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Justice appears as an important strategic concept for promoting sustainability. Among the sustainable development goals established by the United Nations (UN), Goal 16 is about providing access to justice for all and building effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions. In the stakeholder theory perspective, the perception of fair treatment in the stakeholder management allows the organization to value fairness, impartiality, and morality among all stakeholders. The purpose of this chapter is to analyze the influence of justice in the organizational processes of a network of solidarity economy cooperatives. We used semi-structured interviews and desk research on documents made available by the network. The results point to a series of values and processes based on justice throughout the production and managerial chain, providing relationships understood as fair, which can be replicated in organizations that pursue the same ideals.

The study examines the instigating factors behind the development of the local content (LC) policy in Ghana and it further investigates the accountability mechanisms that drive the LC policy implementation to promote sustainable development.

The study reports on a series of interviews with key actors using Institutional Theory and the application of Bovens’ (2010) Global Accountability Framework as a lens for discussion and interpretation of results.

The results reveal that two forces instigated LC policy enactment. One is external funding pressure from the Norwegian government and the World Bank. The other is the government’s engagement of Civil Society Organisations and other internal stakeholders to justify its activities and missions to signal adherence to impartiality, neutrality, and, to a lesser extent, solidarity. The analysis also reveals tensions in how accountability legitimacy relates to implementation of the LC policy. The study further discovers that while participation, transparency, monitoring, and evaluation are frequently invoked as de jure institutional legitimacy in oil and gas contracts, actual practices follow normative (de facto) institutionalism rather than what the LC policy law provides.

The interview had a relatively small number of participants, which can be argued to affect the study’s validity. Nevertheless, given the data saturation effect and the breadth of the data obtained from the respondents, this study represents a significant advancement in LC policy enactment knowledge, implementation mechanisms and enforcement in an emerging O&G industry.

The findings of this study suggest that future policy development in emerging economies should involve detailed consultations to increase decision-maker knowledge, process transparency and expectations. This will improve implementation and reduce stakeholder tension, conflict and mistrust.

The findings of this study build on earlier investigations into legitimacy, accountability and impression management in and outside the O&G sector. Also, the findings reveal the legitimising tactics used by O&G actors to promote local content sustainable development targets.

The purpose of this research is to assess how full-time tenured academic staff promotion practices (SPP) in Malaysian private universities (MPUs) influence academic staff engagement (SE) and academic staff performance (SP).

The research used quantitative and descriptive methods, focusing on MPUs' academic staff as the unit of analysis. Sampling involved simple random and stratified techniques, with 314 academic personnel surveyed. Participant data was collected through a questionnaire, and study hypotheses were tested using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) via a bootstrapping approach.

The findings show that SE somewhat mediates the connection between SPP and SP and that SPP significantly influences SP.

This study emphasizes the importance of impartiality and transparency within university administration when promoting academic staff. Universities should adopt modern strategies and approaches for advancing their employees to higher positions, doing so will motivate employees to fully invest in their work, leading to sustained high-performance levels.

This research has substantially improved the understanding and the practical utilization of literature about SP, SPP and SE. This improvement can potentially facilitate the development of models, theories, research initiatives, and practical strategies geared toward enhancing staff efficiency.

Motivated by concerns and the ongoing debate regarding auditors’ independence and impartiality, this paper aims to examine the impact of the financial crisis on non-audit services (NAS) provision and audit quality (main and robust variables) in the four largest Eurozone countries together during the global financial crisis (GFC).

The authors used a time trend OLS model with a dummy variable as well as a baseline model with a dummy and control variables accounting for multicollinearity, considering the characteristics of the GFC.

It documented a positive (negative) relationship between NAS provision (audit quality) and crisis in four Eurozone countries, Germany, France, Italy and Spain, in the context of a baseline approach, supporting the hypotheses that there are higher non-audit fees and a lower audit quality. Moreover, it is revealed that NAS provision and audit quality behave similarly, using a time trend approach, during the GFC. Considering the role of the auditor specialization or not (Big4 vs non-Big4) in companies, a significant effect from crisis on non-audit fees and audit quality for the four countries under the baseline approach is found. In general, the findings persist for NAS provision and audit quality using the robust methods of the time trend and panel OLS approaches. Multicollinearity was not found to affect the findings of the regressions.

The study provides important implications for firm managers, auditors and regulatory authorities.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, it is the first time that the impact of the crisis on non-audit fees and audit quality is investigated during the GFC with two sets of OLS models (a time trend OLS with a dummy and a panel OLS with a dummy and control variables) in four largest Eurozone countries together.

