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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.

This paper examines the accountability and governance mechanisms and the challenges in a multi-stakeholder partnership seeking to implement the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in a developing country (DC), namely Tanzania.

The paper draws on work on the shift from government to governance to meta-governance to examine the SDGs framework's governance regime. The data stems from documentation, focussed group discussions and face-to-face interviews with key stakeholders involved in the localisation of SDGs in Tanzania.

Despite the emphasis given by promoters of SDGs on the need for multi-stakeholder engagement, and network and market-based governance, Tanzania's hierarchical governance framed in national legislations dominated the localisation of the SDGs. The national-level meta-governance structures were somewhat dysfunctional, partly due to a lack of well-designed coordination mechanisms for collaborative engagement with key stakeholders. The limited involvement of different meta-governors, and particularly network and market-based governance arrangements, has had severe implications for achieving the SDGs in DCs in general and Tanzania, in particular.

The paper calls for a more explicit SDG policy and strategy, alongside strengthening institutional structures and related governance arrangements in Tanzania, to promote the realisation of the SDGs. For the SDGs framework to succeed, the authors suggest that, in addition to adopting SDG friendly policies, the Tanzanian government should devise plans for financial resources, strategies for empowering and engaging with key stakeholders and promote an integrative governance system that underpins accountability at the local level.

Focussing on Tanzania, the paper sheds light on how context in DCs, interactions between state and non-state actors, modes of governance and accountability mechanisms shape the localisation of SDGs and realising the SDGs' agenda. The implementation in Tanzania focussed on priorities in the development plan, thereby neglecting some important SDGs. This raises doubts about the possibility of meeting the SDGs by 2030. The localisation of SDGs remained within the top-down governance structure, as Tanzania's government failed to enact the policy and strategy for multi-stakeholder partnership consistent with the SDGs' principle of “leave no-one behind”. Consequently, meta-governors' efforts and ability to monitor and demand accountability from the government was constrained by the political context, the governance system and regulations enacted to side-line them.

The paper examines financial resilience responses/capacities of governments from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ghana in relation to COVID-19. It highlights the governments’ fiscal, budgetary and actions as either anticipatory or coping mechanisms towards the pandemic.

Multiple case studies and secondary data were used, including official government documentation/records, expert views, policy publications by supranational organisations and international financial institutions and media reports. Textual analysis was conducted to evaluate the case countries’ resilience.

The paper highlights how governmental budgetary initiatives, including repurposing the manufacturing sector, can sustain businesses, aid social interventions and reduce vulnerability during health crises. In addition, the paper highlights that external borrowing continues to be indispensable in the financial and budgetary initiatives of the case countries. The paper finds that lessons learnt from the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) in West Africa within the last decade have shaped the anticipatory resilience capacities of the case countries against COVID-19.

The paper uses the notion of resilience, the dimensions of the resilience framework and the resource-based view (RBV) theory to unearth resilience patterns. This sort of combined approach is new to financial resilience studies.

The Australian Government recognises an obligation to ensure that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (Australia’s First Peoples) are included in the integration of genomics into the healthcare system. First Peoples inclusion in this area requires going beyond general principles for First Peoples health research. This extra need exists for historical reasons as well as the need to maintain connections between patients, participants and communities and between the bio-specimens and data contributing to the resources underpinning genomics. The National Centre for Indigenous Genomics (NCIG) at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, has developed a framework that addresses these requirements through its dedicated First Peoples governance and enduring community engagement processes relating to stored heritage materials, data management and culturally agreed terms for collection preservation and potential use into the future. This chapter incorporates a First Peoples perspective on the NCIG by describing the practical application of ‘doing the right thing’, proceeding at ‘the pace of trust’, obtaining informed consent as part of enduring relationships, acknowledging cultural perspectives, understanding diversity of views and cultural practices within and between communities and respecting the need for community ownership and self-determined mobilisation of First Peoples involvement with research. This culturally appropriate methodology has been developed in partnership with individuals, family groups and community leaders, who are directly involved in genomic research. It provides a model for First Peoples to play an invested and sustaining role in the future development of genome science and precision medicine.

