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The purpose of this exploratory study is to investigate the perceptions of key stakeholders in Vietnam on the impact on audit quality and independence after major reforms to audit.

Using new institutional sociology, this study seeks to explain how Vietnamese external auditors and accountants have responded to audit reforms and provides perceptions on how audit quality and independence may have been impacted. This study draws on semi-structured interviews conducted with 33 highly experienced participants, representing various stakeholder groups in Vietnam.

The findings indicate that after almost a decade since the full implementation of the Law of Independent Audit (2011) in Vietnam, the audit and assurance market in Vietnam is characterised by low quality audits, a lack of compliance with standards and auditor independence concerns, specifically amongst the smaller audit practitioners. Participants indicated that competition for new audit clients or retaining existing clients is a priority over improving audit quality and independence.

By examining a combination of different factors relating to audit quality and independence, the authors further demonstrate the impact of these factors in Vietnam, helping audit professionals and regulators to have a better and more meaningful understanding of that state of the audit profession. This study also considers audit concerns or issues arising because of the COVID-19 pandemic in Vietnam.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the institutionally driven changes impacting organizational accounting manipulation in Vietnam’s emerging transitional economy. Specifically, this study explore how Vietnamese accountants and regulators explain questionable accounting transactions and their rationalization for those practices, especially during the period of accounting system transition from Vietnamese accounting standards to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).

The study uses interview-based methods involving 22 Vietnamese accountants, financial managers, audit partners and regulators.

This study have found dysfunctional approaches to revenue and expense recognition underpinned by institutional theory. At play is a combination of opportunities relating to weak accounting standards and organizational controls; management pressure; and a desire to avoid unwanted scrutiny from Vietnamese regulators.

This study does not include the views of non-financial managers or other accounting users. Future research could focus more on the perceptions of these other stakeholder groups.

Accounting manipulation can be collusive, therefore, regulators should have a stricter view and broader examination in the monitoring process.

This study examine accounting manipulation through the lens of New Institutional Sociology and also share the views of the accountants and regulators. This study argue that weak accounting standards are not the only factors contributing to accounting manipulation. When evaluating the existence of accounting manipulation, this paper find a combination of factors including: opportunities for manipulation, pressure from management and the rationale behind the conduct. These factors should be interpreted in context.

The study explores accountants' views of the likelihood of widespread accounting manipulation in the emerging economy, Vietnam. Applying the fraud triangle framework, we examine accountants' responses to management pressure, manipulation opportunities and perceptions of how they rationalize their decisions.

The study uses an experimental methodology involving 592 Vietnamese accountants as participants. Post-experiment field interviews were conducted with eight highly experienced accountants.

Our findings indicate that accounting manipulation is perceived to be common in Vietnam. The findings reveal that there is no differentiation between manipulation of accounting transactions with or without management pressure and no differentiation between collective gain or individual gain.

While the study focused on accountants' perceptions of accounting manipulation, these views may change over time. The impact of law reforms and the potential for prosecution under the force of law provisions could alter these perceptions.

The study findings alert regulators, government authorities and auditors of the perceptions and views in relation to accounting manipulation and the potential for fraud in Vietnam. Auditors could use help from forensic specialists to uncover unethical behaviors identified in this study.

The fraud triangle framework is used to shed light on fraud through the examination of accounting manipulation in Vietnam. We contribute to the relevant accounting literature with insights into accountants' motivations toward conducting questionable accounting transactions. The contributions we make draw attention to preconceptions of Asian societies; in particular, accounting actions to motivate collectivist gains. While we shed further light on fraudulent accounting, we conclude that the fraud triangle framework does not necessarily articulate fraud well in relation to accounting manipulation in emerging economies.

Although student evaluation of teaching (SET) is widely used, there has been a significant disparity between its potential benefits with the actual impact on improving educational quality. This study aims to inquire into the factors contributing to this discrepancy and the underlying mechanisms hindering the effective utilisation of SET.