This case examines critical ethical accounting practice issues surrounding a request for proposal for audit services at Aviary Corporation based on a real Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement action. Audit and tax partners at Western Accounting Firm, a large international public accounting firm, used confidential information obtained from the company’s Chief Audit Officer to modify their proposal for audit services. In response to their actions, the Securities and Exchange Commission fined the auditing firm, the partners, and the Chief Audit Executive. The authors used publicly available information and adopted fictitious names to develop a teaching case that instructors can implement in a variety of accounting and ethics classes to increase students’ understanding of professional codes of conduct and independence guidance.

This study aims to examine the scope and contribution of Forensic Clinical Psychology (FCP) advice from the National Crime Agency (NCA) to criminal investigations in the UK to address the gap in current knowledge and research.

The 36 FCP reports reviewed were written between 2017 and 2021. They were analysed using Toulmin’s (1958) application of pertinent arguments to the evaluation process. The potential utility of the reports was analysed in terms of the advice provided.

Most of the reports involved murder and equivocal death. The reports focused primarily on understanding the offender’s psychopathology, actions, motivation and risk to self and others using a practitioner model of case study methodology. Out of the 539 claims, grounds were provided for 99% of the claims, 91% had designated modality, 62% of the claims were potentially verifiable and 57% of the claims were supported by a warrant and/or backing. Most of the reports provided either moderate or high insight into the offence/offender (92%) and potential for new leads (64%).

The advice provided relied heavily on extensive forensic clinical and investigative experience of offenders, guided by theory and research and was often performed under considerable time pressure. Flexibility, impartiality, rigour and resilience are essential prerequisites for this type of work.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to systematically evaluate forensic clinical psychology reports from the NCA. It shows the pragmatic, dynamic and varied nature of FCP contributions to investigations and its potential utility.

This chapter explores the nature of military law and IHL during the cold war period. It explores what treaties were completed, Additional Protocols I and II of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, the ad hoc international tribunals of the 1990s and 2000s, and examines the ICJ’s ruling of the legality of nuclear weapons.

This paper aims to investigate the relationships amongst career patterns, neutrality of the state civil apparatus, and organizational performance of the local government in South Konawe District, Southeast Sulawesi Province in Indonesia.

Data were analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) to investigate the relationships between variables through direct and indirect influence testing.

The findings reveal that career patterns influence neutrality and organizational performance. Neutrality of the state civil apparatus in politics mediates career patterns and local government organizational performance. The findings indicate that, first, promotions most significantly influence the organization’s neutrality and performance. Second, demotions have the least influence on the organization’s robustness and performance.

This paper is among the first to examine the relationships amongst career patterns, neutrality, and organizational performance. Recommendations are provided to improve neutrality and organizational performance, that is, the need to increase promotions and reduce demotions.

This paper argues for the need to use multiple sources and methods that respond to research challenges presented by new forms of war. There are methodological constraints and contention on the superiority given to positivist and interpretivist research designs when doing fieldwork in war situations, hence there is a need to use integrated data generation techniques. The combined effect of severe limitations of movement for both the researcher and researched fragmented data because of polarized views about the causes of the war and unpredictable events that make information hard to come by militate against systematic, organised and robust data generation. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to make fieldwork researchers understand significant research problems unique to war zones.

This research was guided by the postmodernist mode of thought which challenges standardised research traditions. Fieldwork experiences in Cabo suggest the need to use the composite strategies that rely on the theoretical foundation of integrative and creative collection of data when doing research in violent settings.

The fieldwork experiences showed that the standardised, conventional and valorised positivist and ethnographic research strategies may not sufficiently facilitate understanding of the dynamics of war. There should not be firm rules, guidelines or regulations governing the actions of the researcher in conflict. As such, doing research in violent settings require reflexivity, flexibility and creativity in research strategies that respond to rapid changes. Research experiences in Mozambique show the need to use blended methods that include even less structured methodologies.

Fieldwork experiences in Cabo challenges researchers who cling to standardised research traditions which often hamper awareness of new postmodernist mode of thought applicable to war settings. It is essential to study the nature of African armed conflicts by combining creativity and flexibility in the selection of research strategies.

This study examines the relationship between school ties among external auditors and audit committee members, and their joint impact on audit fee. We also examine how the monitoring and executive functions within companies moderate this relationship.

This study employs a regression analysis model on a sample of companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange from 2016 to 2019, followed by additional analyses using high-low growth and tech samples, as well as robustness tests involving coarsened exact matching (CEM) and Heckman’s (1979) theory to address potential causality issues.

This study reveals that school ties between external auditors and audit committees positively influence audit fee. The audit committee size weakens this relationship, while the presence of an internal audit enhances it.

This research contributes to the literature related to the relationship between school ties and audit fee in Indonesian public companies, providing insights for stakeholders and informing company policies. It aims to increase awareness of the significance of school ties among Indonesian companies.

This research fills a knowledge gap by examining the link between audit committee-external auditor relationships and audit fees, aiming to generate new insights and empirical evidence to inform future research and regulatory decisions.