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The purpose of this paper is to present the views and challenges from a range of accounting professionals, regulators and preparers with the introduction of a standardised approach to accounting for customer loyalty programmes (CLPs). It aims to highlight the ambiguities of the classification of commercial transactions, particularly the nature and timing of revenue recognition.

Comment letters in response to the exposure draft D20 CLPs are analysed together with an exposition of the effect of International Financial Reporting Interpretations Committee (IFRIC) 13 on an early adopter, Qantas airlines.

Despite limited support for the consensus view advocated in D20, the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) has upheld the deferred revenue approach consistent with the anticipated outcome of the IASB and Financial Accounting Standards Board revenue recognition project.

The paper analyses the characteristics and views of lobbyists using the IFRIC process. The use of other discourse methodologies may present issues of power within this process.

The paper highlights how the implementation of IFRIC interpretations has the potential to alter reported financial results.

The paper highlights the lobbying process and interpretation process at an international level. It also illustrates how companies can engage accounting interpretations to manage earnings, particularly in times of economic challenges.

This tribute is in memory of Professor David Campbell, who sadly died in June 2017. David was an influential and inspirational global researcher in accounting. This tribute summarises his significant contribution to the discipline as well as providing insights into his career at Northumbria and Newcastle Universities.

The tribute provides a review of David’s research and his key publications in accounting. Specifically, his invaluable contribution to social and environmental accounting disclosure and related corporate accountability is highlighted.

David was a hugely popular personality in the accounting research discipline and he will be missed by colleagues and friends across the world. His insightful research, thinking and engaging personality led to enduring friendships and significant collaborative research publications. David was a great supporter of international conferences at which he actively encouraged and nurtured research by others around him.

David leaves a legacy of influential publications in accounting that have shaped the discipline and have helped develop solid foundations for rigorous future research in the area.

David’s research had significant practical implications with regard to the usefulness of voluntary accounting disclosure narrative to stakeholders. As well as highlighting the policy implications in relation to corporate disclosure, his work contributed to the debate concerning the accountability and ethics of organisations. Beyond research, David was also influential in professional accounting education as ACCA chief examiner for “Governance, Risk and Ethics”, embedding these issues into the curriculum.

The tribute highlights David’s global collaborative research friendships and their fruitful publications. He will be a huge loss to those people and others who knew him closely, as well as to the accounting community in general.

David enhanced the discipline as we know it and through his work will continue to shape the discipline in years to come. David had a love for research and for others whom he knew through it.

This chapter conceptualises a link between Industrial Revolution 4.0 (IR 4.0), big data, data science and sustainable tourism.

The author adopts a grounded theory and conceptual approach to endeavour in this exploratory research.

The outcome shows a significant rise of big data in the tourism sector under three major dimensions, i.e. business, governance and research. And, some exemplary evidence of institutions promoting the use of big data and data science for sustainable tourism has been discussed.

The conceptualised interlinkage of concepts like IR 4.0, big data, data science and sustainable development provides a valuable knowledge resource to policy-makers, researchers, businesses and students.

This qualitative paper is about social reporting in response to an incident that involved the loss of human life. It examines Loblaw’s disclosures following the Rana Plaza building collapse that killed over 1,100 Bangladeshi workers.

This article draws on Suchman’s (1995) comprehensive legitimacy typology to interpret Loblaw’s disclosures about the collapse in both mass media coverage of the tragedy and the company’s quarterly, annual and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports.

Loblaw worked on many fronts to secure stakeholders’ support in the aftermath of the fatal incident. Through their social disclosures, Loblaw simultaneously managed exchange, dispositional, consequential, procedural, structural, personal and cognitive legitimacy, striving to demonstrate that, notwithstanding the incident, the company was still conforming to its social contract.

This research operationalizes all aspects of Suchman’s legitimacy typology in the context of social reporting. In particular, the paper further develops the concept of cognitive legitimacy. This should be of benefit to other CSR researchers.

