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The purpose of this paper is to review and critique prior research on audit committees using a practice-theory lens. Research on audit committees has followed the same trajectory as early research on boards of directors, which has been criticised for its singular theoretical perspectives and methodologies that do not capture the complexity of real-world experiences/behaviours.

The authors devise an analytical framework based on practice theory to conduct the review. The authors examine what audit committees should do (i.e. best practice) vs what audit committees actually do (i.e. actual activities in practice – praxis). Attributes of audit committee members, and the relationship dynamics relevant to their role execution (i.e. practitioners), are considered.

Research on boards has found that over-emphasis on agency theory’s monitoring role negatively impacts boards’ effectiveness. The authors invoke other theories in examining what audit committees do in practice. The authors characterise the role of audit committees as oversight not monitoring. The authors question whether, similar to auditing, audit committees are blamist tools or are genuinely orientated towards supporting improvements in organisational management systems. The authors unpack the ritualistic ceremonial behaviours and symbolic endeavours vs substantive engagement by audit committees. The analytical framework also considers the “guardianship circle” around audit committees in the form of the key practitioners and their relationships: audit committee members, auditors and managers.

Drawing on the analytical framework, the authors provide directions for further opportunities for research of audit committees.

The Research Committee at Texas A&M University (TAMU) Libraries provides a model of tenure support that includes funding of research projects and an annual Research Forum. The purpose of this article is to review these support mechanisms and their outcomes. An argument for the benefit of such a model is presented.

Tenure support provided by the Research Committee and the broader supportive environment in which it functions is described. Each supported project was reviewed to determine its outcome (publication or conference presentation).

This model of support benefits tenure‐track librarians at Texas A&M University Libraries.

This model of support would likely benefit other academic libraries that require librarians to engage in scholarly communication. Thus this paper should be of interest to academic librarians and to library managers seeking to enhance tenure support for their faculty librarians.

Much of the literature on tenure support advocates mentoring. While TAMU's Research Committee functions within a library that requires mentors for its untenured faculty, this article provides an argument for the retention, or adoption of the kind of support provided by TAMU's Research Committee, including research funding and the opportunity to present research results to colleagues.

This paper aims to synthesize the diverse literature on nomination and remuneration committees and provide avenues for future research.

This study provides a comprehensive literature review of theoretical and empirical studies published in reputable international journals indexed by Scopus.

The literature review reveals several aspects of the nomination and remuneration committee. These aspects have been classified into the definition of the nomination and remuneration committee, dimensions of the nomination and remuneration committee, measurement and research review results, reasons for conflict empirical findings, company dynamics and research on moderators, as well as recommending future research.

Our literature review shows that nomination and remuneration committees play a role in improving board performance and company performance, reducing agency conflicts and improving corporate governance to provide implications for companies, regulators and investors and pave the way for future research.

This paper identifies issues related to nomination and remuneration committees, their theoretical and practical implications and avenues for future research.

In this chapter I build upon the case I argued in Volume 1 of this series (Carpenter, D. (2016). The quest for generic ethical principles in social science research. In R. Iphofen (Ed.), Advances in research ethics and integrity (Vol. 1, pp. 3–18). Bingley: Emerald). There I established arguments for eschewing principlism and other well-established theories of practical ethics, such as deontology and consequentialism, in favour of virtue ethics. I drew on the work of Macfarlane (2009, 2010) in making a case for virtuous researcher and virtuous research. In this chapter, I draw attention to the role and conduct of ethics committees in reviewing research. If we are to consider the ethics of research and researchers, then we might also consider the ethics of reviewing and reviewers. Whilst there is an abundance of codes and similar documents aimed at guiding research conduct, there is relatively little to guide ethics committees and their members. Given the argument that a virtue ethics approach might help committees evaluate the ethics of proposed research and researchers, it could equally be the case that virtue ethics could be useful when thinking about the work of committees and ethics review. In this chapter I attempt to relocate and develop Macfarlane’s work by examining its application to the work of ethics committees and the virtues of their members. In particular, I will consider the virtues that reviewers should exhibit or demonstrate when reviewing research, and what we might take as the telos of ethics committees.

The chapter reflects on the strengths and limitations of David Carpenter’s proposal to support the work of research ethics committees through consideration of the virtues required by their members. Carpenter’s approach has many strengths, responsibilising researchers and ethics committees, and increasing the scope for robust and active theoretical engagement with ethical issues. I bring two alternative perspectives on research ethics to bear on this discussion. First, I discuss work in care ethics and relational ethics, approaches to ethics that have some similarities with virtue ethics but also distinct differences. Bruce Macfarlane’s text, on which Carpenter draws, notes care ethics briefly. I offer a more detailed consideration of what this perspective can offer, both for research ethics and for the virtuous research ethics committee. This helps to identify the relationships that are missing from a virtue ethics focus. Further, a context sensitive relational approach suggests ways in which we can strengthen Carpenter’s proposals to help research ethics committees select between competing principles or virtues. Second, my research ethics expertise is in undergraduate teaching for a multidisciplinary course, and an enquiry-based learning programme, which allows students in mixed discipline groups to plan, conduct, report and present their own original social research. The research skills training provided includes an interactive introduction to research ethics, what they are for and why they matter. Since we aim to offer practical guidance to research ethics committees when they consider what they should do and how this should be done, such a first principles approach may be useful.

This paper aims to recognise the importance of informal processes within corporate governance and complement existing research in this area by investigating factors associated with the existence of informal interactions between audit committees and internal audit functions and in providing directions for future research.