This qualitative case study used problem-based methodology to investigate the theories of action of administrators involved in SET. The study uses SET documents and individual interviews with 18 administrators from six Vietnamese higher education institutions.

While the administrators monitored SET data and addressed SET problems, few used it for quality improvement. The participants’ SET approaches were influenced by various constraints, especially the intricate interaction between neoliberal agendas with professional and cultural values.

Despite a lack of statistical generalisability, this study contributes to analytical generalisation by vividly portraying the complexity of the SET practice in a higher education context.

This study suggests a more inclusive approach to quality improvement that prioritises multi-stakeholder engagement.

The constraint analysis offers invaluable insights into the challenges and dynamics of SET practice, which can be used to enhance SET effectiveness and overall educational quality.

This paper addresses the need to examine the theories of action of administrators involved in SET, emphasising the significance of a comprehensive understanding of the stakeholders’ underlying reasoning process for successful evaluation implementation.

This research examines the impact of organisational culture on the ethical judgement and ethical intention of corporate accountants in Vietnam.

The study relies on survey data collected from 283 practising accountants in Vietnam. Organisational culture was measured using the Organisational Culture Assessment Instrument, developed by Cameron and Quinn (2011). The Instrument is developed based on the competing values framework comprised of four distinct cultures: clan, hierarchy, market and adhocracy. Ethical judgement and ethical intention were measured based on respondent responses to five ethical scenarios, each linked to a principle of professional conduct in the code of ethics.

The findings indicate that the clan culture (family oriented) is dominant and has a significant positive influence on accountants' ethical judgement and ethical intention. Respondents in the clan culture evaluate scenarios more ethically compared with accountants in the adhocracy and market cultures but not the hierarchy culture. Accountants who emphasise the adhocracy and market cultures display a more relaxed attitude towards unethical scenarios whereas respondents in the hierarchy culture (rule oriented) display the highest ethical attitude.

The code of ethics, its content and how it is interpreted and applied may differ between professions, organisations or cultures.

Organisational research on ethical decision-making is ample but few studies link organisational culture with ethical judgement and ethical intention from the perspective of individual accountants.

This paper examines the factors that influence the work attitudes of employees and the conditional effects of family support on the job demand–turnover intention relationship.

The authors used a sample of 231 employees working in the manufacturing industry in Vietnam to test the conceptual model.

Drawing upon the job demands-resources (JD-R) model and job embeddedness theory, the authors found that employees' psychological capital and family support influenced turnover intentions through enhancing their job satisfaction. The authors also found that the influence of job demands on turnover intentions was altered when employees had higher levels of family support.

This study provides important insights for human resource managers regarding what may influence employees' job satisfaction and turnover intentions. The findings advance turnover literature by highlighting the important roles of both internal resources (psychological capital) and external resources (family support) in influencing employee turnover intentions in Vietnam.

This study evaluates the impact of online menus and perceived convenience of online food ordering on consumer purchase intention and shows how a desire for food creates a relationship between an online menu and a customer's purchase intention. Suggestions for management are proposed to design an effective menu to improve business performance in the competitive market in Vietnam.

The paper follows a quantitative method. Quantitative research aims to analyze and critically evaluate the research question(s) to discover new factors.

Findings indicate a positive relationship between menu visual appeal (MV), menu informativeness (MI), desire for food (DF), the perceived convenience (PC) of ordering food online and intention to purchase (PI). The attractiveness of images and information is a significant factor affecting diners’ desire to eat, while the demand for food and the convenience of ordering food online are also factors affecting purchase intention.

The study confirms the importance of online menus to purchase intention. Economically, when supply and demand are reasonable, the market is stable and technology develops. In terms of social, hygiene, attractiveness and price factors, it is helpful to have an overview. Research is the premise for further studies with factors from menu to customer trust.

The study provides a solid foundation for further studies on restaurant menu elements as well as a new perspective on how restaurants improve their dishes.

The purpose of this study is to explore audit procedure disclosures related to key audit risks, during the prior year and the initial year of the COVID-19 outbreak, by reporting on matters published in over 3,000 Australian statutory audit reports during 2019 and 2020.

