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The study aims at examining the level of financial transparency of local governments in a sub-Saharan African country and how financial transparency is affected by democracy in the sub-region.

The study applied a panel regression model to data collected from public accounts of 43 local authorities in Ghana from 1995 to 2014. Financial transparency was measured using a transparency index developed based on the Transparency Index of Transparency International and the information disclosure requirements of public sector entities under the International Public Sector Accounting Standards.

The study finds the low level of financial transparency among the local governments in Ghana, creating information asymmetry within the agency framework of governance. Further, evidence from the study suggests a strong positive relationship between democracy and financial transparency in the local government.

Deepening democracy is necessary for promoting the culture of financial transparency in local governance in sub-Saharan Africa, perhaps in entire Africa.

There is a need for the local governments and governments, in general, to deepen democracy to ensure proactive disclosure of the financial information to the citizens to improve participation trust and eventual reduction in corruption. Effective implementation of the Right to Information Act would also help promote financial and other forms of transparency in the sub-region.

The study contributes to the public sector accounting literature by linking democracy to financial transparency in the local government. Hitherto, studies concentrate on how entity level variables impact on the level of financial information flow in the local government without considering the broader governance infrastructure within which local governments operate.

With the introduction of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), financial institutions are faced with many investor protection provisions; this has a major impact on the day-to-day operations of private banks, which provide investment services to predominately retail or non-professional investors. The purpose of this paper is to determine how MiFID provisions regarding investor protection with respect to suitability are complied with in practice by private banks.

Based on interviews with 25 representatives of private banks from 10 different European Union (EU) member states, the researchers have determined how these provisions are fulfilled and associated risks mitigated. Mapping out the suitability requirements of MiFID and comparing them with how these have been operationalised, we arrive at the question of whether this leads to a level playing field and investor protection by different private banks.

Although MiFID is trying to achieve a level playing field between the EU member states, this study shows that this has not been achieved in all areas. Investor protection requirements from MiFID are interpreted and operationalised differently. Although these differences are sometimes small, sometimes they are larger and affect the way the investor is served and suitability determined.

This research provides a unique insight into the way private banks in Europe have implemented the MiFID II requirements and gives insight into best practices. For the future, this research can serve as a prelude to in-depth follow-up research on the implementation of EU provisions.

This paper aims to inform the discussion on why and how non-profit organizations can experience a hybridization process to address the criticism that would assume hybridity as an intrinsic characteristic of all organizations. Specifically, by referring to the academies of intellectuals as the non-profit setting in which investigating the emergence of hybridity takes place, this paper aims at exploring, first, to what extent this emergence could be induced by institutional conditions, and, second, which structural innovations could sustain the academies’ “motion” towards hybridity.

This paper relies on the institutional logics perspective and adopts the case study method applied to a historical context. The case under analysis is the Academy of “the Immobili”, which, in spite of its name, experienced a hybridization process in 1720 because of the decision to involve an impresario in the management of its theatre.

The findings highlight the significant role played by institutional conditions in inducing the emergence of hybridity, even in presence of internal resistance to any “motion” from the non-profit setting. Moreover, the analysis of the innovations associated with this emergence detects the intertwined action of the different decision makers involved in the hybridization process, in spite of their formal separation. These findings strengthen the conceptualization of hybridity within non-profit organizations.

Besides referring to a historical period that is still little explored in terms of hybridity within organizations, the paper focuses on an original context, i.e. academies, representing an ancient typology of cultural organizations. Therefore, the paper also provides the first insights into the hybridization process of cultural organizations from a historical perspective.

Micronutrient malnutrition is a public health problem in many developing countries, especially in the poorest population segments. Fortification and other food-based approaches, such as using more nutritious ingredients in processing, could help to address this problem, but little is known about poor consumers’ attitudes toward nutritionally enhanced foods. The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether poor consumers in Africa would purchase foods with more nutritious ingredients and the related willingness and ability to pay.

A survey and choice experiment were conducted with 600 randomly selected households in the poorest neighborhoods of Nairobi (Kenya) and Kampala (Uganda). Participants were asked to choose between various alternatives of porridge flour with different types of nutritional attributes. The data were analyzed with mixed logit models. Porridge flour is widely consumed among the urban poor, so that the example can also provide interesting broader lessons.