This study aims to investigate the impact of a salesperson’s babyface in his/her profile picture on the number of online reviews the salesperson receives. In addition to testing the direct relationship, this study explores the moderating roles of salesperson gender and consumer involvement.

Responding to the call for field-based consumer research, the authors test their theory using an experimental design and a field study. Study 1 employs an experimental design in high and low involvement service settings to test the effect of a babyface on consumers’ intention to write online reviews. Study 2 uses field data, utilising real estate salespeople’s online profile pictures to test the effect of salespeople’s babyface on the number of online reviews they receive. It does so by using an artificial intelligence facial recognition application interface.

A salesperson’s babyface results in fewer online reviews in situations in which consumers are highly involved in the purchase process. By contrast, a salesperson’s babyface engenders more online reviews when consumers purchase low involvement services. The adverse effect of a babyface on the number of online reviews, however, attenuates when a salesperson is female.

Limited information about salespeople, a skewed number of online reviews and blurry online profile pictures from a real-world data set constitute the study’s limitations.

When consumers are highly involved in the purchase process, salespeople should appear mature in their online profile photos to engender more online reviews. However, salespeople providing low involvement services should opt for online profile pictures reflecting babyish facial features to generate more online reviews.

Research has shown that salespeople’s physical appearance plays an important role in consumers’ perceptions of salespeople and their performance. Although abundant research and practice have shown the importance of online reviews, less is known about how online profile pictures affect online reviews. Thus, building on well-studied cases of an overgeneralization effect, this work examines the extent to which salespeople’s babyface features in their online profile picture affects the number of online reviews received in a real-world setting.

Both investors and the stock markets are believed to behave in a perfectly rational manner, where investors focus on utility maximization and are not subjected to cognitive biases or any information processing errors. However, it has been discovered that the sentiment of the social mood has a significant impact on the stock market. This study aims to analyze how did the protest event of Tesla happened in April 2021 have a significant effect on the company's stock performance as well as its competitors, Nio, under the competitive effect.

The research is based on time series data collected from Tesla and Nio by employing 10 days, 15 days and 20 days anticipation and adjustment period for the event study. This study employed a text sentiment analysis to identify the polarity of the sentiment of the protest event using the Microsoft Azure machine learning tool which utilizes MPQA subjective lexicon.

The findings provide further evidence to show that a company-specific negative event has deteriorating effects on its stock performance, while having an opposite effect on its competitors.

The paper argues that negative sentiments through social media word of mouth (SWOM) affect the stock market not just in the short run but potentially in the longer run. Such negative sentiments might create a snowball effect which causes the market to further scrutinize a company's operations and possibly lose confidence in the company.

This study explores how the Tesla's protest event at Shanghai Auto Show 2021 has a significant impact on Tesla's stock performance and prolonged negative impact although Tesla implemented immediate remedial actions. The remedial actions were not accepted positively and induced a wave of negative news which had a more persistent effect.

The purpose of this polyphonic paper is to report on interdisciplinary discussions on the state-of-the-art and future of public sector accounting research (PSAR). The authors hope to enliven the debates of the past and future developments in terms of context, themes, theories, methods and impacts in the field of PSAR by the exchanges they include here.

This polyphonic paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach. It brings into conversation ideas, views and approaches of several scholars on the actual and future developments of PSAR in various contexts, and explores potential implications.

This paper has brought together scholars from a plurality of disciplines, research methods and geographical areas, showing at the same time several points of convergence on important future themes (such as accounting as a mean for public, accounting, hybridity and value pluralism) and enabling conditions (accounting capabilities, profession and digitalisation) for PSA scholarship and practice, and the richness of looking at them from a plurality of perspectives.

Exploring these past and future developments opens up the potential for interesting theoretical insights. A much greater theoretical and practical reconsideration of PSAR will be fostered by the exchanges included here.

In setting out a future research agenda, this paper fosters theoretical and methodological pluralism in the interdisciplinary research community interested in PSAR in various contexts. The discussion perspectives presented in this paper constitute not only a basis for further research in this relevant accounting area on the role, status and developments of PSAR but also creative potential for practitioners to be more reflective on their practices and also intended and united outcomes of such practices.