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This paper offers a critique of the sacred and secular dichotomy, a theoretical framework recently introduced into the accounting and accountability literature primarily by Laughlin and Booth. The divide has been used to interpret the ambiguous roles of accountants and accounting practices within religious organizations.

The present paper examines the divide by drawing on H. Richard Niebuhr's narrative theology, and in particular, the distinction that he draws between “internal history” and “external history”. Niebuhr's discussion of internal/external history and his typology of social action are used to demonstrate the many ways that religious communities balance faith and social practice.

The paper argues that the activities and contributions of accountants and accounting practices are not by virtue of their secularity antithetical to the values of religious organizations. It contends that within many religious settings, secular activities, such as accounting, often co‐exist, promote and are used to support religious beliefs and practices.

The paper challenges the dominant paradigm by highlighting the importance of adopting flexible theoretical frameworks.

It will be of value to accounting and accountability researchers who are seeking to gain a better understanding of the fit between accounting practices and the internal histories of religions.

The purpose of this paper is to establish the importance of accounting in the management of Spanish military hospitals by the St John’s Order (SJO) of the Roman Catholic Church in the eighteenth century, a time of crisis between the Church and the State. The sacred mission of the Order required that they had a significant role outside the Roman Catholic Church in the care and treatment of the sick and infirm which required them to establish hospitals throughout Spain and across the lands that it had conquered. The study establishes that accounting played a key role in ensuring the success of the unconventional commercial relationship between the SJO and the government and the military.

Niebuhr’s typology is used to help understand how accounting practices were consistent, indeed essential, expectations of the sacred mission of the SJO and not something which represented a denial of the Order’s religious beliefs. The paper relies primarily on documents and other material located in Spanish archives.

The SJO accepted that secular accounting and accountability processes were relevant to their search for God’s love and to showing this love to others. The need for the Order to be accountable to the State was not regarded as profane and antithetical to their religious beliefs. Adopting Niebuhr’s typology of religion and society, this study concludes that the Order was an extraordinary example of Christ the transformer of the culture.

This study recognises the need to deepen the understanding of the way in which accounting practices have often played a critical role in the activities of religious organisations by examining an extraordinary example of one organisation which was engaged in an unusual, ongoing, highly complex commercial relationship with the Spanish State.

Informed by the work of Laughlin and Booth, this paper aims to analyze the role of accounting and accountability practices within the fifteenth century Roman Catholic Church, more specifically within the Diocese of Ferrara (northern Italy), in order to determine the presence of a sacred‐secular dichotomy. Pope Eugenius IV had embarked on a comprehensive reform of the Church to counter the spreading moral corruption within the clergy and the subsequent disaffection with the Church by many believers. The reforms were notable not only for the Pope's determination to restore the moral authority and power of the Church, but also for the essential contributions of “profane” financial and accounting practices to the success of the reforms.

Original fifteenth century Latin documents and account books of the Diocese of Ferrara are used to highlight the link between the new sacred values imposed by Pope Eugenius IV's reforms and accounting and accountability practices.

The documents reveal that secular accounting and accountability practices were not regarded as necessarily antithetical to religious values, as would be expected by Laughlin and Booth. Instead, they were seen to assume a role which was complementary to the Church's religious mission. Indeed, they were essential to its sacred mission during a period in which the Pope sought to arrest the moral decay of the clergy and reinstate the Church's authority.

The paper shows that the sacred‐secular dichotomy cannot be considered as a priori valid in space and time. There is also scope for examining other Italian dioceses where there was little evidence of Pope Eugenius' reforms.

The paper presents a critique of the sacred‐secular divide paradigm by considering an under‐researched period and a non‐Anglo Saxon context.

The author provides a mental health service user's perspective on leadership, arguing that users should be empowered by services to lead their own lives. In order to do so, leaders in services should have human and emotional skills because their decisions have human and emotional consequences. She argues that leadership and power sharing should happen throughout the organisation, rather than being concentrated at the top. Related and responsible rather than remote leadership may be more likely to lead to better mental health services. User experience is valuable for leadership.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether labour market entry via temporary work has any (persistent) effects on labour market outcomes.