Poor consumers welcome foods that are micronutrient-fortified or include new types of nutritious ingredients. However, willingness to pay for nutritional attributes is small. New ingredients that are perceived to have little effect on taste and appearance are seen more positively than ingredients that may change food products more notably.

New nutritionally enhanced foods have good potential in markets for the poor, if they build on local consumption habits and are not associated with significant price increases.

This is among the first studies to explicitly analyze poor consumers’ preferences for nutritionally enhanced foods.

This paper examines whether and when improvement routines are critical for implementing lean practices in small- and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SMEs). Improvement routines such as “employees initiate and carry through improvement activities” are generally seen as an important means to achieve the full benefit of structural lean interventions. Womack and Jones (2003) suggest that these improvement routines should be developed as the company becomes more experienced in lean. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relative importance of individual improvement routines at various degrees of lean practice implementation.

A Between-Case Comparison Analysis (Dul and Hak, 2012) and a Necessary Condition Analysis (Dul, 2016) were performed on self-assessment data from 241 respondents at 38 Dutch manufacturing SMEs.

The importance of improvement routines depended on the degree of lean practice implementation. Lean practices could be implemented to some extend without developing specific improvement routines, yet certain routines were necessary for more advanced implementations of lean. These routines relate to employees conducting shared improvement activities and in the most advanced cases to aligning different improvement activities.

These findings question existing lean implementation models that neglect improvement routines and indicate the need to integrate improvement routines into every lean transformation for it to be sustainable.

Doctoral students’ ill-being in terms of stress, exhaustion and high levels of mental health problems has been well documented. Yet, the well-being of doctoral students is more than the absence of these negative symptoms. The number of studies exploring the combination of positive and negative attributes of doctoral students’ well-being is limited. Therefore, this study aims to focus on exploring individual variation in doctoral students’ experienced engagement and burnout across two distinct socio-cultural contexts in Finland and in South Africa.

A total of 884 doctoral students from Finland (n = 391) and South Africa (n = 493) responded to the cross-cultural Doctoral Experience Survey. The data were quantitatively analyzed.

Altogether four distinctive engagement–burnout profiles were detected, including engaged, engaged–exhausted, moderately engaged–burnout and burnout profiles. Differences between the Finnish and South African students were identified in profile emphasis. The profiles were also related to several study progress attributes such as drop-out intentions, time-to-candidacy and satisfaction with study.

This study provides new understanding on doctoral students’ well-being by focusing on both positive and negative attributes and exploring doctoral students’ discrepant profiles with a cross-country design.

This paper aims to revisit the relationship between intangible capital and labour productivity growth using the largest, up-to-date macro database (2000–2015) available to corroborate the econometric findings of earlier work and to generate novel econometric evidence by accounting for times of crisis (2008–2013) and economic recovery (2014–2015).

To achieve these aims, this paper employs a cross-country growth accounting econometric estimation approach using the largest, up-to-date database available encompassing 16 EU countries over the period 2000–2015. The paper accounts for times of crisis (2008–2013) and of economic recovery (2014–2015). It separately estimates the contribution of three distinct dimensions of intangible capital: (1) computerized information, (2) innovative property and (3) economic competencies.

First, when accounting for intangibles, the paper finds that these intangibles have become the dominant source of labour productivity growth in the EU, explaining up to 66 percent of growth. Second, when accounting for times of crisis (2008–2013), in contrast to tangible capital, the paper detects a solid positive relationship between intangibles and labour productivity growth. Third, when accounting for the economic recovery (2014–2015), the paper finds a highly significant and remarkably strong relationship between intangible capital and labour productivity growth.

This paper corroborates the importance of intangibles for labour productivity growth and thereby underlines the necessity to incorporate intangibles into today's national accounting frameworks in order to correctly depict the levels of capital investment being made in European economies. These levels are significantly higher than those currently reflected in the official statistics.

This study aims to examine the impact of habitual Facebook use (HFU) on life satisfaction and psychological well-being. In addition, the study examined the impact of life satisfaction on psychological well-being. Moreover, the study investigates the impact of social safeness in moderating the relationship between HFU and life satisfaction.

The study employed a quantitative survey design, using a sample of 261 Generation Y students based in Mthatha, in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. Scales for data collection were operationalized from prior studies. The collected data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

The study’s results disclosed that HFU positively and significantly impacts life satisfaction and psychological well-being. In addition, life satisfaction positively and significantly impacted psychological well-being. Moreover, the results showed that social safeness had a positive and significant moderating effect on the nexus between HFU and life satisfaction.

