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Accounting academics in the South African system understand their primary responsibility to be the teaching of prospective Chartered Accountants (CAs) rather than the advancement of knowledge through research. The purpose of this study is to determine what factors motivate accounting academics who are CAs to obtain doctorates in an environment dominated by the profession, where promotion is possible to Full Professor without a Doctorate but not without the professional qualification of CA. And did these doctoral CAs face challenges on their journey, such as resistance from colleagues?

A total of 22 academic CAs with doctorates and 18 academic CAs studying towards doctorates were surveyed to gain a deeper understanding of who they are, what their motivations were for undertaking the doctorate journey and what they experienced.

The main finding of this study is that the culture of accounting departments in South Africa is beginning to shift from being teaching orientated towards being more research orientated. The CAs are pursuing doctorates for the purpose of career progression and for intrinsic personal reasons. The main challenges that they faced on their journey were finding the time for family and a social life and a lack of support from colleagues and their institution. However, support seems to be improving.

The change to a research-orientated culture in South African departments of accounting, as envisioned by Van der Schyf (2008), is only now starting to take place. These CAs with doctorates provide evidence of that change.

The value of this study is to provide accounting academics and the profession with a better understanding of, and a greater sensitivity to, accounting academics operating under the influence of the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA). The study also adds to the limited amount of literature on the motives and experiences of doctoral students, especially accounting doctoral students.

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 investigate the production of accounting doctorates in South Africa during the period from 2008 to 2014. The investigation was prompted by calls to qualify more academics at the doctoral level, bearing in mind that postgraduate supervision forms part of an academic’s core teaching responsibilities.

This archival study uses data obtained from the institutional repositories of four research-intensive universities in South Africa to construct a profile of the accounting doctoral theses produced.

Overall, the findings indicate a move towards the international requirement for doctoral-qualified accounting academics, implying an increased research orientation in South African university accounting departments. Some of the detail findings follow: most doctorates were produced at the University of Cape Town and the University of Pretoria. The accounting fields of taxation and financial management produced the most doctorates. Almost 50 per cent of the doctorates went to members of staff. Further, 28 per cent of the doctorates went to students with the CA(SA) professional qualification. The use of the PhD by publication format is growing. The low quantity of PhDs produced can possibly be explained by the low numbers of PhD qualified professorial staff who can act as supervisors. Lastly, the accounting doctorates analysed in this paper were longer and supervised by more people than the typical commerce faculty doctorate.

Not all South African universities were included in the study and therefore some accounting doctorates might have been excluded. In addition, accounting education doctorates, possibly supervised in faculties of education, would also be excluded in view of the approach followed in this paper, which was to identify accounting doctorates via departments and commerce faculties.

This article is the first of its kind to examine the accounting doctorates produced in South Africa since Van der Schyf’s (2008) call for the establishment of a research culture in the accounting departments of South African universities. As such, this paper makes an important contribution towards how such a research culture may be enhanced through cultivating doctoral education in this context.

This study investigates firm attributes (namely level of capitalisation, scope of operation, organisational structure, organisational lifecycle, systemic importance and size) affecting the robustness of enterprise risk management (ERM) practice, the extent to which ERM affects the performance of banks and the impact of ERM on the long-term sustainability of banks in Nigeria. This was against the backdrop that the 2012 banking reform was a major regulatory intervention that mainstreamed ERM in the Nigerian banking sector.

The study employed a mixed methodology of content, trend and quantitative analyses. Ex post facto research design was deployed to analyse performance differential of banks, with respect to the implementation of ERM, over a 10-year period (2008–2017). A disclosure checklist developed from the COSO ERM integrated framework was used to assess the robustness of ERM by content-analysing divulgence on risk management in published annual reports. The banking reform periods were dichotomised into pre- (2008–2012) and post- (2013–2017) reform periods. Jonckheere–Terpstra test, independent sample t-test and Mann–Whitney test were applied to analyse a total of 1,036 firm-year observations over the period 2008–2017.

Result shows that bank attributes significantly affecting the robustness of risk management practice are level of capitalisation, scope of operation, systemic importance and size. Performance of banks improved slightly during the post-2012 banking reform period. This suggests that as banks consolidate on the gains of ERM, benefits of the regulatory policy on risk management may be realised in the long run. Result also shows that ERM enhances long-term performance, connoting that effective risk management could serve as a competitive strategy for surviving turbulence that typically characterises the banking sector.

The emergence of level of capitalisation, scope of operation, systemic importance and size as determinants of ERM provides empirical evidence to support the practice of reviewing the capital requirements for banking business from time to time by regulatory authorities (i.e. recapitalisation policy) as a strategy for managing systemic risk. Top management of banks may consider instituting mechanisms that will ensure risk management is given prominence. A proactive approach must be taken to convert risks to opportunities by banks and other financial institutions, going forward, to cope with the vicissitudes of financial intermediation.

The originality of the study stems from the consideration that it provides some new insights into the impact of ERM on banks long-term sustainability in a developing country. The study also contributes to knowledge by exposing the factors determining the robustness of risk management practice. The study developed a checklist for assessing ERM practice from annual reports and other risk management disclosure documents. The paper also adds to the scarce literature on risk governance and risk management.

