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The purpose of this paper is to reflect on how mandatory sustainability accounts can be designed to maximise the likelihood of moving society towards sustainability.

The authors use institutional theory to show that organisations are constrained by institutions. Sustainability accounts can drive change by providing information that changes the institutional mix of pressures on organisations.

Mandatory disclosure is most likely to drive change when: indicators are appropriate for information intermediaries or other intended users; information is provided at the appropriate level of aggregation; data are comparable to external benchmarks and/or other corporations; there exists a linkage to network of other relevant information; and sufficient popular and political support exists.

Social changes will only come about if users receive information relevant to their goals and are able to translate it into political action. Corporate-level reporting may not be the best mechanism for this, because many users are interested in issues-based information. In many instances, due to the ability to facilitate greater comparability, a database mechanism is likely to be more helpful. Social and environmental accounting research should consider adopting more site-based reporting, ascertain what sustainability information governments already collect, determine what information NGOs need for campaigning purposes, and theorise how to create and link a nexus of accounts.

While many studies have called for improved practice and lamented the impotence of reporting, few studies have explored this link from a theoretical perspective.

This paper aims to explore the extent to which global reporting initiative (GRI) standards reflect the material concerns of stakeholders in developing countries, with particular reference to Latin America.

The main dataset was a sample of 120 media articles that discussed corporate conduct related to COVID-19 from both developing (Chile, Mexico and Peru) and developed (Australia, UK and the USA) countries. Concerns evident from those articles were compared and then mapped to applicable GRI standards to identify relevant disclosures and gaps. Findings were triangulated by drawing on two additional datasets: Latin American GRI-related academic literature (in Spanish) and submissions to GRI standards.

Media analysis reveals significant differences between developing and developed country concerns, as well as gaps in GRI disclosure requirements in relation to customers, labour standards and corporate interactions with non-government organisations and governments. Analysis of Latin American literature corroborates the concerns raised in media articles regarding employment. Additionally, it points out country-specific issues and calls for increased reporting of corruption. Analysis of the GRI standards development process reveals marked underrepresentation of developing countries, which may contribute to the observed deficiencies in the GRI standards.

This paper contributes to the (surprisingly rare) research concerning the quality of GRI standards and responds to calls for greater attention to developing countries in the SEA literature by showing that GRI standards may not fully meet the needs of users in the developing country context of Latin America. The paper also contributes to practice via specific recommendations for improvement to GRI standards and the standard-setting process and provides a summary of the key findings from Spanish-language Latin American literature.

This study aims to examine whether accountability and culture have an impact on auditors’ professional scepticism. It also examines whether culture moderates the effect of accountability on auditors’ professional scepticism.

Three of the Big 4 firms in Australia and Egypt participated in an audit judgement experiment, which required them to indicate their beliefs about the risk of fraud and error at the planning stage of a hypothetical audit and evaluate the truthfulness of explanations provided by the client management. The authors examined whether their professional scepticism was influenced by accountability.

The results indicate professional scepticism differs significantly between cultures in some situations. The fact that culture influences scepticism suggests that even when auditors use the same standards (such as ISA 240 and ISA 600), they are likely to be applied inconsistently, even within the same firm. The authors, therefore, recommend that international bodies issue additional guidance on cultural values and consider these cultural differences when designing or adopting auditing standards.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that examines whether culture moderates the impact of accountability on auditors’ professional scepticism using Egyptian and Australian (Middle Eastern and Western) auditors. Prior literature suggests that individuals subject to accountability pressure increase their cognitive effort and vigilance to detect fraud and error. As the authors find evidence that culture moderates accountability pressure and as accountability affects scepticism, they add to the literature suggesting that culture can influence professional scepticism.

A primary tool for managing the democratic risks posed by political donations is disclosure. In Australia, corporate donations are disclosed in government databases. Despite the potential accountability benefits, corporations are not, however, required to report this information in their annual or stand-alone reports. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the quantity and quality of voluntary reporting and seek to add to the nascent theoretical understanding of voluntary corporate political donations.