The loss of human life during business operations is one of the most terrible events an organization can face. Corporate activities leading to loss of human life are obviously far from being socially acceptable. Stakeholders are likely to disapprove such activities and reconsider their support, which can threaten the survival of the organization. It is thus of utmost importance to understand the strategies used by corporate managers in their attempt to secure ongoing stakeholder support.

This paper innovates by focusing specifically on social disclosures about a negative event. In so doing, it also contributes to a small, but important, literature within CSR research that examines incidents resulting in the loss of human life. The paper adapts and applies Suchman’s legitimacy framework to interpret social reporting in response to a specific instance of loss of life, the Rana Plaza building collapse. Finally, this paper mobilizes the notion of cognitive dissonance to further develop Suchman’s notion of cognitive legitimacy.

This study aims to examine the extent and quality of corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure in Jordan for the time periods of 2005–2006 and 2014–2015, ultimately establishing whether there was a change in the extent and quality of disclosure practices before and after the new regulations for CSR. Furthermore, this study additionally seeks to determine if the regulations are a major factor in changing CSR disclosure practices, or whether there are other factors for such a change.

The annual reports of 55 manufacturing companies (11 sub-sectors) on the Amman Stock Exchange for the years 2005–2006 and 2014–2015 were selected, and a CSR checklist was measured via the construction an index covering 36 items in 4 themes: environmental; human resources; community; and products and others. The study measures the quantity of CSR via the number of sentences and the quality of CSR by the weighting approach (on a scale of 0–3); furthermore, the paired sample t-test and Wilcoxon signed rank tests were used to establish whether there was a change in the extent and quality of CSR disclosure practices.

The results of the study revealed that there being a significant increase in the extent and quality of CSR for the period 2014–2015 compared to that of 2005–2006, the most optimal performance being in 2015, bragging an average of 61,41 total sentences per annual report and an average quality score of 1.423. Moreover, detailed analysis of CSR extent and quality by theme reveals that the highest percentage of CSR extent and quality was within the environmental theme, with an average score 28.6% of total sentences in 2014 (extent) and 1.743 in 2015 of total sentences (quality).

The current study has some limitations, which have implications for future studies. First, this study examined the extent and quality of CSR for only two time frames: before and after regulation. However, a longitudinal study would have provided a wider scope of study. Second, the study focussed only on the industrial sector, thus limiting the results to only this area. Indeed, the exploration of the CSR extent and quality for other sectors (e.g. financial and services) would generalise the results further, allowing for the making of comparisons compare among different sectors. Moreover, the study at hand has focussed solely on annual reports, which could lead to subjectivity, thus reducing the reliability of results. Future studies should thus focus on other means of disclosure (e.g. websites; environmental reports).

The current mandatory requirements would suggest Jordanian regulators have begun specifying CSR disclosure requirements in an easier, more user-friendly and traceable format. Indeed, the increase in CSR extent and quality for the post-regulations period would increase the need to organise mandatory requirements in CSR. For managers, on the other hand, the study provides the CSR as a strategic tool for reflecting the actual environmental activities, comparing it with the society’s expectations. Moreover, when budgets are limited, managers prioritise CSR activities that yield a positive impact on financial performance by allocating the limited resources in a broad manner.

The results additionally highlights the ways in which the Jordanian industrial companies increase their levels within the environmental theme in CSR for the post-regulations. It could be argued that a great number of companies in the past decade have started adopting environmentally friendly practices and strategies to protect the natural environment, such as greenhouses, extracting non-renewable resources and reducing amount of industrial waste.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is currently no existing study within Jordan exploring the change of CSR over time – specifically in terms of before and after the regulations. In addition, exploring the quality of CSR using a weighted approach (scale out of 3) is not conducted in Jordanian studies before.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight some methodological problems concerning the neglect of participants' voices by workplace ethnographers and neglect of the highly interactional and co‐constructive nature of research interviewing. The study aims to use discourse analysis, to show the phenomena of workplace learning and expertise to be constituted in participants' talk.

From excerpts of natural talk and research interviews by fish culturists speaking about their learning in a salmon hatchery, discourse analysis is used to analyze how workplace learning and expertise are rhetorically performed.

