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Business organizations should strive to create ethical cultures to win consumer loyalty and thus safeguard long-term performance success. Management bears ultimate responsibility for promoting ethical behavior. By rewarding ethical behaviors and punishing transgressions, management will reinforce morally upright behavior and create a positive company culture. Successful promotion of corporate ethics, in turn, will boost employee morale, increase performance beyond bare minimums and retain employees in the long run. With a well-structured ethics code and strong reward system, management has all the tools necessary to create an ethical company culture.

This viewpoint paper, while advocating for a systematic approach to ethical behavior in a business organization, carefully reviews both well-established literature in this area as well as current best practices. The aim is to provide senior managers with a sense of how the best corporate ethics programs are organized and structured.

A successful corporate ethics program must involve all employees from executives to hourly wage workers, with each taking personal responsibility for his or her own performance and results. While no guarantees of success are offered, one reasonably certain path to failure is for an organization to post an ethics code and then ignore it. Ethics must be discussed, modified from time to time and actively integrated into the life of every organization that hopes to avoid ethical missteps.

This paper offers a fresh viewpoint on both the value and the organization of a potentially successful corporate ethics program. While time-honored ideas serve as the foundation for our discussion, a thorough review of current issues and best practices form the directional heading for the paper’s conclusions.

The main purpose of this paper is to approach the legal problems of mass privatisation in Poland. The authors present the structure of national investment funds which intend to be the experimental financial intermediaries in Poland. Their assets are quoted on the Stock Exchange in Warsaw from the beginning of May 1997. New and controversial roles of management firms are discussed in this paper.

As demands on global water resources intensify, battles are emerging over water ownership and governance. Evidence to support opposing views is scarce, however, especially with respect to the impact of ownership on water quality. Using a data set of 168,823 municipal water systems in the United States from 2010 to 2014, we find evidence that stakeholder attention moderates the effect of ownership on compliance with drinking water quality standards. Private systems’ compliance improves more rapidly with system size, consistent with greater social movement pressure, while public systems’ compliance improves more rapidly with local educational attainment, consistent with greater responsiveness to stakeholder attention and concern.

In Central Eastern Europe (CEE) the transition to market democracy significantly influenced the emerging corporate governance practice. The region, however, demonstrates much more diversity in corporate governance than expected in generally similar transition economies and the variables and their impacts only partially overlap with the variables of corporate governance in other regions. This research aims to focus on how to help discover and explain these similarities and differences.

This paper is a review of the secondary literature. The review is carried out with the intention of providing an opportunity to map out new terrains or provide critiques of the direction of a research field. The majority of literature reviewed in the paper is published in refereed journals, but other resources like book chapters, conference papers, reports and in certain cases unpublished materials are added. The paper discusses the key topics and variables according to the requirements of a holistic approach to corporate governance.

The review of available literature indicates that much work has been done on a significant set of variables of corporate governance, both in the domestic (privatization and the legal environment primarily, institutions and market conditions secondarily) and the international (impact of foreign direct investment, European Union directives and expectations, globalization and global institutions like OECD and the WB) context, but this body of research has not been discussed comparatively, within the context of a holistic model. Existing literature in the first two decades after transition has devoted less attention to issues of hierarchy and institutions of corporate governance, although they have relevance to better understand the impact of the macro‐level factors on corporate governance practices and their differences in the region. The paper has indicated the importance of a systematic review of macro‐level factors, both internal and external from a national perspective, influencing corporate governance practices.

A systematic review of the variables of corporate governance in CEE has been missing to date and the theoretical framework adequate for pursuing such research is emerging only recently. The further elaboration and application of a holistic approach is necessary to analyze the numerous aspects that influence and shape corporate governance structures and practices in transition economies and to understand the differences that prevail even after two decades of transition to market democracy.

The paper provides a comprehensive review of the literature on corporate governance practices and the factors influencing the emergence and impact of those codes in CEE. It argues for a holistic approach not applied before in the research of corporate governance in transition economies; and discusses the role of external and domestic macro‐level factors in explaining the differences in the emerging national practices. It emphasizes the importance of the holistic analysis in future research.

