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This study examines how assurors make sense of sustainability assurance (SA) work and how interactions with assurance team members and clients shape assurors’ sensemaking and their actual SA work.

To obtain detailed accounts of how SA work occurs on the ground, this study explores three SA engagements by interviewing the main actors involved, both at the client firms and at their Big Four assurance providers.

Individual assurors’ (i.e. partners and other team members) sensemaking of SA work results in the crafting of their logics of action (LoAs), that is, their meanings about the objectives of SA work and how to conduct it. Without organizational socialization, team members may not arrive at shared meanings and deviate from the team-wide assurance approach. To fulfill their objectives for SA work, assurors may engage in socialization with clients or assume a temporary role. Yet, the role negotiations taking place in the shadows of the scope negotiations determine their default role during the engagement.

Two options are available to help SA statement users gauge the relevance of SA work: either displaying the SA work performed or making it more uniform.

This study theoretically grounds how assurors make sense of SA work and documents how (the lack of) professional socialization, organizational socialization and socialization of frequent interaction partners at the client shape actual SA work. Thereby, it unravels the SA work concealed behind SA statements.

Wage employees enter self-employment either directly or in a staged manner and may subsequently undertake multiple stints at self-employment. Extant research on the relationship between entry modes and the persistence and outcomes of self-employment is inconclusive. This study investigates the relationship between wage employees’ initial mode of entry into self-employment and the duration of the subsequent first two stints of self-employment.

This study used a matched longitudinal sample of 9,550 employees who became majority owners of incorporated firms from 2005 to 2016.

The findings demonstrate that the initial mode of entry into self-employment matters for the first two stints at self-employment. Staged entry into self-employment was associated with a shorter first stint and became insignificant for the second stint. Staged entry into self-employment was positively related to the odds of becoming self-employed for the second time in the same firm.

Using a comprehensive and reliable dataset, the paper shifts focus from the aggregated onward journey of novice entrepreneurs (survival as the outcome) to the duration of their self-employment stints. By doing so, the paper offers insights into the process of becoming self-employed and the patterns associated with success/failure in entrepreneurship associated with self-employment duration.

To provide insights into the role of formal and informal accounts in preventing the liquidation of a professional football club and in post-crisis rebuilding.

This case study, framed as a conflict arena, covers an eight-year period of a high-profile struggle over the future of a professional football club. It uses a mixed methods design, including direct engagement with key actors involved in administration proceedings and transformation to a hybrid supporter-owned organisation.

Our findings suggest that within the arena:• formal accounting and governance were of limited use in managing the complex network of relationships and preventing the abuse of power or existential crises. • informal accounting helped mobilise critical resources and maintain supporters’ emotional investment during periods of conflict. • informal accounts enabled both resistance and coalition-building in response to perceived abuse of power. • informal accounts were used by the Club as part of its legitimation activities.

This study provides theoretical and empirical insights into an unfolding crisis with evidence gathered directly from actors involved in the process. The conceptual framework developed in this paper creates new visibilities and possibilities for developing more effective accounting practices in settings that enable continuing emotional investment from supporters.

This paper aims to define a hierarchical and multi-criteria framework based on pillars of the Modernization of Higher Education to evaluate European Accounting Doctoral Programmes (EADE-Model).

The authors applied a quali-quantitative methodology based on the analytic hierarchy process and the survey approach. The authors conducted an extensive literature and regulation review to identify the dimensions affecting the quality of Doctoral Programmes, choosing accounting as the relevant and pivotal field. The authors also used the survey to select the most critical quality dimensions and derive their weight to build EADE Model. The validity of the proposed model has been tested through the application to the Italian scenario.

The findings provide a critical extension of accounting ranking studies constructing a multi-criteria, hierarchical and updated evaluation model recognizing the role of doctoral training in the knowledge-based society. The results shed new light on weak areas apt to be improved and propose potential amendments to enhance the quality standard of ADE.

Theoretical and practical implications of this paper are directed to academics, policymakers and PhD programmes administrators.

The research is original in drafting a hierarchical multi-criteria framework for evaluating ADE in the Higher Education System. This model may be extended to other fields.

This chapter examines the concepts of race and racism, critically reviewing their historical and contemporary applications in everyday life as well as in academic and policy debates. Racism has been extensively researched, with various theories and conceptualisations developed across social science. However, there is a great deal of disagreement regarding its nature, contemporary significance and empirical validation. This chapter examines these and attempts to synthesise some of the common definitions of racism provided in the literature. It explores related concepts and underlying themes pertaining to expressions of race and racism. Furthermore, it unpacks current knowledge about racial issues and discusses recent advances in the conceptual understanding of various forms of racism. It also elucidates the social, political and analytical applications of racism as a concept and the significance of racism in contemporary societies. The chapter concludes by highlighting how racism is a dynamic phenomenon, continuously evolving with the social, political and technological transformations in contemporary societies.

