' decisions to issue qualified audit reports in the case of companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE).

The authors utilized data from the financial statements of 96 Iranian firms as the sample over a period of five years (2012–2016). A total of 480 observations were analysed using a probit model through 11 primary financial ratios accompanying non-financial variables, including the type of audit firm, auditor turnover and corporate performance, which affect the issuance of audit reports.

The results demonstrated high explanatory power of financial ratios and type of audit firm (the national audit organization vs other local audit firms) in explaining qualifications through audit reports. The predictive accuracy of the estimated model is evaluated using a regression model for the probabilities of qualified and clean opinions. The model is reliable, with 72.9% accuracy in classifying the total sample correctly to explain changes in the auditor's opinion.

This study contains some limitations. First, it is likely that similar researches in developed countries set a large sample (e.g. over 1,000 firms) including more years, but the authors cannot follow such a trend due to data access restrictions. Second, banks and financial institutions, investment and holding firms are removed from the sample, because their financial structure is diverse. The third limitation of the study represents the different economic and cultural conditions of Iran compared to other countries. Future studies could focus on internal control material weaknesses or earnings management to predict audit opinion in emerging economies including Iran.

The paper has practical implications and can assist auditors in identifying factors motivating audit report qualifications, mainly in emerging economies.

The paper contributes to auditing research, since very little is known about the determinants of audit opinion in emerging markets including Iran; it also constitutes an addition to previous knowledge about audit opinion in the context of TSE. The paper is one of the rare studies predicting auditor opinions using both financial variables and non-financial metrics.

Construction projects in the real estate sector are important for a nation’s economic growth. However, owing to several constraints and stereotypes, the construction industry is suffering from major capital losses. A review of recent literature revealed that risks occurring in real estate construction projects (RECPs) carried out in developing economies can be divided into four categories, i.e. financial risks, design risks, execution risks and sociopolitical risks. This study aims to identify the critical factors that lead to these risk categories and develop a control structure for RECPs.

A quantitative method, i.e. a questionnaire-based survey, was used for this study. Using a random sampling technique the questionnaire was distributed to selected, highly experienced project managers. To determine whether the factors identified as part of the literature review strongly influence the categories, the factor analysis of the observations was performed.

The observations made in this study lead to the identification of six critical risk causing factors, i.e. lack of efficient planning, execution constraints, external constraints, client-induced constraints, project constraints and partner experience. The observations indicated a lack of knowledge of project management, organizational culture and a claims redressal mechanism in RECPs. Also, this study recommends a blockchain-based control structure to control the occurrence of the risk causing factors identified.

This study recommends a blockchain-based control structure for controlling the risks occurring.

This study investigates the effect of corporate governance mechanisms and country-level factors on the extent of Internet Financial Reporting (IFR). We used a sample of 106 listed firms from five African countries. A financial reporting disclosure index was used to compute the aggregate IFR scores, which are made up of two components: content and presentation. Our results indicate that IFR relates to board size, firm size, country-level governance, economic development and index return. These results evidence the predominance of country-level factors over firm-specific factors in explaining the extent of IFR in Africa. It also shows that corporate governance mechanisms via board practices are insufficient to explain IFR in Africa. By further extending our analysis into the two components of IFR, we find that factors affecting the content and presentation dimensions are different. This study is among the first to investigate the extent of IFR in several African countries and adds to the existing evidence that has mainly focussed on firm-specific factors.

The main objective of this article is to develop a theoretical formulation for predicting the response of CNTs reinforced beam under multiple impactors with general boundary conditions, using first-order shear deformation beam theory.

The rule of mixtures is implemented to derive the material properties of the beam. The nonlinear Hertz contact law is applied for simulation between impactors and the surface of the beam. A combination of approaches includes energy method, Ritz method and generalized Lagrange equations are used to extract the matrix form of equations of motion. The time-domain solution is obtained using implementing the well-known Runge Kutta 4th order method.

After examining the accuracy of the present method, the effects of the number of impactors include one impactor, and three impactors in various CNTs volume fraction are studied for CNTs reinforced beam with clamped-clamped, clamped-free and simply supported boundary conditions under the low-velocity impact. The most important finding of this article is that contact force and beam indentation at the middle of the beam in the case of one impactor are greater than those reported in the case of three impactors.

