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This study aims to explore the challenges in the construction of the audit report by a public sector organisation within a non-financial information (NFI) audit context.

This field study primarily uses data collected from semi-structured interviews, in addition to internal and external documents. The data are framed around the generic key audit report elements including audience, scope and criteria, and draw upon insights from Power (1999, 2003a, b) into NFI assurance and Fiske's (1990) insights into communication to draw inferences on the communicative value of the audit report under study.

The findings provide insights into the challenges in determining the appropriate stakeholder audience, objective, content and format of audit reports in a complex non-financial subject matter context. Despite the organisation going to considerable lengths to understand their audiences' needs and audit objectives/criteria when constructing the audit report as the literature suggests, unintended consequences resulted and the communicative value of the audit report was still questionable.

The evidence was analysed from an assuror's perspective. Future research may examine in more detail the user's perceptions on the communicative value of the NFI financial audit report.

The paper's insights into one organisations' challenge in developing appropriate reporting practice(s) within a “new” NFI context have practical implications for the development of emerging assurance practices of other NFI both in public and private sector.

This paper is one of very few studies to use in-action field study approach to comprehensively examine how audit reporting practice develops in a complex non-financial subject matter context within a public sector context.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a comprehensive framework that covers the major dimensions of performance-oriented office environments including involved actors and performance parameters on the one hand, and the processes and success factors of implementation and change management of such workspace projects on the other hand, with their interaction to be considered as well. This framework can serve as a first guideline and rough “checklist” to support such projects, both in research and practice.

The framework was developed and refined by combining international literature analyses, industry experience from the authors and application of first conceptual ideas to a pilot project. The methodology of the whole endeavor, not only this paper, is a grounded theory approach, acknowledging the intermediate state of prior theory regarding workspace change projects. The framework will thus be further developed with additional case-based empirics in the future.

The framework addresses the design parameters (the content) of (re)developing performance-oriented office environments as well as the management (the processes) of this (re)development including its implementation. Due to the considerable number of dimensions and factors relevant for workspace projects in addition to their interaction and dependency as well as the individuality of situation and stakeholders, the probability of workspace project failure is high. Knowing the parameters of workspace change project success and measures to be tracked and checked during the design and implementation processes of such projects is therefore imperative. Suggestions for operationalizing the relevant factors are made. Equally important is to understand and address individual emotions and concerns of those being involved in or affected by the change situation, and to inform and include them adequately. The comprehensive framework provides a respective first overview.

The framework is conceptual, based on many sources. Yet, the exhaustive inclusion of all research on the many relevant factors is neither feasible nor intended. The paper rather tries to be comprehensive on the dimensions to be considered and to only exemplarily concretize how to handle this complexity in a manageable and practical way. Future research needs to test and adapt the proposed framework, to detail key performance indicators (KPIs), indicators and processes suggested, and to develop an according planning and controlling system.

The paper pictures key aspects for the effective design and change management of holistic workspace projects. KPIs as well as leading indicators are introduced that can be used to measure the various dimensions in an ongoing process throughout all phases of the project, enabling the organization to anticipate or at least rapidly react to problems arising. Accordingly, success factors for managing workspace change are collected and structured along the workspace dimensions including actors and performance.

The originality of this study lies in the approach to comprehensively integrating design and change management parameters of workspace projects, the explicit performance orientation and the inclusion of the multitude of actors (i.e. users, facilities management, Human Resources, ICT). Instead of the design and its implementation only being supported by change management, the organizational environment and its needs – like way of working, organization models, performance priorities and change capabilities – are driving the design, which constitutes a new approach in the design activity.

Support for environmental research has a long tradition at the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. A new funding priority establishes a new substantive priority area – sustainable management. The purpose is to develop strategies and solutions for sustainable management and test them in real life through cooperation between research institutions, industry and consumers. The results of 18 collaborative projects should help to exploit the potential for sustainable management in the private sectors, set new priorities in research on business management and initiate standardisation processes towards sustainable management. A support process has to pass the results of the projects as well as their implications for sustainable management on to potential users. The research projects altogether cover four priority areas; namely, information technology instruments, controlling instruments, planning instruments and communication instruments.

In 1947, John Merriman Gaus contended that “the study of public administration must include its ecology” (Gaus, 1947, p. 6). He elaborated on the importance of the ecological approach in public administration thus:An ecological approach to public administration builds, then, quite literally from the ground up; from the elements of a place – soils, climate, location, for example – to the people who live there – their numbers and ages and knowledge, and the ways of physical and social technology by which from the place and in relationships with one another, they get their living. It is within this setting that their instruments and practices of public housekeeping should be studied so that they may better understand what they are doing, and appraise reasonably how they are doing it. (Gaus, 1947, pp. 8–9)

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model for producing an objective and holistic assessment of organisational decision-making to measure the procurement success of built facilities from the perspective of six key stakeholder groups (i.e. company, staff, customers, community, government and the environment).

This research is based on grounded theory. The methodology comprises a number of sequenced but interdependent steps. The first step involves reviewing the underpinning literature, whereas the second and third steps involve a detailed case study of actual practice and identification of stakeholder models that have been previously published, respectively. A knowledge gap is then highlighted from which a conceptual framework using a six-star rating algorithm as an integration metric is developed. The final steps seek an expert panel to validate the framework through focus group discussion ultimately leading to suggestions for further improvements.

It is found that the developed stakeholder satisfaction model is capable of assessing the sustainable procurement of built infrastructure using a generic six-star rating algorithm. The overall rating can be used to compare and rank performance across a range of portfolio assets, although some modification is required for non-built assets.

This research makes a contribution to knowledge through the presentation of a model, grounded in practice, that combines the economic, social and environmental performance of organisational decision-making from a stakeholder satisfaction perspective. It is acknowledged that there are a number of techniques that could be used to assess each stakeholder group, although the ones chosen in this research are mostly drawn from existing approaches developed and validated by others.

The aim of this paper is to provide a validated theoretical framework for the measurement of office productivity.

The study's strength is that it is based on two sizable data sets. The data collected consists of data about the physical characteristics of the office environment and data pertaining to the behavioural environment.

One of the key contributions of this study was the development of the components of office productivity, which were: comfort, office layout, informal interaction points, environmental services, designated areas, interaction and distraction. The components were reduced to four in preparation for subsequent analysis. The four distinct components were comfort, office layout, interaction and distraction.

This study establishes that it is the behavioural environment that has the greatest impact on office productivity. It demonstrates that it is the dynamic elements of the office environment, interaction and distraction that are perceived as having the greatest positive and negative influences on self assessed productivity.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship of regulatory foci (promotion focus and prevention focus) to expatriate adjustments (general, interaction, and work adjustments) and explore whether mentoring functions (psychosocial support, role modeling, and career development) moderate the aforementioned relationship.

Using 141 questionnaired primary data (response rate 32.25 percent) gathered from at least six months experienced expatiates of multinational companies in six industries, this study adopts regression method to examine the moderating effect.

This study found that promotion focus was positively related to the interaction and work adjustment, respectively; prevention focus was positively related to the general, interaction, and work adjustment, respectively. Psychosocial support function moderates the relationship between promotion focus and general adjustment. Career development function moderates the relationships between promotion/prevention foci and work adjustment.

According to the interactionism perspective, behavior is a result of the interaction between personality and situational influences, has a long history in social and personality psychology. This study extends this perspective to the interactive effects of mentorship (situational factor) and expatriates’ regulatory foci (personality factor) on expatriate adjustment.