Using unique data on several cohorts of graduates from the German apprenticeship system, the authors interpret labour market entry via temporary work agency (TWA) work as a treatment and apply propensity score matching and the control function approach to investigate corresponding effects.

The results indicate a pronounced wage gap but no significant wage disadvantage in the medium term for graduates who switch to regular employment. Nevertheless, approximately 30 per cent of the graduates do not manage to leave the temporary help sector and, as a result, suffer persistent wage penalties.

The numerous studies that investigate the consequences of TWA work on individual labour market performance have not considered the specific situation of young workers after graduation. The rapidly increasing percentage of TWA jobs and the above average share of young workers among temporary workers call for corresponding evidence.

Work environments are undergoing a transition and COVID-19 accelerated this change. Prior studies have associated various physical, digital and social work environment elements with occupational well-being. However, holistic approaches to the social work environment to compare the effects of the different elements have received less attention. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship of various social work environment elements with hybrid worker well-being. The findings help organizations design their work environments and cultures for the post-COVID era.

The study builds on a quantitative survey with 1,057 respondents. The respondents were randomly selected, the answers were anonymous and the results were based on regression analysis.

The analysis indicated that working methods and practices, leadership and management practices, organizational communality and social interaction associate with hybrid worker well-being. Organizational values, reward systems and organizational structures yield no association with hybrid worker well-being.

The value of this paper is in that it investigates elements of the social work environment, presents a research model that examines the relationship of social work environment elements with hybrid worker well-being and provides new empirical data on their implications in a comparative manner.

Evaluation and development of personnel in the materials management area is a major concern for today′s growth‐oriented organisations. A model is provided for evaluating both the routine and non‐routine areas of employee responsibilities and an effective behaviourally oriented approach to developing individuals is presented. It is recognised by the model that the potential aspect of a strict objective‐based performance appraisal system is negative and the concept of a behavioural filter designed to provide the proper developmental focus for encouraging change in employee performance is introduced.

Surely the absence of a sociology of morality has to be one of the major weaknesses of academic sociology, and a mysterious one at that. For Durkheim, one of sociology's founding fathers, morality was to have a central place as an object of inquiry; moreover, he was passionately interested in it on the existential level, as was Weber.

Personnel turnover entails considerable costs and is a major problem for the call center industry. By modifying the job demands-resources model, this study aims to examine how emotional exhaustion and organizational pride affect turnover intentions. In addition, it investigates how emotional exhaustion and organizational pride are formed by job demands and job resources and how gender and organizational tenure moderate the model.

The paper surveyed 252 call center agents and tested the research hypotheses with component-based structural equation modeling. Two multi-group analyses clarify the proposed moderating effects of gender and organizational tenure.

Emotional exhaustion and organizational pride essentially determine turnover intentions. Organizational pride, which has received little attention in related research, plays a central role. Two job demands and three job resources strongly influence emotional exhaustion and organizational pride, respectively. Gender and organizational tenure moderate several effects.

This study is based on a sample of call center agents from three different call centers in one country. Therefore, the generalizability of the findings has to be tested. Furthermore, the paper examines turnover intentions, which are good predictors of turnover behavior. Nevertheless, further research should investigate the relationship between the variables and actual turnover. Moreover, the model included six different job determinants. Future research should test the proposed model with other job demands and resources.

Emotional exhaustion and organizational pride substantially affect turnover intentions. Call center managers should protect employees from emotional exhaustion and enhance organizational pride, using specific job demands and resources. This study shows how the importance of certain variables differs for various groups of employees.

This study is the first to examine how certain job resource foster organizational pride and how organizational pride affects voluntary employee turnover in call centers. Further, the study demonstrates that the socio-demographic variables gender and organizational tenure moderate the creation of emotional exhaustion and organizational pride, which together explain a large amount of the variance in turnover intentions among call center agents.