The readability of annual reports is an important feature that determines the quality of communication between a firm and its stakeholders. Extant literature has demonstrated that readability characteristics of annual reports are crucial in facilitating the investor's ability to process and analyze information, resulting in higher firm performance and lower agency costs. This study examines the relationship between annual report readability, agency costs and the firm performance of listed financial sector companies in Oman.

Using a sample of 150 firm-year observations of listed financial sector companies on the Muscat Securities Market (MSM) over the period 2014 to 2018, a panel regression analysis is used, along with the system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation to address endogeneity concerns. The readability of annual reports is proxied by the length of the annual report, the Flesch reading ease and the Flesch–Kincaid index.

The ordinary least squares (OLS) results suggest that readability proxied by the length of the annual report has no significant relationship with agency cost, return on assets (ROA) or stock returns. The OLS results are confirmed through the system GMM estimation model for agency costs, Tobin's Q and stock returns. Easier-to-read annual reports measured by the Flesch reading ease demonstrate high asset utilization ratio and Tobin's Q. These results emphasize Flesch reading ease measure in explaining the economic significance of agency cost and Tobin's Q. In contrast, difficult-to-read annual reports are observed for firms with high ROA.

The study is limited to the financial sector. Its generalizability could be extended to a similar sector or countries with features similar to Oman. Future studies on readability could be extended to other sectors of Oman, and financial firms with easier-to-read annual reports show a high Tobin's Q, which reflects the confidence of investors in the stock market. These findings may encourage policymakers to regulate the readability features of annual reports and influence the reporting quality of financials and disclosures also including cross-country comparisons.

Financial firms with easier-to-read annual reports show a high Tobin's Q, which reflects the confidence of investors in the stock market. These findings may encourage policymakers to regulate the readability features of annual reports and influence the reporting quality of financials and disclosures.

While the study extends prior literature on readability, agency costs and firm performance, it is also one of the first to examine the financial sector of an emerging country, namely, Oman. The study supports the obfuscation hypothesis through the association of readability measure with agency cost. Unlike prior research that has focused on common computational linguistic literature, this study uses three proxies for readability to assess information quality.

This study investigates the potential of two different digital in-store technologies and advertisement message framings according to the construal-level theory for increasing sustainable consumption. This paper aims to provide managerial implications for the promotion of sustainable products at the point of sale as well as to theoretically contribute by integrating the literature streams of perceptual research, point-of-sale marketing and construal-level theory.

The authors tested their hypotheses in a two-week field experiment with a 2 (product label: organic vs local) × 2 (message framing: high vs low construal level) × 2 (presentation technology: digital signage vs augmented reality) between-subjects factorial design. The study was conducted in two grocery stores of different sizes using milk as a test product. Purchase data, as well as attention data gathered by facial recognition software, were analyzed.

Even though the magic mirror augmented reality application attracted significantly more attention, it did not significantly boost sales compared to the digital signage technology. In the larger store, the sales of the advertised sustainable products were significantly higher in both technology conditions than in the control condition without advertisement. If consumers pay enough attention to the promotion, results indicate that using messages with a concrete low-level construal is more useful for organic goods.

This study is the first investigating a combination of in-store technology and construal-level message framing for the promotion of sustainable products. It extends the retailing literature by proposing a two-step approach on how to use in-store technology effectively: (1) gaining attention and (2) matching messages to existing cognitions.

This study aims to examine the influence of audit committee existence and internal audit function on the earnings management of companies.

This paper uses generalised least squares regression to investigate the influence of audit committee existence, internal audit function and the interaction of these two mechanisms on earnings management for a sample of 86 industrial companies listed on the Amman Stock Exchange over a four-year period from 2007 to 2010. The paper uses the extent of discretionary accruals as the proxy for earnings management.

This paper finds that audit committee existence and the internal audit function reduce the level of earnings management. The number of meetings between the audit committee and internal audit function also reduces discretionary accruals. Overall, this study finds that audit committee existence and internal audit function decrease earnings management and improve the financial reporting quality.

The main contribution of this study is that it investigates the combined effects of audit committee existence and internal auditors on earnings management. Furthermore, this study is the initial paper to examine the impact of audit committee and internal audit on earnings management in Jordan.

As adults and young adults have become increasingly active on social media, public libraries have incorporated social media alongside their more traditional services. However, libraries are faced with the challenging task of determining how to successfully engage with their users through social media. This chapter examines research literature from both social media and information studies to explore evidence-based results on providing popular information services and resources for adult and young adult users in social spaces. Key elements of social media use by libraries identified in this review include promotion of information resources and services, participation and engagement, social care, pastoral care, outreach, cocreation and motivation of users, advocacy and crowdsourcing, and measurement and assessment. Based on results from current research, best practices and assessment methods for social media are discussed which offer practical considerations for selecting social media platforms appropriate to a library’s mission, goals, and objectives, with examples relevant to a variety of social media platforms. The chapter also offers a review of social media platforms, practices, and assessment designed to inform librarians and library managers in decision-making about library social media efforts.