To examine the existence and drivers of informal interactions between audit committees and internal audit functions, this paper relies on a questionnaire survey of chief audit executives (CAEs) in the UK from listed and non‐listed, as well as financial and non‐financial, companies. While prior qualitative research suggests that informal interactions do take place, most of the evidence is based on particular organisational setting or on a very small range of interviews. The use of a questionnaire enabled the examination of the existence of internal interactions across a relatively larger number of entities.

The paper finds evidence of audit committees and internal audit functions engaging in informal interactions in addition to formal pre‐scheduled regular meetings. Informal interactions complement formal meetings with the audit committee and as such represent additional opportunities for the audit committees to monitor internal audit functions. Audit committees' informal interactions are significantly and positively associated with audit committee independence, audit chair's knowledge and experience, and internal audit quality.

The results demonstrate the importance of the background of the audit committee chair for the effectiveness of the governance process. This is possibly the first paper to examine the relationship between audit committee quality and internal audit, on the existence and driver of informal interactions. Policy makers should recognize that in addition to formal mechanisms, informal processes, such as communication outside of formal pre‐scheduled meetings, play a significant role in corporate governance.

This study aims to examine the literature from the Web of Science database published on board committees between 2002 and 2023 and outline the quantitative summary, journey of board committees’ research and suggest future research directions.

This study examines bibliometric-content analysis combined with a systematic literature review of articles on board committees to document the summary of the field. The authors used co-citation, co-occurrence and cluster analysis under bibliometric-content analysis to present the field summary.

Board committee composition, such as their gender, independence and expertise, as well as factors affecting corporate governance, such as reporting quality, earnings management and board monitoring, all have a significant impact on board committee literature. The field is getting growing attention from authors, journals and countries. Nevertheless, there is a need for further exploration in areas like expertise, member age and tenure, the economic crisis and the nomination and remuneration committee, which have not yet received sufficient attention.

This paper has both theoretical and practical contributions. From a theoretical perspective, this study substantiates the prevalence of agency theory within board committee literature, reinforcing the foundational role of agency theory in shaping discussions about board committees. On practical ground, the comprehensive overview of board committee literature offers scholars a road map for navigating this field and directing their future research journey. The identification of research gaps in certain areas serves as a catalyst for scholars to explore untapped dimensions, enabling them to strengthen the essence of the committees’ performance.

Many researchers, in several contexts, have investigated the influence of audit committee effectiveness and audit quality variables on reducing the extent of earnings management, and empirical evidence is rather inconsistent.

The aim of this paper is to meta-analyze the results of 58 prior studies that examined whether differences in results are related to moderating effects associated with corporate governance mechanisms or measures of earnings management.

The findings show that the meta-analysis identifies many significant relationships. The independence of the audit committee, its size, expertise and the number of meetings have a negative relationship with earnings management. Similar negative relationships exist between auditor size, specialization and earnings management.

This study contributes to the corporate governance literature. Further, recognizing the function of an audit committee and audit quality shows the value of considering an institutional setting in governance research. This study is significant to academic and practitioner literatures, policy makers and professional accounting bodies as it shows that governance reforms promote companies to adopt good governance practices. The results also give useful information to investors in examining the effect of audit committee characteristics and audit quality on earnings quality.

This study extends existing research on audit committee and audit quality to oversee both accrual and real earnings management using meta-analysis. Thus, this study has the potential to help stakeholders, board of directors, regulators and auditors, who are related with enhancing the supervision of firms and reducing the opportunities given to managers, to engage in earnings management.

Formal research ethics codes perpetuate imbalances between ethics regulators and researchers in the social sciences. Some of these imbalances are an outcome of ethics regimes that use the biomedical paradigm when evaluating social science research. The bureaucratic nature in the manner by which ethics committees operate is yet another factor that produces imbalances that reshape social scientific enquiry. This chapter, however, underscores some of the less recognised ways that ethics codes produce a disequilibrium. First, ethics codes require, in effect, that researchers in the social sciences ‘other’ themselves at the expenses of their traditional stock of social scientific methodology by seeing themselves through the eyes of the colonising ethics codes. Second, ethics codes insist that researchers need to exemplify a far larger number of virtues than the very few set aside for members of ethics review committees. Ethics regimes place social scientists on the margins of the ethics world: the regime not only colonises them, but also insists that they hold on to virtues that are quite absent with respect to members of ethics committees.

The internet offers an opportunity for researchers to engage participants in research in a cost-effective and timely manner. Yet the use of the internet as a research tool (internet research) comes with a range of ethical concerns, and the rapidly changing online environment poses challenges for both researchers and ethics committees. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the key ethical issues of using the internet to recruit, retain and trace participants in public health research, from the perspectives of researchers and human research ethics committee (HREC) members.

This study employed a qualitative design using semi-structured interviews with eight public health researchers and seven HREC members in Australia to explore the key ethical issues of using the internet to engage research participants.

The study identified commonalities between researchers and HREC members regarding the utility and ethical complexity of using the internet to recruit, retain and trace research participants. The need for guidance and support regarding internet research, for both groups, was highlighted, as well as the need for flexibility and responsiveness in formal ethical processes.

This research contributes to the understanding of how the internet is used to engage participants in public health research and the ethical context in which that occurs. Supporting the ethical conduct of internet research will benefit those involved in research, including researchers, HRECs, organisations and research participants.