This paper highlights how career capital is accrued through three ways of knowing in a women’s leadership programme (WLP) in an Australian State Police Department. A shift in focus to building capability rather than addressing gaps in participants' abilities was enhanced through the unique use of sponsors and positive psychology interventions.

A longitudinal study, which comprised 31 semi-structured in-depth interviews and focus groups, and a survey with participants eight months after the interviews, assessed the impact of enhanced skills, connections and qualifications on extant role performance.

The WLP enhanced three key components of career capital.

The authors' study extends extant knowledge in seven key ways related to WLPs: (1) reaffirms the benefits for police, (2) developing or enhancing career capital, (3) accruing women’s career capital in policing, (4) pedagogical benefits for WLPs, (5) articulating outcomes of developing career capital, (6) the uniqueness of allocating sponsors and (7) extending empirical studies demonstrating synergies within the intelligent career framework.

This paper explores the similarities and differences in privacy attitudes, trust and risk beliefs between younger and older adults on social networking sites. The objective of the article is to ascertain whether any notable differences exist between younger (18–25 years old) and older (55+ years old) adults in how trust and risk are influenced by privacy concerns upon personal information disclosure on social media.

A Likert scale instrument validated in previous research was employed to gather the responses of 148 younger and 152 older adults. The scale was distributed through Amazon Mechanical Turk. Data were analyzed through partial least squares structural equation modeling.

No significant differences were found between younger and older adults in how social media privacy concerns related to trust and risk beliefs. Two privacy concern dimensions were found to have a significant influence on perceptions of risk for both populations: collection and control. Predictability and a sense of control are proposed as two conceptual approaches that can explain these findings.

This article is the first one to explore age differences in privacy concerns, trust and risk on social media employing conceptual developments and an instrument specifically tailored to the social media environment. Based on the findings, several strategies are suggested to keep privacy concerns on social media at a minimum, reduce risk perceptions and increase users' trust.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an emerging technology and turned into a field of knowledge that has been consistently displacing technologies for a change in human life. It is applied in all spheres of life as reflected in the review of the literature section here. As applicable in the field of libraries too, this study scientifically mapped the papers on AAIL and analyze its growth, collaboration network, trending topics, or research hot spots to highlight the challenges and opportunities in adopting AI-based advancements in library systems and processes.

The study was developed with a bibliometric approach, considering a decade, 2012 to 2021 for data extraction from a premier database, Scopus. The steps followed are (1) identification, selection of keywords, and forming the search strategy with the approval of a panel of computer scientists and librarians and (2) design and development of a perfect algorithm to verify these selected keywords in title-abstract-keywords of Scopus (3) Performing data processing in some state-of-the-art bibliometric visualization tools, Biblioshiny R and VOSviewer (4) discussing the findings for practical implications of the study and limitations.

As evident from several papers, not much research has been conducted on AI applications in libraries in comparison to topics like AI applications in cancer, health, medicine, education, and agriculture. As per the Price law, the growth pattern is exponential. The total number of papers relevant to the subject is 1462 (single and multi-authored) contributed by 5400 authors with 0.271 documents per author and around 4 authors per document. Papers occurred mostly in open-access journals. The productive journal is the Journal of Chemical Information and Modelling (NP = 63) while the highly consistent and impactful is the Journal of Machine Learning Research (z-index=63.58 and CPP = 56.17). In the case of authors, J Chen (z-index=28.86 and CPP = 43.75) is the most consistent and impactful author. At the country level, the USA has recorded the highest number of papers positioned at the center of the co-authorship network but at the institutional level, China takes the 1st position. The trending topics of research are machine learning, large dataset, deep learning, high-level languages, etc. The present information system has a high potential to improve if integrated with AI technologies.

The number of scientific papers has increased over time. The evolution of themes like machine learning implicates AI as a broad field of knowledge that converges with other disciplines. The themes like large datasets imply that AI may be applied to analyze and interpret these data and support decision-making in public sector enterprises. Theme named high-level language emerged as a research hotspot which indicated that extensive research has been going on in this area to improve computer systems for facilitating the processing of data with high momentum. These implications are of high strategic worth for policymakers, library stakeholders, researchers and the government as a whole for decision-making.

The analysis of collaboration, prolific authors/journals using consistency factor and CPP, testing the relationship between consistency (z-index) and impact (h-index), using state-of-the-art network visualization and cluster analysis techniques make this study novel and differentiates it from the traditional bibliometric analysis. To the best of the author's knowledge, this work is the first attempt to comprehend the research streams and provide a holistic view of research on the application of AI in libraries. The insights obtained from this analysis are instrumental for both academics and practitioners.