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The purpose of this paper is to investigate why environmentally-sensitive companies still face criticism despite the extensive disclosures in their annual reports. This paper explores the extent of site-specific social, environmental and ethical (SEE) reporting by mining companies operating in Ghana.

The authors conduct an interpretive content analysis of the annual/integrated reports of mining companies for the years 2009–2014 to extract site-specific SEE information relating to the companies’ mining operations in Ghana. The authors also theorise these actions using the existentialist work of Jean-Paul Sartre, in particular his work on “bad faith, nothingness and authenticity”.

The findings suggest that SEE information disclosure at site-specific level remains problematic because of bad faith and inauthenticity by mining companies attempting to placate a range of stakeholders. Bad faith represents a form of self-deception or internal denial which manifests in corporate narratives. Inauthenticity is a self-awareness that culminates in the denunciation of corporate identity and the pursuit of external expectations. The effect is the production of inauthentic corporate accounts that is constrained by the assumption made on stakeholder expectation.

The authors apply a Sartrean lens to explore site-specific SEE. Furthermore, the authors seek to expand the social accounting research domain by drawing on Sartre’s work on “bad faith” and “nothingness”. Sartre’s work to the best of the authors’ knowledge is not explored in social accounting research.

The study examines the social and environmental responsibility indicators disclosed by three International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM) corporate mining members in their social and environmental reporting (SER) from 2006 to 2014. To achieve this aim, the author limits the data two years before (i.e. from 2006 to 2007) and six years after (i.e. from 2009 to 2014) the implementation of the Sustainable Development Framework in the mining sector in 2008.

Using the techniques of content analysis and interpretive textual analysis, this study examines 27 social and environmental responsibility reports published between 2006 and 2014 by three ICMM corporate mining members. The study develops a disclosure index based on the earlier work of Hackston and Milne (1996), together with other disclosure items suggested in the extant literature and considered appropriate for this work. The disclosure index for this study comprised six disclosure categories (“employee”, “environment”, “community involvement”, “energy”, “governance” and “general”). In each of the six disclosure categories, only 10 disclosure items were chosen and that results in 60 disclosure items.

A total of 830 out of a maximum of 1,620 social and environmental responsibility indicators, representing 51% (168 employees, 151 environmental, 145 community involvement, 128 energy, 127 governance and 111 general) were identified and examined in company SER. The study showed that the sample companies relied on multiple strategies for managing pragmatic legitimacy and moral legitimacy via disclosures. Such practices raise questions regarding company-specific disclosure policies and their possible links to the quality/quantity of their disclosures. The findings suggest that managers of mining companies may opt for “cherry-picking” and/or capitalise on events for reporting purposes as well as refocus on company-specific issues of priority in their disclosures. While such practices may appear appropriate and/or timely to meet stakeholders’ needs and interests, they may work against the development of comprehensive reports due to the multiple strategies adopted to manage pragmatic and moral legitimacy.

A limitation of this research is that the author relied on self-reported corporate disclosures, as opposed to verifying the activities associated with the claims by the sample mining companies.

The findings from this research will help future social and environmental accounting researchers to operationalise Suchman’s typology of legitimacy in other contexts.

With growing large-scale mining activity, potential social and environmental footprints are obviously far from being socially acceptable. Powerful and legitimacy-conferring stakeholders are likely to disapprove such mining activity and reconsider their support, which may threaten the survival of the mining company and also create a legitimacy threat for the whole mining industry.

This study innovates by focusing on Suchman’s (1995) typology of legitimacy framework to interpret SER in an industry characterised by potential social and environmental footprints – the mining industry.

The purpose of this study is to develop a novel general mathematical model to find the optimal product mix of commercial graphite products, which has a complex production process with alternative sub-processes in the graphite mining production process.

The network optimization was adopted to model the complex graphite mining production process through the optimal allocation of raw graphite, byproducts, and saleable products with comparable sub-processes, which has different processing capacities and costs. The model was tested on a selected graphite manufacturing company, and the optimal graphite product mix was determined through the selection of the optimal production process. In addition, sensitivity and scenario analyses were carried out to accommodate uncertainties and to facilitate further managerial decisions.

