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This paper aims to offer a new history of management by tracing a religious dimension of scientific management. The thesis is that the good was foundational for bringing scientific management to success in Taylor’s native Quaker Philadelphia in the 1880s. The paper’s main contribution is to contrast the philosophical origins of Taylor’s ideas in scientific management to his native Quaker roots, and how Taylor, over time, into the 1910s, wrestled with this issue.

The paper is situated in historical interpretivism and subjectivism, leaning on contextual and narrative research on religious morality.

Quaker morality prevented managerial opportunism at Taylor’s Midvale Steel in the 1880s. Conversely, by the 1900s and 1910s, interest conflicts between workers and managers escalated when scientific management moved out of its traditional cultural contexts of Quaker Philadelphia and spread across the USA. The historical implication is, already for Taylor’s time, that scientific management never was the “one-best way” of management.

Future research needs to deepen and broaden research on scientific management when tracing the significance of religion and culture in management thought.

The paper has implications for modern studies of business morality by uncovering the practical relevance of religious business ethics at the outset of management studies.

The historic emergence of scientific management points to a theory of institutional evolution and economic growth, when religiously grounded governance of the firm deinstitutionalized, and institutional economic governance, with different but superior economic advantages, progressed by the 1900s.

The paper suggests an alternative version of the intellectual heritage of management studies by tracing the legacy of Taylor’s Quakerism and how religious and cultural ideas contributed to the formation of science in management.

This study aims to investigate the nature of management accounting (MA) change and the institutional pressures driving the change using the context of an emerging economy – Bangladesh.

The study collected data from 20 listed companies in Bangladesh through in-depth interviews. It uses the typology of MA change proposed by Sulaiman and Mitchell (2005) in identifying the nature and extent of MA change executed during the preceding three years. A modified version of Granlund and Lukka’s (1998) model is used to identify and explain the impact of institutional and economic pressures on MA change.

This study finds that MA changes have taken place in the Bangladeshi listed companies in the forms of modification, addition and replacement during the preceding three years. The findings also showed that mimetic and coercive pressures influence the adoption of new MA techniques or changes in the existing MAP. The impact of economic forces (specifically the advancement of operating technology and competition intensity) on MA change is also well evident.

This study focuses on the typology of MA change and the institutional forces affecting the MA change, which have rarely been addressed in the context of an emerging and developing economy.

This paper aims to examine the theoretical underpinnings of international financial reporting standards (IFRS)-related studies and offers directions for theoretical and empirical research. Specifically, this study examines the main theories in IFRS adoption research (i.e. adoption, compliance and effects).

The sample contains 67 empirical papers that have used theories and was collected from Web of Science database. This study uses a systematic review technique.

Generally, the review shows the prevalent and pervasive use of institutional theories of isomorphism across all the three areas of IFRS adoption. Particularly, regarding IFRS adoption stream, this study finds the institutional theory as a dominant theory used to explain IFRS diffusion around the globe. For IFRS compliance, this study finds that the agency and the capital need theories are widely used. For IFRS adoption effects stream, this study finds a few studies using the contingency and neo-institutional theories. Overall, the review provides theoretical lens for IFRS adoption, IFRS compliance and IFRS adoption effects.

Given the lack of a well-defined set of theories in the domain of accounting, the findings provide further guidance on theory building within the field. Further, accounting regulators, academics and practitioners may benefit from the findings when explaining various changes in the world of accounting.

Relying on institutional theory and Oliver’s (1991) strategic responses framework, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the different strategies adopted by Spanish public universities to respond to institutional pressures for sustainability reporting.

Data were collected from a variety of sources, such as a series of email-structured interviews with key personnel from universities, a qualitative analysis of sustainability reports and a consultation of the website of each Spanish public university.

The findings reveal that Spanish public universities have responded to institutional pressures for sustainability reporting by adopting acquiescence, compromise, avoidance and defiance strategies. The variety of strategic responses adopted by Spanish public universities suggests that these organizations have not fully adhered to institutional pressures.

The results of this paper would be useful for practitioners since it tries to demonstrate whether universities, which are facing increasing institutional pressures and demands from stakeholders, have been developing sustainability reporting practices.

Universities have a remarkable social impact that could be used to promote sustainability practices. This paper investigates how these organizations can contribute to sustainability reporting as they should reproduce social norms.