This article fulfills an identified need to study how CNTs reinforced beam behaviour with general boundary conditions under multiple low-velocity impacts can be enabled.

Lean manufacturing is an operational strategy oriented toward achieving the shortest possible cycle time by eliminating waste. It is derived from the Toyota Production System and its key thrust is to increase the value-added work by eliminating waste and reducing incidental work. In today's competitive global marketplace, the concept of lean manufacturing has gained vital consciousness to all manufacturing sectors, their supply chains, and hence a logical measurement index system is indeed required in implementing leanness in practice. Such leanness estimation can help the enterprises to assess their existing leanness level and can compare different industries who are adapting this lean concept. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The present work exhibits an efficient fuzzy-based leanness assessment system using generalized interval-valued (IV) trapezoidal fuzzy numbers set. The concept of “degree of similarity” between two IV fuzzy numbers has been explored here to identify ill-performing areas towards lean achievement.

The methodology described here has been found fruitful while applying for a particular industry, in India, as a case study. Apart from estimating overall lean performance metric, the model presented here can identify ill-performing areas towards lean achievement.

The major contributions of this work have been summarized as follows: development and implementation of an efficient decision-making procedural hierarchy to support leanness extent evaluation. An overall lean performance index evaluation platform has been introduced. Concept of generalized IV trapezoidal fuzzy numbers has been efficiently explored to facilitate this decision-making. The appraisement index system has been extended with the capability to search ill-performing areas which require future progress.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a systematic literature review of available research evidence on marginal participation of women in ICT-related jobs (ICT – information and communication technology). In this study, it has been attempted to identify gaps in these literature studies according to the Global Index of Gender dimensions and briefly has been explained guidelines for policymakers to improve the participation of women in this area.

The authors follow from the method of (Tranfield et al., 2003) for conducting a systematic literature review (a systematic review means that the research has specific and systematic steps). Then key words were searched and appropriate resources with this study were evaluated. Accidentally, 55 articles in the period 2000 to 2014 were investigated, and articles were reviewed according to the Global Index of Gender dimensions.

A review of previous studies indicated that despite considerable attention given to open access to information and women’s skills, role of women in ICT has been underestimated. Results indicated that to keep pace with today’s information society, we would have to reinforce knowledge and abilities of women and provide them employment grounds in jobs that require new skills in ICT. To reinforce participation of women in the jobs, we need to invest in education and design policies to increase the number of women in educational courses related to ICTs. Also, we need to promote equal educational opportunities. Libraries are suitable platforms to create bold employment of women in jobs related to ICTs. Because it seems that majority of professionals are women in these places. In current information communities, we have to raise the level of individual development for reaching total development. Thus, women’s progress at professional jobs is needed to remove barriers of creativity and entrepreneurship for women. Also, development of strategies for providing contribution of women in ICT jobs should not be neglected.

This study is the first comprehensive study on the systematic review of the literature in the field of Gender Gap to show marginal participation of women in the ICT-related jobs.

To address the challenges encountered in disaster responses, optimize resource utilization, minimize environmental and social impact, and ensure transparency and accountability, it is essential to review humanitarian supply chains and incorporate sustainability considerations. Humanitarian organizations can enhance their ability to deliver timely and effective assistance to those in need by continuously improving supply chain practices. Consequently, this work explores the convergence of two fast-growing domains: sustainability and humanitarian supply chain management (HSCM).

The authors conducted a systematic literature review of peer-reviewed articles to identify the prominent research trends and themes from the two domains' interactions. The extant literature is represented under the theory, context, characteristics, and research method (TCCM) framework. The authors have utilized a stakeholder theory perspective to identify coordination and collaboration among the various stakeholders.

This study's review findings reveal five future research directions formulating this study's central themes: the role of environmental sustainability, coordination, and collaboration in building effective HSCs; the role of humanitarian aid for the responsive HSC; the influence of big data predictive analytics on the HSC performance; development and empirical validation of sustainable HSC performance framework; the role of HSC stakeholders in building effective and efficient HSCs.

There is no existing academic literature review available on sustainable HSCM. This review fills this void by fostering discussion about sustainable humanitarian supply chains where the authors notably propose the TCCM framework in the context of sustainable HSCM, followed by a stakeholder network.