Although neo‐classical economics has undoubtedly driven the global pension privatization reform agenda, it does not provide an adequate framework for the reform of retirement income protection. Indeed, it poses salient decision risks for policy‐makers because of its naturalist epistemology and agency ontology, which deny both the value of hermeneutic knowledge and the existence of structural imperatives. When confronted with the challenge of income maintenance for those in retirement, policy‐makers must necessarily tackle strategically important, values‐laden questions. This requires them to engage in policy discourses that are informed by competing welfare ideologies. Reflecting these discourses, national governments have adopted three reform approaches to public pension privatization. All are consistent with values of community solidarity, social cohesion and citizenship rights, which are seen by national governments to be preferable to the values that underpin neo‐classical economic analysis, namely, individual responsibility, freedom of choice and contractual rights.

Russia's size – both in terms of population and geography, spanning 11 time zones, 89 oblasts (states or regions) and autonomous republics and its privatization program, encompassing some 100,000 small-scale enterprises, 25,000 medium to large firms, and 300 or so of its largest firms, made its privatization program the largest sale/transfer of assets conducted among the transition economies, with the possible exception of China. Comparisons by many of the program's critics, and there are many, to Poland, Hungary, or the Czech republic are invidious, especially the latter two countries whose populations are similar to just that of greater Moscow.

Internationally public utilities, sometimes referred to as network industries, are being privatised and dedicated regulatory structures to protect the public interest are being introduced. This study looks at the related issues of post‐privatisation performance, regulatory risk and management strategies in privatised public utilities, drawing on evidence from the UK. The main findings are, first, that in assessing the impact of privatisation on economic performance it is difficult to separate out the effects of ownership, competition, regulation and technological change. Second, that in terms of the distribution of the efficiency gains, initially investors were the main beneficiaries in the UK, but consumers gained as competition developed and regulation tightened. Third, regulated enterprises are subject to regulatory risk as well as commercial risk with implications for types of management strategies adopted. Following privatisation the dynamics of regulation involve both the regulator and management learning about regulation and the optimal strategies to adopt. The UK's experiences are educational for those countries now contemplating or in the process of introducing privatisation programmes.

The main aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the most influential economic changes and accounting legislation affecting financial reporting and disclosure practices in Jordan. It also provides an overview of disclosure studies conducted in Jordan covering the year(s) between 1986 and 2014 to investigate whether there is an improvement in disclosure practice in Jordan. This paper also investigates the most influential firm characteristics affecting disclosure practices in Jordan found in prior disclosure studies that were conducted in Jordan between 1986 and 2014. The paper also addresses the disclosure items required in Corporate Governance Codes that exist for listed shareholding companies, banks and insurance companies. Finally, the paper discusses the quality of accounting education in Jordan, as prior studies noted its impact on accounting practice.

Based on a review of prior disclosure studies conducted in Jordan between 1986 and 2014, this study compared the results of disclosure studies before and after 1998. In 1997, Jordan, as a result of economic changes, issued the Temporary Securities Law and its Directives of Disclosure, which came into effect in 1998. The law is considered as the turning point in the improvement of disclosure practice in Jordan. A trend line of disclosure practice is also used to investigate whether disclosure practice is improved after the issuance of this law. A descriptive analysis is also used to examine the factors affecting disclosure practice in Jordan.

Based on a review of prior disclosure studies, it was concluded that disclosure practices have improved overtime. It was also observed that that firm size as a factor has always affected the level of disclosure in Jordan and is followed by external auditing, while liquidity is found to have the least effect. It was concluded that economic changes, agreement with international organizations like the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO), new regulations and financial market reforms have improved disclosure practice in Jordan. It was also found that there is a need for further studies in disclosure practice that are not sufficiently covered in Jordan.

The study is based on a review of disclosure studies conducted in Jordan between 1986 and 2014. We investigate whether mandatory, voluntary, corporate social and internet disclosure practice improved over the last three decades in Jordan. This study is the first to provide evidence on the improvement of disclosure practices based on a review of disclosure studies in Jordan. The paper is expected to be a reference for disclosure studies in developing countries, Jordan in particular, as it summarized and criticized the weaknesses on disclosure practice and accounting legislations in Jordan.