The sustainability reporting context is in a phase of change. This paper tries to contribute to the accounting research by analyzing the extent to which universities are engaged in sustainability reporting. Relying on these premises, Oliver’s (1991) framework might be an insightful theoretical perspective to examine the responses provided by universities to institutional pressures.

This study aims to explore how key stakeholders and recipients of local food access programs operate strategically to meet individual and community food needs, enhance experiences of dignity and promote social justice. The study of a fragmented community food system highlights the connections between micro and meso dimensions of food access, illustrating how people work around food system limitations to access food.

Using qualitative in-depth interviews with food assistance managers, workers, volunteers and recipients, this study examines the period before the implementation of a centralized community-based food access initiative in a mid-sized, rural Oklahoma college town with a high rate of food insecurity. This study asks: What are community members’ experiences in a fragmented food assistance system? In what ways do individuals use everyday resistance and workarounds to actively promote experiences of dignity and social justice in food access spaces?

Those involved in sites of community food access build important networks to share information and engage in negotiation and trade to gain access to useful food resources. As forms of everyday resistance, such practices encourage co-construction of dignity and social justice in stigmatized spaces.

This research contributes to literature examining micro- and meso-level community dynamics that inform agency, dignity and social justice in community food access approaches.

The World Bank-sponsored public financial management reforms attempt to instil fiscal discipline through techno-managerial packages. Taking Ghana's integrated financial management information system (IFMIS) as a case, this paper explores how and why local actors engaged in counter-conduct against these reforms.

Interviews, observations and documentary analyses on the operationalisation of IFMIS constitute this paper's empirical basis. Theoretically, the paper draws on Foucauldian notions of governmentality and counter-conduct.

Empirics demonstrate how and why politicians and bureaucrats enacted ways of escaping, evading and subverting IFMIS's disciplinary regime. Politicians found the new accounting regime too constraining to their electoral and patronage politics and, therefore, enacted counter-conduct around the notion of political exigencies, creating expansionary fiscal conditions which the World Bank tried to mitigate through IFMIS. Perceiving the new regime as subverting their bureaucratic identity and influence, bureaucrats counter-conducted reforms through questioning, critiquing and rhetorical venting. Notably, the patronage politics of appropriating wealth and power underpins both these political and bureaucratic counter-conducts.

This study contributes to the critical accounting understanding of global public financial management reform failures by offering new empirical and theoretical insights as to how and why politicians and bureaucrats who are supposed to own and implement them nullify the global governmentality intentions of fiscal disciplining through subdued forms of resistance.

The research objective starts from the argument that small-scale multinational corporations’ (SMNCs’) managerial behavior toward auditing decisions is influenced by their personal value, especially when the auditing process is not mandatory. This study aims to examine how national culture-religiosity affects that decision. The authors further examine how foreign-owned MNCs might behave differently from local MNCs, although the host country’s cultural-religiosity value might influence that decision.

This study obtains the data from three sources: Hofstede Framework, Pew Research Center and World Bank Enterprise Survey in cross-sectional mode. The final sample consists of 8,590 SMNCs from 45 countries as the observations. This study uses robust regression analysis to test the effects of culture, religiosity and controlling shareholders on the audited financial statements decision.

The regression results support the hypothesis, whereas cultural-religiosity values are associated with the audited financial report. The findings confirm stakeholder theory and institutional theory.

This study fills a gap in the literature by providing empirical evidence on the cultural and religiosity effects on the accounting decision of SMNCs. The results can be used as the foundation for future research related to MNCs’ managerial behavior toward accounting policies, especially with the psychosocial factors.

The aim of this paper is to understand how systemic change agents influence the twin digital and green transitions. The authors build on agency-based theories to argue that transition pathways are influenced by a combination of place-based characteristics, the mobilisation and preferences of systemic change agents (such as local clusters), and the institutional and economic context. The conceptual framework defines the different steps of the twin transition, and it identifies how systemic change agents and geographic characteristics determine the direction and speed of the transition pathway.

This paper starts with a literature review to identify the different schools of thoughts on transition pathways and the twin transition, before developing a conceptual framework and deriving policy implications.

First, this paper argues that each transition involves three steps: framing, piloting and scaling. Each of these steps is driven by systemic change agents who engage local actors in trust-based collaboration, pool resources, create network effects and exchange information to source solutions for industry-level challenges. Second, the combination of place-based characteristics and the actions of local systemic change agents define the path of the transition and the new (post-transition) equilibrium. Finally, this paper sets out implications for policymakers who are interested in using systemic change agents to shape transition pathways in their local area.