This study partially uses latent semantic analysis methods to apply textual and readability analyses to external audit reports in Australia. The authors measure the tone of the audit reports using the Loughran and McDonald (2011) approach.

The authors find that 3% of audit procedures undertaken during 2020 were designed to address audit risks associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. As a percentage of total audit procedures undertaken during 2020, the authors find that smaller practitioners reported much less audit procedures related to COVID-19 audit risks than most larger audit firms. Finally, the textual analysis further found differences in the sentiment or tone of words used by different auditors in 2020, but differences in sentiment or tone were not found when 2020 was compared to the prior year 2019.

This study provides early evidence on whether auditors designed audit procedures to deal specifically with audit risks that arose due to the COVID-19 pandemic and on the extent and nature of those audit procedures. The study will help policymakers to better understand whether Key Audit Matters provided informational value to investors during a time of global crisis.

This study aims to articulate the conceptual foundations of the role of accounting infrastructure (calculative practice and the communicative dimension of accounting) in extractive industries (EIs) towards a sustainable orientation from an actor-network theory (ANT) perspective.

This study is a literature-based analysis of the calculative property and communicative dimension of accounting in EIs, using the concepts of calculability, assemblage and other related concepts from ANT to identify potentialities and limits of the roles of accounting in this sector.

While accounting infrastructure can influence social and environmental outcomes, it has not, as yet, led to ecologically and socially sustainable practices in EIs. Calculative properties and the communicative dimension of accounting infrastructure have capabilities to foster the phenomenon of “sustainability” in EIs by valuing, disclosing (reporting) and governing EIs towards a sustainable orientation. Conceptualizing sustainable EIs as a promissory economy, accounting infrastructure serves as a tool not only to represent past performance but also to enact the future: it helps to shape a sustainable future for the industry by informing and triggering behavioural decisions of EIs firms towards sustainable practices.

This conceptual paper is anticipated to stimulate future sustainability accounting research. The research agenda discussed in this paper can be used to enrich our understanding of the role of accounting in sustainability.

This paper charts a direction for future research by interpreting the role of sustainability accounting within networks of sociotechnical relations, using ANT concepts which attach importance to the dualism of nature and society. Conceptualizing sustainability accounting and reporting as an infrastructure, which draws more attention to the relationality characteristic of accounting, the study goes beyond the traditional interpretation of accounting as a mediation device and draws on a contemporary view of accounting by invoking the dynamic relation between accounting and society, in the context of EIs.

The purpose of this exploratory study is to better understand the interactions between external auditors, their audit clients and audit regulators when considering the supply of and demand for high-level audit technology. The authors examine the developed markets of Australia, New Zealand and the UK to better understand: how high-level audit technology has started to become embedded into existing audit spaces and any emerging issues this technology has created for the audit profession.

Through the theoretical lens of the socio-technical (ST) systems of innovation theory, the present study involved semi-structured interviews with 25 stakeholders in Australia and New Zealand from 2019 to 2020 and 21 stakeholders in the UK from 2016 to 2018.

Advancements are revitalizing the technologies of not only the external auditors and their firms but also of their audit clients. Although the audit model is changing, external auditors are reported to be reluctant to fully engage with new audit technologies. In this setting, the authors find audit rules are yet to become embedded in the objects or practices of ST systems and that keeping up with the pace of change for regulators and standard setters is a major challenge.

The findings of this study raise call for regulators to be more up to speed with these new technological changes, as audit standards need to be amended accordingly. Although the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board deliberates, both clients and auditors need to lobby for specific audit data analytics regulations.

The present study provides perspectives about new audit practices that emerge due to high-level technological advancements and then embed themselves into existing audit spaces. The authors draw on several different stakeholder groups, not just the Big Four firms. The ST systems theoretical lens we adopt better helps us understand how audit firms at the organisational level are adapting to these new technological changes in existing audit spaces.