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The present work aimed to present the perception of Tunisian professionals towards companies engaged in social responsibility practices and describe the tax evasion strategies of socially responsible Tunisian companies following the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic (COVID-19) shock.

A survey was sent to 119 Tunisian tax administration auditors. Data analysis methods principal component analysis (PCA) and regression analysis were used. The data were collected through a questionnaire after the general containment of Tunisia from September 2020 to February 2021. These quantitative data were analysed using processing software (STATA).

Professionals of the tax authorities, particularly those in charge of the audit mission, aim for corporate profitability from the perspective of stakeholders that seek to integrate ethics and social responsibility into companies and consider employee morale a top priority. The results show that highly ethical and socially responsible professionals are far from practising aggressive strategies. Thus, an auditor from the tax administration is far from engaging in social responsibility to justify fraudulent acts. During the COVID-19 period, the role of these professionals was to prevent and detect fraud in the tax sector to fight corruption and investigate taxes based on sound regulations.

The results are consistent with optimal taxation theory, which postulates that a tax system should be chosen to maximise a social welfare function subject to a set of constraints. Professionals seek to make taxation much simpler for taxpayers by providing advice and consultation to manage tax obligations. The minimisation of tax or the play of tax values requires expertise in the field to respect legal constraints. Therefore, these professionals play a crucial role in tax collection, as the professionals' advice and suggestions can influence taxpayers' decision-making.

In recent years, academic researchers, policy makers and the public have become increasingly interested in corporate tax evasion behaviour. At the same time, companies are under increasing pressure to integrate CSR into the companies' decision-making processes, which has led to increased academic interest in CSR. Opportunistic tax minimisation reduces state resources and funds needed for government programmes to improve the social welfare of the entire community. This study represents an overriding concern not only for legal and tax authorities and companies, but also for shareholders and stakeholders.

The authors' study contributes to the existing literature by determining the state of play on corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices amongst Tunisian tax authorities' professionals. In Tunisia, an executive of the tax authorities in charge of the verification mission is required to verify the proper application of the accounting and tax legislation in force, follow up on tax control operations on declared taxes and validate the sincerity of the accounts. This study focussed on the tax evasion of companies engaged in social responsibility practices according to the judgements of Tunisian tax authorities' auditors during the global COVID-19 pandemic.

The “Germanwings” air crash in 2015 in which 150 people were killed highlighted the challenges pilots working in the aviation industry face. Pilots regularly work for extensive periods in inhospitable and high-pressure operational conditions, exposing them to considerable work-related stress. This has raised calls for a more systemic cultural change across the aviation industry, championing a more holistic perspective of pilot health and well-being. The study aims to explore how peer coaching (PC) can promote an inclusive psychosocial safety climate enhancing pilot well-being and can mitigate hazardous attitudes and dysfunctional behaviours.

Adopting an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), semi-structured interviews and questionnaires were conducted with military and civilian peer coach/coachee pilots and key industry stakeholders, totalling 39 participants. The research provided significant insights into the perceived value of PC in promoting both pilot health and mental well-being (MW) and flight safety across the aviation industry.

The study highlights four key PC superordinate themes, namely, coaching skills, significance of well-being, building of peer relationships and importance of confidentiality and autonomy. Such combined themes build reciprocal trust within peer conversations that can inspire engagement and effectively promote personal well-being. The contagious effect of such local interventions can help stimulate systemic cultural change and promote a positive psychosocial safety climate throughout an organisation and, in this case, across the aviation industry. This study provides a PC conceptual framework “Mutuality Equality Goals Autonomy Non-evaluative feedback, Skill Confidentiality Voluntary Supervisory (MEGANS CVS),” highlighting the salient features of PC in promoting MW.

The study highlights the salient features of PC and its role in promoting peer conversations that enable personal transition, openness and acceptance. This study also highlights how PC and well-being can be used to encourage inclusivity and engagement, thereby strengthening institutional resilience.

This study highlights how PC that can assist HRM/HRD professionals to embed a more inclusive and salutogenic approach to MW that can reshape organisational cultures. This study highlights the significance and link of workplace stress to hazardous attitudes and dysfunctional behaviours. It further notes that whilst the MEGANS CVS peer coaching framework has been applied to pilots, it can also be applied across all sectors and levels.

This study highlights the value of PC as an inexpensive means to engage at the grassroots level, which not only improves personal performance, safety and well-being but by building peer relationships can also act as a catalyst for positive and deep organisational cultural change.

