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The study examines how calculative practices and accountability appear in a rural community of marginalised people in Egypt who depend on jasmine plantations that contribute to the production of global essences.

The data were collected from various sources, namely conversations with villagers, documents and relevant videos and news available on social media and the Internet. This study draws on the concepts of social accountability, the politics of blame avoidance and using calculative practices as a language to explain accountability in context.

The author found a lack of accountability on the part of the government and business owners, with serious implications for the livelihoods of people in a community that has been wholly dependent on jasmine plantations for a century. Power holders have deployed a blame-shifting game to avoid social responsibility. In response, calculative practices rather than advanced accounting tools are used by the poor in the community to induce power holders to be accountable.

The findings of this study show that authorities need to take proactive steps to address the disadvantaged position of powerless people in the lower echelons of society, recognising their accountability for those people.

This paper enhances the understanding of the status of calculative practices and accountability in a community of marginalised people who contribute to the production of global commodities. The paper also enhances the understanding of what goes on behind the scenes with popular and prestigious commodities, whose development is initiated in poor countries, with the end product marketed in rich Western countries.

This research aims to explore the perceived usefulness of audited social information in making economic decisions, in the eyes of both Tunisian financial analysts and bankers.

The authors conduct an exploratory qualitative study using twelve semi-structured interviews: seven are carried out with financial analysts, and five are performed among bankers.

This study’s results reveal that financial analysts and bankers paid little attention to the audited social information in making investment/credit granting decisions. The authors also show that the low perceived usefulness of social audit is due to many reasons related to political, economic, regulatory, educational, cultural and cognitive factors.

This study contributes to the current literature in several ways. First, it enriches the knowledge about the perceived usefulness of social audit. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore the perception of financial analysts and bankers to audited social information and its usefulness for decision-making. Second, the focus on the Tunisian context is interesting as it was marked, since the outbreak of the Jasmine Revolution, by the uncertainty and the instability of political, economic and social conditions. Third, this research goes further by exploring the most important factors affecting the perceiveness of social auditing.

The study aims to understand why women-owned microenterprises (WOMEs) in India experience a lower growth rate, where growth can be represented in increments in the venture’s size or scope. There is no conclusive understanding of the factors that affect the sustained growth of WOMEs in India.

What personal, social and economic factors support or hinder the choice, growth and sustainability of women-owned ventures? What role do institutional factors (government, nongovernment organizations (NGOs), self-help groups and microfinance institutions) play toward the sustainability of WOMEs? The answers to these questions were obtained through a qualitative design by interviewing 30 micro women entrepreneurs from Tamil Nadu, a Southern state of India and one of the largest hubs for WOMEs and their responses were content analyzed using NVivo 12 software.

The findings capture and apply the fundamentals of two key theoretical perspectives, resource-based view (RBV) and self-determination theory (SDT), in identifying the links between the individual, social and economic factors and their combined effect on the sustained growth of women-owned micro businesses. The findings add value in identifying the ingrained cultural norms and traditions and several internal and external factors that support or challenge the growth of WOMEs. This study highlights that the interventions by the government need to be strengthened for the growth and sustainability of WOMEs.

The study’s findings provide suggestions to policymakers, banks, funding agencies, financial institutions and NGOs to design applicable policies and schemes toward the sustained growth of WOMEs.

This study contributes toward a better understanding of the trends in the context of WOMEs from an Indian context. This topic has received little attention in the academic literature. Second, the study’s conceptual contribution is an application of SDT and RBV to understand and categorize the enablers and deterrents in the path of growth of WOMEs, which is a novel pursuit.

This paper aims to highlight the expanding link between facility management (FM) and building automation and control systems (BACS) through a review of literature. It examines the opportunities and challenges of BACS for facility managers and proposes solutions for mitigating the risks associated with BACS implementation.

This paper reviews various research papers to explore the positive influences of BACS on FM, such as support with strategic decision-making, predictive maintenance, energy efficiency and comfort improvement. It also discusses the challenges of BACS, including obsolescence, interoperability, vendor lock-in, reliability and security risks and suggests potential solutions based on existing literature.

BACS offers numerous opportunities for facility managers, such as improved decision-making, energy efficiency and comfort levels in office buildings. However, there are also risks associated with BACS implementation, including obsolescence, interoperability, vendor lock-in, reliability and security risks. These risks can be mitigated through measures such as hardware and software obsolescence management plans, functional requirement lists, wireless communication protocols, advanced feedback systems and increased awareness about BACS security.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no prior academic research has been conducted on the expanding link between FM and BACS. Although some papers have touched upon the opportunities and challenges of BACS for FM, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of these findings by consolidating existing literature.

Seaports are vital in facilitating sustainable development, and environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors significantly impact an organization’s performance. Therefore, this study aims to identify and evaluate barriers and strategies of green investments to promote ESG practices within the seaport sector.

To fulfill this aim, a systematic literature review, interpretive structural modeling and the matrix of cross-impact multiplications were applied to classification analysis.

12 barriers were prioritized and categorized by experts in a focus group to optimize efforts and define the materiality of these barriers in implementing ESG strategies within seaport companies.

The implications of this study provide an alternative approach for ESG management in the context of seaports that can be applied in different regions by experts' opinion assessment.

No prior studies assessed the barriers and strategies for green investments in ESG from the port sector perspective.

This study aims to investigate the effects of environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance on financial risk disclosure of European companies. It analyzed the relationships between ESG factors and financial risk disclosure between 2010 and 2020.

To test their hypotheses in this study, the authors used the multivariate regression analysis on panel data using the Thomson Reuters ASSET4 database and the annual reports of 154 European companies listed in the ESG index between 2010 and 2020.