The paper finds that fish culturists drew on two discursive repertoires/resources – school‐ and workplace‐based learning – to account for their learning and expertise. The main participant affirmed the primacy of interest and practical workplace experience in his job just as he presupposed a weak correlation between school‐based (theoretical) and workplace (practical) knowing. However, both kinds of learning were deemed important though articulating this view depended on the social contexts of its production.

Discourse analysis does not establish immutable truths about workplace learning and expertise but rather it is used to understand how these are made accountable through talk in real‐time, that is, how the phenomenon is “done” by participants.

There is increased sensitivity when using ethnographic and interview methods. No method can avoid being theory‐laden in its conduct and reporting but discourse analysis perhaps does it better than its alternatives.

While some contributors to this journal have also approached workplace learning from a discursive perspective, this paper attempts to understand the phenomenon solely from participants' categories and interpretations.

The purpose of this study is to empirically examine whether two major stakeholder groups – customers and employees – consider third party-reviewed corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports and assurance on the quality of internal controls as value determinant in their decisions, and how their decisions influence financial performance through the halo effect of these reports.

Using Compustat North America and Global Reporting Initiative data, the authors used first-order autoregressive models over the period from 2006 to 2012.

The results indicate that the impacts of customers and employees on financial performance are influenced by third party-reviewed CSR reports and effective internal control. Moreover, it is found that the third party-reviewed CSR reports and effective internal control enable the persistence of financial performance.

The findings have implications for stakeholders in terms of third party-reviewed CSR reports and effective internal control. The findings are important due to the influence that these stakeholders (customers and employees) have on the financial performance of firms and the impact that CSR actions can have on society as a whole.

To the authors' knowledge, this is the first study that contributes to the literature by demonstrating that information about third party-reviewed CSR reports and internal control reviews may influence the perceptions of firms by two primary stakeholders – customers and employees.

The field of interorganizational studies is not currently known for applying qualitative methodologies with the same enthusiasm as statistically‐based survey techniques. A review of recent developments in qualitative methodologies reveals several techniques which can be fruitfully applied to the study of interorganizational (IO) networks. This paper extends the meaning‐based social definitionist perspective to the study of IO networks, by drawing upon the relevant theoretical aspects of social phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, and ethnomethodology. The social definitionist perspective is concerned with theories and methodologies relevant to the social definition and construction of meaning in multiple actor settings. Such a meaning‐based perspective would facilitate the application of qualitative methodologies to IO networks, in parallel with similar developments in organizational behavior. The paper identifies four specific types of qualitative analyses for IO studies: phenomenological typification, domain analysis, componential analysis, and conversational analysis.

Assuming that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is “a process of accumulating knowledge and experience” (Tang et al., 2012, p. 1298), this paper aims to investigate whether and how CSR knowledge (Asif et al., 2013; Kim, 2017) affects financial performance in the European banking industry.

The empirical research analyses a panel of 72 banks from 20 European countries over seven years (2009-2015). The hypotheses were tested using fixed effects regression analysis and the two-stage Heckman model (1976) to address endogeneity bias.

The findings of this work are twofold. First, consistent with the concept of knowledge absorptive capacity (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990), the internal CSR of banks (Kim et al., 2010) positively affects citizenship performance (Peterson, 2004a). Second, in line with the reputational effect of CSR (Margolis et al., 2009; Bushman and Wittenberg-Moerman, 2012), citizenship performance is a positive predictor of a bank’s financial performance.

From a knowledge-based perspective, the analysis shows that accrued internal CSR knowledge plays a key role in implementing effective CSR programs for external stakeholders. Moreover, this study shows how CSR engagement in external initiatives can improve a bank’s competitiveness because of the relationship between citizenship performance and the positive reputation of a bank.

The management of CSR initiatives may favor the sharing of knowledge and creation of trust relationships among banks and internal and external stakeholders. CSR knowledge contributes to expanded value creation for both society and banks.

The knowledge management perspective of CSR provides new insights into the sustainability of banks’ business models and contributes to advancing the debate on the governance modes and effects of CSR. Moreover, the CSR perspective offers additional opportunities for addressing the challenges associated with sharing tacit knowledge within and outside of organizations.