The selected graphite mining company mines approximately 400 metric tons of raw graphite per month to produce ten types of graphite products. According to the optimum solution obtained, the company should produce only six graphite products to maximize its total profit. In addition, the study demonstrated how to reveal optimum managerial decisions based on optimum solutions.

This study has made a significant contribution to the graphite manufacturing industry by modeling the complex graphite mining production process with a network optimization technique that has yet to be addressed at this level of detail. The sensitivity and scenario analyses support for further managerial decisions.

The core of this study is women in mining. The aim of this study was to analyze the perception of women, about their work environment, their career, the human resources policies and practices and the work–family balance in the context of a multinational organization in the sector.

The case study was carried through semi-structured interviews with 27 women who work in this organization.

Although women report that they are capable of exercising any position/function in the company, they perceive wage gap in the investigated organization; that maternity leave and the fact of having children impact their career and their rise to higher positions in the organizational hierarchy negatively; situations of prejudice and discrimination experienced at work. Sometimes subtly, sometimes not so subtly, but they still constitute barriers faced by women in mining.

Although the debate around the issue of gender inequality in organizations is not recent, little has been produced about the working condition of women in occupational fields where male domination is strong, such as mining.

Recently, the entry of new players has prompted significant restructuring in the Australian coal market with value migrating away from the existing fragmented, traditional production/export model characterised by competing operators generally using 'common user' infrastructure facilities to new, fully integrated supply chains creating a multi-tiered production-consumer framework.

This paper argues that not only are coal markets restructuring but they are doing so within the framework of a significant paradigm shift towards efficiency-seeking and efficiency-driven mechanisms. Value innovation and a deregulated market are enabling operators to enter the industry seeking and implementing end-to-end control of the supply chain - and, in so doing, capturing the significant gains of integration.

This paper explores these changes within the framework of integrative efficiency - a product of end-to-end control by a single party, derived from a number of companies, or chain elements, working cooperatively rather than competitively, or a single operator vertically integrating the chain from point of production to point of consumption to capture and deliver significantly higher value. The paper focuses attention on this paradigmatic shift in a brief though detailed case study of a major new industry entrant into export coal chains from the rapidly developing Galilee Basin in northern Queensland. It examines the dynamics and implications of this shift in the context of chain efficiency and value innovation

For the supply chain to be responsive in the age of globalization, the firm needs to adopt strategies to enable them to meet the changing market needs. Thus, it is essential to adopt automatic replenishment programmes such as vendor-managed inventory (VMI). This study sought to examine the relationship between VMI and operational performance (OP) and the moderation roles of leadership and digitization in the mining sector.

A quantitative approach was used, including primary data collected from industry players in the mining sector in Ghana. A total of 97 industry players were included in the study. Data gathered was analysed using SPSS and LISREL (8.5).

The results indicate that VMI significantly affects OP. However, both digitization and leadership failed to moderate the relationship between VMI and OP.

The study offers mining companies an understanding of VMI applications in their industry. The knowledge will stimulate and improve inventory management practices in the mining industry.

This study is among the first few attempts to understand VMI in the mining industry, especially in the Sub-Saharan Africa context. It presents a detailed understanding of VMI and opportunities for future research.

Introducing additive manufacturing (AM) in a multinational corporation with a global spare parts operation requires tools for a dynamic supplier selection, considering both cost and delivery performance. In the switchover to AM from conventional manufacturing, the objective of this study is to find situations and ways to improve the spare parts service to end customers.

In this explorative study, the authors develop a procedure – in collaboration with the spare parts operations managers of a case company – for dynamic operational decision-making for the selection of spare parts supply from multiple suppliers. The authors' design proposition is based on a field experiment for the procurement and delivery of 36 problematic spare parts.

The practice intervention verified the intended outcomes of increased cost and delivery performance, yielding improved customer service through a switchover to AM according to situational context. The successful operational integration of dynamic additive and static conventional supply was triggered by the generative mechanisms of highly interactive model-based supplier relationships and insignificant transaction costs.

The dynamic decision-making proposal extends the product-specific make-to-order practice to the general-purpose build-to-model that selects the mode of supply and supplier for individual spare parts at an operational level through model-based interactions with AM suppliers. The successful outcome of the experiment prompted the case company to begin the introduction of AM into the company's spare parts supply chain.