This study contributes to understanding HFU as a precursor to life satisfaction and psychological well-being among Generation Y students. Also, evaluating the moderating effect of social safeness contributes to a more thorough understanding of the link between HFU and life satisfaction. Furthermore, this research aims to add to the body of knowledge in Africa’s communication psychology and social media literature, a field that has received little academic attention in developing countries.

This purpose of this paper is to analyze how consumers’ online recommendations affect the omnichannel webrooming experience based on the internet, physical and mobile channels.

Two experimental studies are implemented. Study 1 analyzes the impact of an online review on the physical interaction with the product. Study 2 modifies the moment of receiving the online recommendation and its social tie.

Webrooming improves the shopping experience. Online recommendations from anonymous customers increase confidence in the product’s adequacy, although this effect depends on the moment of receiving the recommendation and the level of confidence before interacting physically with the product. Friend recommendations reinforce preferences regardless of previous online experiences.

This research examines the effects of different types of online recommendations on offline shopping experiences, choice and confidence. Confidence is stressed as a key variable in omnichannel behavior.

The findings offer practical value for electronic word-of-mouth marketing, omnichannel marketing, as well as online and physical channel management.

This is one of the first studies that examine the impact of online consumer recommendations on shopping experiences combining online, mobile and physical channels. The results reveal the importance of recommendations’ source and moment of reception for determining consumers’ preferences, choice and confidence.

La presente investigación analiza cómo las recomendaciones online afectan a la experiencia webrooming omnicanal, basada en el canal físico, online, y móvil.

Se llevaron a cabo dos experimentos. El Estudio 1 analiza el impacto de una revisión online positiva en la interacción posterior con el producto. El Estudio 2 modifica el momento de recibir la recomendación y el vínculo social entre emisor y receptor.

El proceso webrooming mejora la experiencia de compra. Las recomendaciones online de clientes anónimos incrementan la auto-confianza sobre la adecuación del producto, aunque este efecto depende del momento de recibir la recomendación y del nivel de auto-confianza previo a la interacción física con el producto. Las recomendaciones de amigos refuerzan las preferencias, independientemente de la experiencia online previa.

Esta investigación examina los efectos de diferentes tipos de recomendaciones online en experiencias offline, le elección y la auto-confianza. La auto-confianza se revela como una variable clave del comportamiento omnicanal.

Los resultados ofrecen implicaciones para la gestión del marketing boca-oído y omnicanal, así como la gestión de la experiencia en el canal físico y el online.

Este es uno de los primeros estudios que analizan el impacto de recomendaciones online en experiencias de compra que combinan canales online, offline y móvil. Los resultados revelan que la importancia de la fuente y del momento de recibir la recomendación determinan las preferencias, elección, y auto-confianza de los consumidores.

Comercio minorista, Omnicanal, Webrooming, Auto-confianza, Boca-oído electrónico, Vínculo social

Trabajo de investigación

The purpose of this paper is to examine “black box” links between HRM innovations and organizational performance by investigating the perspective of a workforce often excluded from the HR realm. Professional Independent Contractors (IPros) play a vital role in achieving workforce flexibility and innovation. While the use of such arrangements has been examined often using a compliance-oriented lens, the authors explore the value of adding a commitment aspect.

In total, 375 IPros working in Australian organizations completed an online questionnaire distributed by a national business support services provider.

Results show organizational support significantly predicted work engagement and affective commitment. Self-efficacy, age and gender were also significant predictors.

The cross-sectional nature of this study and reliance on self-reported data limit the reliability of the findings. In addition, the findings may be specific to the Australian labor market.

The study present the views of a difficult to reach population and the findings suggest by adopting an innovative hybrid commitment-compliance HR configuration, practitioners may positively increase desirable contractor outcomes.

Concerns that organizational imperatives for efficiency, quality and high performance will be compromised by considering the human side of non-employee work arrangements are not supported. Indeed, as previously outlined, much of the concern with the employee/non-employee dichotomy is legally based and an artefact of a system of labor law that in many settings has failed to move with the times.

Few investigations of the impact of high commitment HRM practices have incorporated the perspective of professional, non-employees. While IPros are recipients of compliance focused contractor management practices, carefully integrated commitment-based HRM aspects have the potential to deliver positive outcomes for both individuals and organizations.