Further research is needed to provide robust empirical evidence from a range of territorial realities for the hypotheses in this paper. Specifically, the role of systemic change agents, such as trade associations, regional organisations, clusters or research groupings, needs to be investigated more closely. These agents can play a key role in progressing the transition because they already focus on sourcing solutions to joint challenges and opportunities by exchanging information, engaging local actors in trust-based collaboration, pooling resources and fostering network effects and critical mass. Future research should investigate how policymakers can best leverage on these crucial actors to progress or steer transitions and how this varies depending on place-based characteristics. This could include, for instance, training activities, networking and collaboration (e.g. through the European Cluster Collaboration Platform) or clearer sign-posting the key next steps required for the transition.

This paper identifies specific ways in which local actors can influence the direction and speed of transitions at each stage of the transition: at the framing stage, political entrepreneurship can be fostered through collaboration and smooth information flows between different levels of governance, at the piloting stage, commercial and social entrepreneurship require effective knowledge sharing and a wide and open search for solutions which, in turn, may require capacity building at the local level and coordination across stakeholder groups and levels of governance and effective scaling up can be fostered through network effects, joint commitment from a broad range of stakeholders and pooling of resources to achieve economies of scale.

An important implication of the framework is that, if several places are undergoing a parallel or joint transition, the result may not be convergence between these places. Instead, different places may choose different end points and they may proceed at different speeds. For instance, in the context of the European Union’s green and digital transitions, it is unlikely that every region will transition to a similar level of digitisation or make steps in the same direction when it comes to sustainability.

This paper plugs a gap in understanding how systemic transitions unfold and how their speed and direction are influenced by different stakeholder groups. This paper develops a conceptual framework to define twin transition pathways and it analyses prominent place-based factors affecting these pathways.

Although Agtech firms have promoted digital platforms for retailing farm supplies (RFS), farmers are sceptical while purchasing them online. As a result, they struggle to generate a sustained demand. Among other approaches, these platforms onboard complementors to become full-stack farming solution providers. Whether platform complementarity can induce farmers' trust remains ambiguous. Literature on network externality theory highlights that complementarity positively affects the perceived value for buyers. The sociotechnical systems literature indicates that perceived value is an antecedent of user trust. In this vein, the authors ask: Does perceived complementarity affect farmers' trust in the RFS platform? Alternatively, the Agtech firms augment the platform's look and feel to make the digital retail setting appear “normal” to farmers. The extant research on the social cognitive theory indicates that a retail setting conforming with the generalised expectancy of buyers harbours their trust. Against this backdrop, the authors ask whether situational normality affects farmers' trust in the RFS platform.

The study is based on a questionnaire survey of 212 Indian farmers using RFS platforms. The data were analysed using structural equation modelling (SEM) analysis.

This study establishes that platforms' complementarity and situational normality ameliorate farmer trust. The authors also identify the socioeconomic factors shaping the farmers' trust in platforms.

The present study has taken all RFS together as a single umbrella category, which can be considered a limitation. Also, the study is based on the cross-sectional survey of RFS platform users; the farmers' attitudes are dynamic in nature and evolve over time; however, the temporal factors shaping the farmer attitudes have not been considered in this study.

The study establishes the epistemological relationship between complementarity, situational normality and farmers' trust in agricultural platforms.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a novel storytelling approach that investigates lived experience at the intersection of motherhood/caregiving and Ph.D. pursuits. The paper contributes to the feminist tradition of writing differently through the process of care that emerges from shared stories.

Using a process called heartful-communal storytelling, the authors evoke personal and embodied stories and transgressive narratives. The authors present a composite process drawing on heartful-autoethnography, dialogic writing and communal storytelling.

The paper makes two key contributions: (1) the paper illustrates a novel feminist process in action and (2) the paper contributes six discrete stories of lived experience at the intersection of parenthood and Ph.D. studies. The paper also contributes to the development of the feminist tradition of writing differently. Three themes emerged through the storytelling experience, and these include (1) creating boundaries and transgressing boundaries, (2) giving and receiving care and (3) neoliberal conformity and resistance. These themes, like the stories, also became entangled.

The paper demonstrates how heartful-communal storytelling can lead to individual and collective meaning making. While the Ph.D. is a solitary path, the authors' heartful-communal storytelling experience teaches that holding it separate from other relationships can impoverish what is learnt and constrain the production of good knowledge; the epistemic properties of care became self-evident.