This study offers the MEGANS CVS framework that exposes insights into PC practice that can assist HRM/HRD professionals embed a more inclusive and salutogenic approach to health and well-being that can reshape organisational cultures. This study highlights the significance and link of workplace stress to hazardous attitudes and dysfunctional behaviours, and whilst this framework has been applied to pilots, it can also have relevance across all sectors and levels. This study calls for a “salutogenic turn,” employing MW and PC to transform organisational capabilities to be more forward-thinking and solution-focused, promoting an inclusive “just culture” where leaders positively lead their people.

This study aims to use emotions-as-social information theory to investigate how physical (customer perceived store atmosphere) and social servicescapes (customer information searching) influence the effects of employees’ positive affective displays on customer outcomes via customer positive moods and positive expectation disconfirmation.

This research included two studies, each using a distinct research design, to empirically test the proposed model. Study 1 involved 200 observational data points on objective purchase amounts from designer watch shops. In Study 2, data were collected from 230 customers in designer jewelry stores.

The results of path analyses revealed that: employee positive affective displays are positively associated with customer purchase outcomes; employee positive affective displays had positive indirect effects on customer purchase outcomes by enhancing customer positive moods and positive expectation disconfirmation; these positive indirect effects were strengthened when customers engaged in information search behaviors; and these positive indirect effects were attenuated when customers perceive store atmosphere as favorable, indicating a substitution effect of customer perceived store atmosphere.

Previous research has not thoroughly examined the role of the servicescape in moderating the effects of employees’ positive affective displays on customer purchase outcomes. This present study not only clarified the affective and cognitive mechanisms that link employees’ positive affective displays on purchase outcomes but also identified servicescape as a critical boundary condition of these effects.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on internal auditing as the pandemic forced individual internal auditors and audit teams to conduct the work remotely.

Five in-depth semi-structured interviews of internal audit experts that work in German retail and manufacturing industry were conducted between February and April 2021.

The authors find that the importance of audit technologies did not change significantly due to the pandemic, as audit technologies were already an integral part of internal audits. Interestingly, the transition to remote audits occurred with remarkable speed and efficiency. The presence of well-functioning information and communication technologies emerges as a critical facilitator for effective remote communication, collaboration and data exchange. However, audit technologies can only partially replace physical on-site examinations and human interaction. The main challenges of remote audits are related to the auditing of non-digitalized processes and the inherent limitations of auditee interviews and interactions.

The authors' interview approach does not allow to cover variations between industries and between countries. While internal audit experts provided notably consistent responses during the interviews, acknowledging that the sample size is very small is important.

The COVID-19 pandemic serves as a catalyst for increased digitalization and technology adoption within the realm of internal auditing. A hybrid approach combining the benefits of on-site and remote audits is expected to prevail in the future.

The paper is among the first to document the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the work of internal auditing using field-based research methods.

Background: This study aimed to appraise the monetary value of human life losses associated with COVID-19 in Turkey. To our knowledge, it is the first study in Turkey to value human life losses associated with COVID-19.

Methods: A human capital approach (HCA) model was applied to estimate the total monetary value of the 4,807 human lives lost in Turkey (TMVHL) from COVID-19 by 15 June 2020. The TMVHL equals the sum of monetary values of human lives lost (MVHL) across nine age groups. The MVHL accruing to each age group is the sum of the product of discount factor, years of life lost, net GDP per capita, and the number of COVID-19 deaths in an age group. The HCA model was re-calculated five times assuming discount rates of 3%, 5%, and 10% with a national life expectancy of 78.45 years; and the world highest life expectancy of 87.1 years and global life expectancy of 72 years with 3% discount rate.

Results: The 4807 human life losses from COVID-19 had a TMVHL of Int$1,098,469,122; and a mean of Int$228,514 per human life. Reanalysis with 5% and 10% discount rates, holding national life expectancy constant, reduced the TMVHL by Int$167,248,319 (15.2%) and Int$ 429,887,379 (39%), respectively. Application of the global life expectancy reduced the TMVHL by 36.4%, and use of world highest life expectancy increased TMVHL by 69%. However, the HCA captures only the economic production losses incurred as a result of years of life lost. It ignores non-market contributions to social welfare and the adverse effects of economic activities.

Conclusions: Additional investment is needed to bridge the persisting gaps in international health regulations capacities, universal health coverage, and safely managed water and sanitation services.

This paper’s objective is to provide a systematic literature review of the contextual factors affecting downward communication from supervisors to subordinates in the audit environment. In addition, this review identifies emerging research themes and directions for future research.

I accomplish this review’s objectives by leveraging communication literature to establish a framework to identify and synthesize contextual factors affecting downward communication in the audit environment. The review identifies 50 published articles in the last 20 years from leading accounting and auditing journals.