Empirical evidence shows a positive association between European companies' environmental and governance performance with financial risk disclosure, whereas social performance does not influence financial risk disclosure. Concerning the control variables, the findings demonstrate that firm size and profitability are significant factors in changing the financial risk disclosure. Nevertheless, firms’ leverage is insignificantly correlated with financial risk disclosure.

This study extends the stream of accounting literature by focusing on the financial risk disclosure, a topic that has received little attention in previous research. Furthermore, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first that provides ESG companies with evidence of the effect of ESG factors on financial risk disclosure in a developed market like Europe.

This study aims to investigate whether Brazilian companies have increased their reporting on biodiversity within the past decade and whether reporting practices are linked to the government's stance on environmental protection, media coverage and industry biodiversity risk.

Using content analysis and ordinary least squares regression models, the authors examine sustainability reports from Brazilian listed and non-listed companies from 2010 to 2020.

This study’s empirical analysis indicates that companies have decreased their reporting on biodiversity over the decade. Findings suggest that biodiversity reporting is associated with the level of scrutiny from external constituents, such as industry biodiversity and the president's own public policy agenda and partially by media coverage.

The literature seems to lack an understanding of how political factors may drive social and environmental reporting practices, especially biodiversity reporting. This study addresses this issue by examining the relationship between the government's stance on environmental protection. By focusing on biodiversity reporting in an emerging country like Brazil, this study also generates insights into a highly impactful yet under-researched context.

The link between entrepreneurial intention and positive attitudes towards entrepreneurship for established and nascent entrepreneurs has been well documented in the extant literature, with the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) viewing entrepreneurial intention as a pre-requisite for entrepreneurial pursuit. Whilst scholars generally agree on these insights, little empirical evidence exists on how marginalised social groups can convert their intentions into action. This study aims to understand to what extent the elements of TPB, the attitudes towards entrepreneurship, self-efficacy and subjective norms, help explain the emergence of entrepreneurial activity amongst marginalised demographic groups.

This research focuses on unemployed women residing in social housing located in a deprived urban area of the United Kingdom to empirically examine how multiple layers of disadvantage faced by this group shape their motivations and intentions for entrepreneurial pursuit. A multi-source qualitative methodology was adopted, drawing upon inductive storytelling narratives and extensive fieldwork on a sample of unemployed ethnic minority women residing in social housing in a deprived urban area of the United Kingdom. Community organisation representatives and housing association employees within the social housing system were included to assess the interpretive capacity of TPB.

The findings display that TPB illuminates why and how marginalised groups engage in entrepreneurship. Critically, women’s entrepreneurial intentions emerge as a result of their experiences of multiple layers of disadvantage, their positionality and the specificity of few resources they can activate from their disadvantageous position for entrepreneurial activity.

By illuminating the linkages between marginalised women’s positionality and their associated access to the limited pool of resources using the TPB lens, this study contributes to emerging works on disadvantaged populations and entrepreneurial intention-action debate. This work posits that despite facing significant additional challenges through their positionality and reduced ability to mobilise resources, women in social housing can defy the odds and develop ways to overcome limited capacity and structural disadvantage.

Spatial olfactory design in the library appears to be a practical approach to enhance the coordination between architectural spaces and user behaviors, shape immersive activity experiences and shape immersive activity experiences. Therefore, this study aims to explore the association between the olfactory elements of library space and users’ olfactory perception, providing a foundation for the practical design of olfactory space in libraries.

Using the olfactory perception semantic differential experiment method, this study collected feedback on the emotional experience of olfactory stimuli from 56 participants in an academic library. From the perspective of environmental psychology, the dimensions of pleasure, control and arousal of users’ olfactory perception in the academic library environment were semantically and emotionally described. In addition, the impact of fatigue state on users’ olfactory perception was analyzed through statistical methods to explore the impact path of individual physical differences on olfactory perception.

It was found that users’ olfactory perception in the academic library environment is likely semantically described from the dimensions of pleasure, arousal and control. These dimensions mutually influence users’ satisfaction with olfactory elements. Moreover, there is a close correlation between pleasure and satisfaction. In addition, fatigue states may impact users’ olfactory perception. Furthermore, users in a high-fatigue state may be more sensitive to the arousal of olfactory perception.

This article is an empirical exploration of users’ perception of the environmental odors in libraries. The experimental results of this paper may have practical implications for the construction of olfactory space in academic libraries.

This study aims to formulate a user-friendly pre-design model that could be a decision support tool for green wall systems to assist designers in selecting an optimal green wall system aligned with specified performance criteria while concurrently addressing project requirements linked to social and economic parameters. This approach seeks to enhance overall project satisfaction for the designer and the owner.

A correlation between the green wall context and design requirements and its performance on the buildings have been defined by considering its social and economic parameters, which represented the owner preferences to ensure the most satisfaction from installation as it achieves the required performance that is defined by the designer such as maximizing thermal insulation, improving indoor air quality, reducing the needed heating and cooling loads, etc. and also to achieve the satisfaction in social and economic requirements defined by the owner such as system installation cost, system maintenance cost, adding beauty value, etc.

The research developed an easy pre-design model to be a tool for green wall system decision-making for the most suitable system, which contains three main steps: the first one is defining the required performance of the green wall (designer requirements), the second step is limiting the context of the project which is made by designer and the owner requirements and finally the third step is choosing the system components that ensures achieving the requirements of both owners and designer, related to the building and climate context.

The added value lies in developing a green wall decision-making tool, essentially a pre-design model. This model considers the correlation between the project’s context, encompassing climate and building conditions. It provides a structured approach for decision-making in the early stages of green wall design. It offers valuable insights into the optimal choices related to system type, installation methods and plant characteristics. This enhanced decision-making tool contributes to more informed and efficient design processes, considering each project’s specific needs and conditions.