There is evidence of country-level contextual variations regarding the benefits of practical experience acquired by students during higher education. This paper, therefore, analyses the benefits of student internships in the Ghanaian context.

In Study 1, two structured but distinct surveys were distributed to senior members and students of six specialised technical education institutions (TIs). Study 2 involved in-depth interviews with the heads of organisations in the tertiary education sector, including trade groups, industries and government agencies.

Internship provides soft skills, confidence, career development, sense of responsibility, employability, income, knowledge sharing and networking for students/interns. For TIs, it contributes to the professional development of faculty supervisors and helps them to update the content they teach. For employers, it unveils talented and promising students who can be employed immediately after graduation at a relatively cheaper cost.

There is still the need for additional research in different contexts: both developed and developing economies to clear doubts on the controversies surrounding the relevance of internship in the 21st century.

TIs should continue to champion student internship programmes. This study highlights the need for employers to place internship students in areas that relate to their fields of study. It also underscores the need for students to embrace internship since it is the cornerstone to their employability in the labour market.

Undeniably, student internships provide a critical platform for career beginners.

This paper contributes to knowledge by offering contextual literature in Ghana on the benefits of student internship programme for interns/students, TIs and employers, all together.

Digitalization, innovation and changing customer requirements drive the continuous improvement of an organization's business processes. IT demand management (ITDM) as a methodology supports the holistic governance of IT and the corresponding business process change (BPC), by allocating resources to meet a company's requirements and strategic objectives. As ITDM decision-makers are not fully aware of how the as-is business processes operate and interact, making informed decisions that positively impact the to-be process is a key challenge.

In this paper, the authors address this challenge by developing a novel approach that integrates process mining and ITDM. To this end, the authors conduct an action research study where the researchers participated in the design, creation and evaluation of the approach. The proposed approach is illustrated using two sample demands of an insurance claims process. These demands are used to construct the artefact in multiple research circles and to validate the approach in practice. The authors applied learning and reflection methods for incrementally adjusting this study’s approach.

The study shows that the utilization of process mining activities during process changes on an operational level contributes to (1) increasing accuracy and efficiency of ITDM; (2) timely identification of potential risks and dependencies and (3) support of testing and acceptance of IT demands.

The implementation of this study’s approach improved ITDM practice. It appropriately addressed the information needs of decision-makers and unveiled the effects and consequences of process changes. Furthermore, providing a clearer picture of the process dependencies clarified the responsibilities and the interfaces at the intra- and inter-process level.

Background: Amid increasing leadership failures in the global business context, the mining industry is one of the industries with many adverse incidents, affecting employee safety, the environment, and surrounding communities. Emerging economies tend to have unique socio-economic challenges and greater relative economic dependence on mining, presenting unique challenges to leaders. The purpose of this research was to study the realities of responsible leadership in the mining industry in an emerging economy.

Methods: A qualitative research study, consisting of semi-structured interviews was conducted. Nine senior mine managers were selected to represent perspectives from different operations and mining houses. Data was gathered from August to October 2020 in South Africa, an emerging economy with significant mining operations. A thematic analysis of interview transcripts was conducted through the use of software, rendering five themes, with 12 sub-themes.

Results: The research found that requirements on mining leaders in emerging economies demand consistent balancing of a complex set of competing risks, whilst attending to paradoxical requirements among operations, and internal and external stakeholders. Leaders face several competing requirements from stakeholders, the environment, mining practices, and time frames. Responsible leaders must navigate a paradoxical maze of needs and time horizons, with several conflicting forces and dilemmas, and dichotomous relationships. Responsible leadership in the mining industry of an emerging economy is a proverbial minefield of paradoxes and dilemmas between responsible intentions and practical realities. These paradoxes and dilemmas are specifically acute in the context of emerging economies due to the dire socio-economic situations. A total of 10 competencies emerged as essential responsible leadership requirements in this context.

Conclusions: The study provides an in-depth understanding of the intricacies of responsible leadership in the mining industry of an emerging economy. This understanding will contribute to capacitating leaders in the mining industries of emerging economies to act responsibly.