This study consolidates research findings on downward communication under two primary contextual factors: (1) message and (2) channel. Findings indicate that empirical research examining communication in audit is fragmented and limited. Studies examining the message focus heavily on its content and treatment in the areas of feedback, nonverbal cues, and fraud brainstorming, and a handful of additional studies examine the effectiveness of the channel in these areas. Additional research is needed to understand a broader set of supervisor–subordinate communication practices, including those that are computer-mediated, and their effect on subordinate auditors’ judgments and behaviors in the contemporary audit environment.

Much of the audit literature examining communication to date is topic-versus construct-based, making it difficult to see how the research findings relate to one another. This review is the first to synthesize the literature to provide academics recommendations for a way forward, and inform practitioners of communication practices whereby supervisors can be trained to improve audit quality.

The purpose of this paper is to show that forgotten classics, such as Melvin T. Copeland’s (1924) Principles of Merchandising, can still teach lessons to students of the history of marketing thought.

The method involved using various key words on several internet search engines. The extensive internet search produced more than a dozen contemporaneous reviews and commentaries. Additionally, there was an intensive search through the histories of marketing thought literature. The extensive and intensive searches allowed a meta-analysis reexamining Copeland’s principles in light of future historical developments from the mid-1920s to the 21st century.

Historically, Copeland’s principles established the commodity school of marketing thought. (One of the three traditional approaches to understanding marketing taught to generations of students from the mid-1920s until the mid-1960s.) Although the traditional approaches/schools have long gone out of favor, Copeland’s classification of consumer and industrial (business) goods (products and services) have stood the test of time and are still in use 100 years later. Long overlooked, Copeland’s (1924) Principles of Merchandising also anticipated the marketing management/strategy as well as the consumer/buyer behavior schools of marketing thought, dominant in the discipline since the 1960s, for which he has seldom – if ever – been acknowledged.

Historical research is limited because some relevant source material may no longer exist or may have been overlooked.

There have been no reviews of Copeland’s principles in almost a century, and no published meta-analysis of this forgotten classic exists. New discoveries reveal the value in studying marketing history and the history of marketing thought. For marketing as a social science to progress, it is invaluable to understand how ideas originated, were improved and integrated into larger conceptualizations, classification schema and theories over time.

The banking industry faces increasing scrutiny from stakeholders regarding its environmental and social impacts, given its crucial role in fostering economic growth. Banks have been encouraged to adopt environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices to mitigate risks and safeguard their reputation. However, the effectiveness of ESG sensitivity within the banking industry is contingent upon ownership and structural factors. The extent to which banks can integrate ESG considerations into their operations and decision-making processes may vary based on their ownership structures. Therefore, this study aims to examine if the impact of ESG on the performance of Indian banks varies between private and public sector banks.

The study employs six years of panel data from two separate samples of 12 private sector banks and 10 public sector banks in India. It utilises fixed and random effect estimation techniques with robust standard errors to derive accurate and reliable econometric results.

The main findings of this study reveal intriguing insights into the relationship between ESG factors and bank performance, considering the influence of ownership structure. For private sector banks, the ESG composite score, particularly the social dimension, negatively impacts financial performance. However, there is a contrasting positive effect on efficiency. In contrast, public sector banks demonstrate a positive and significant association between the environmental score and return on equity and non-performing assets.

The findings highlight the need for tailored strategies that align with ownership structure to achieve sustainable financial and societal outcomes in the banking industry. Furthermore, it emphasises the need for private-sector banks to streamline their ESG initiatives, especially in the social dimension, to mitigate negative impacts on their financial performance.

This study introduces a novel dimension by addressing the “one size fits all” bias in prior research that overlooked bank ownership differences when examining the impact of ESG factors on bank performance.

This study aimed to examine the similarities and differences between the ability to analyze the environment and exploit new knowledge (absorptive capacity) and the skills to generate value from innovation (appropriation). These fields have similar origins and are sometimes confused by practitioners and academics.

A review was conducted based on a full-text analysis of 681 and 431 papers on appropriation and absorptive capacity, respectively, from Scopus, Science Direct and Lens, using methodologies such as text mining, backward citation analysis, modularity clustering and latent Dirichlet allocation analysis.

In business disciplines, the fields are considered different; however, in other disciplines, it was found that some authors defined them quite similarly. The citation analysis results showed that appropriation was more relevant to absorptive capacity, or vice versa. From the dimension perspective, it was found that although appropriation was considered a relevant element for absorptive capacity, the last models did not include it. Finally, it was found that studies on both topics identified the importance of appropriation and absorptive capacity for innovation performance, knowledge management and technology transfer.

This is one of the first studies to examine in-depth the relationship between appropriation and absorptive capacity, bridging a gap in both fields.