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The tremendous relevance of societal discrimination to special education of the learning disabled cannot be gainsaid. Mistreatment of disabled children in public and private educational institutions is a bad reflection on the moral and egalitarian values of the society at large. “Many students, regardless of race, who are deemed eligible to receive special education services [mandated by federal laws] are unnecessarily isolated, stigmatized, and confronted with fear and prejudice” (Losen & Welner, 2001, p. 407). According to the U.S. Congress, “poor African-American children are 2.3 times more likely to be identified by their teacher as having mental retardation than their white counterpart” (20 U.S.C. §1400 (8)(c) Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)). Congress has also found that a highly disproportionate number of elementary and secondary special education students are African-Americans (IDEA §1400 (8)(D)) and their social disadvantage stems from “lack of opportunities in training and educational programs, undergirded by the practices in the private sector that impede their full participation in the mainstream society” (IDEA §1400 (10)).

Since November 29, 1975, when President Gerald Ford signed the original bill entitled the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EAHCA), school services for disabled children have been a major component of public school administration in America. The ethical awareness and the legal complexities engendered by this legislation have required school superintendents nationwide to develop expertise, provide leadership, and wrestle with budgetary issues in accommodating and providing equal opportunity for these children. Subsequent amendments to the federal legislation, coupled with state initiatives expanding opportunity, have created an endless array of conditions requiring pervasive knowledge of special education and sharply honed administrative skills. In particular, the 1997 amendments to the IDEA expanded the law beyond merely requiring access; it furthered an emphasis on outcomes and educational performance, and helped clarify the concept of inclusion.

A gap between research and practice is commonly perceived throughout accounting academia. However, empirical evidence on the magnitude of this detachment remains scarce. The authors provide new evidence to the ongoing debate by introducing a novel topic-based approach to capture the research-practice gap and quantify its extent. They also explore regional differences in the research-practice gap.

The authors apply the unsupervised machine learning approach Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to compare the topical composition of 2,251 articles from six premier research, practice and bridging journals from the USA and Europe between 2009 and 2019. The authors extend the existing methods of summarizing literature and develop metrics that allow researchers to evaluate the research-practice gap. The authors conduct a plethora of additional analyses to corroborate the findings.

The results substantiate a pronounced topic-related research-practice gap in accounting literature and document its statistical significance. Moreover, the authors uncover that this gap is more pronounced in the USA than in Europe, highlighting the importance of institutional differences between academic communities.

The authors objectify the debate about the extent of a research-practice gap and stimulate further discussions about explanations and consequences.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first paper to deploy a rigorous machine learning approach to measure a topic-based research-practice gap in the accounting literature. Additionally, the authors provide theoretical rationales for the extent and regional differences in the research-practice gap.

The purpose of this study is to introduce innovative ideas into the treatment of the radical and incremental innovations and to fill the research gap by using: (1) methods that can perform complicated tasks and solve complex problems leading in creation of radical and incremental innovation and (2) a broad sample of firms across countries. The authors’ ambition is to contribute to the scientific knowledge by producing evidence about the novel usage of artificial neural network techniques for measuring European firms' innovation activities appearing in black boxes of innovation processes.

In this study, the authors incorporate an international context into Chesbrough's open innovation (OI) theory and, on the one hand, support the hypothesis that European radical innovators benefit more from foreign cooperation than incremental innovators. On the other hand, the results of the analyses show that European incremental innovators rely on domestic cooperation supported by cooperation with foreign public research institutes. Moreover, the use of decision trees (DT) allows the authors to reveal specific patterns of successful innovators emerging within the hidden layers of neural networks.

The authors prove that radical European innovators using either internal or external R&D strategies, while the combinations of these strategies do not bring successful innovation outputs. In contrast, European incremental innovators benefit from various internal R&D processes in which engagement in design activities plays a crucial role.

The authors introduce innovative ideas into the treatment of hidden innovation processes and measuring the innovation performance (affected by domestic or international cooperation) of European firms. The approach places emphasis on the novelty of innovation and the issue of international cooperation in the era of OI by designing the framework using a combination of artificial neural networks and DT.

Organizational culture has been identified as an important factor in increased employee commitment. Particularly during a shortage of skilled workers, commitment is a meaningful indicator of higher loyalty and retention. However, limited research has studied the relationship between organizational culture and commitment from a global perspective. Most research focuses on specific aspects of culture and examines the aspects' effects on commitment separately. The author's objective is to identify influential organizational culture's dimensions and assess dimensions' relationship to commitment holistically.

For this purpose, the author analyzed a data set with 241,648 participants from 9 industries in Germany. The survey captures individual attitudes toward certain aspects of organizational culture and assesses workers' commitment to their organizations.

The results of a linear regression show that all cultural dimensions considered, namely transformational leadership behavior, team cohesion, compensation, fairness and caring attitude, if well-developed, positively and significantly influence organizational commitment. Interestingly, team cohesion has the greatest effect on commitment, followed by transformational leadership behavior, compensation, caring attitude and fairness.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between organizational culture and commitment holistically, thereby revealing which aspects of corporate culture are particularly important for increasing workers' commitment.