Corporate donors were obtained from the Australian Electoral Commission database. Annual and stand-alone reports were analysed to determine the quantity and quality of voluntary disclosures and compared to O’Donovan’s (2002) legitimation disclosure response matrix.

Of those companies with available reports, only 25 per cent reported any donation information. Longitudinal results show neither a robust increase in disclosure levels over time, nor a clear relationship between donation activity and disclosure. The findings support a legitimation tactic being applied to political donation disclosures.

The findings suggest that disclosure of political donations in corporate reports should be mandatory. Such reporting could facilitate aligning shareholder and citizen interests; aligning managerial and firm interests and closing disclosure loopholes.

The study extends the literature by evaluating donation disclosures by companies known to have made donations, considering time-series data and theorising the findings.

Entrepreneurs prioritise and act on purposeful endeavours instigated to actions by the visions of profits and benefits in the perceived opportunities. In the state of maximum entropy, with disorderliness and disequilibrium, entrepreneurs select the preferred pathway, through the profit-sensing mechanism, with the best probability of success to bet on. Therefore, this paper unpacks the forces at work in the mechanism to explain how entrepreneurs respond to opportunity and interpret the signals to coalesce into organised actions.

This research is primarily a conceptual paper on entrepreneurial action and the mechanism leading to that action. It refers to thermodynamic principles and biological cases to explain the forces at work using mostly analogical comparisons and similarities.

This paper aims to present an alternative theoretical scaffolding for entrepreneurship researchers to explore non-rational entrepreneurial behaviours and actions in uncertain, unstable and non-equilibrium environments, thereby creating new and competing hypotheses under the backdrop of adaptive evolution and thermodynamics phenomena.

The discussion featuring instinctively and naturally forming responses cannot fully explain the real entrepreneurial action as there is an element of free will and choices that are not discussed. While strategic choice and free-will shape decisions, they are preceded first by the attraction of the gradients and the biased motion in the direction of profit-attractant.

There remain essential links and issues not addressed in this “natural science”, constituting life science and physical science, oriented entrepreneurship research and exploration. Conceptualising opportunity-as-artefact and entrepreneurship as design, significant incidences of entrepreneurial actions can be explained by the presence of gradients stimulating entrepreneurial actions.

This viewpoint of information causality in opportunity-as-artefact casts a new look at the venerable question of what causes entrepreneurial actions. Shane and Venkataraman brought into focus this conversation, initiating the conceptual definition of opportunity. To have entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial opportunities must come first. Figuring the signals arising from these opportunities and cueing entrepreneurs to action is the main focus of this study.

Considering the “mechanism” at work and the thermodynamical forces at play, the entrepreneurial design process appears to hold considerable promise for future research development.

Entrepreneurship has been one of the major pillars in our economy around the world. Aside from the aspiring and innovative entrepreneurs looking for like-minded collaborators to start new ventures that disrupt the business world, managers are increasingly looking for entrepreneurial graduates to tackle the ever-changing business landscape. There has been increasing consensus that entrepreneurship is not limited to being an attitude or a certain characteristic that one is born with, but a skill that can be developed through education. This can be seen in the sprung of entrepreneurship programs in various educational institutions, as well as dedicated entrepreneurship degrees in higher education. However, the information that each person is receiving can vary depending on their environment, and how they perceive and process the information can also be different. In addition, propensity to take actions to pursue the identified opportunities can also vary. Thus, how can the governments and universities work together in breeding the next generation of entrepreneurs? To answer our research question, we sampled 191 undergraduate students in a private university in Malaysia. We examined the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation, entrepreneurial self-efficacy, emotional intelligence, and entrepreneurial intention. Our findings contribute to future research with a more refined understanding of the factors affecting entrepreneurial intention, as well as practical implications for governments and higher education institutions on how they form an ecosystem in equipping future generations with entrepreneurialism.

The purpose of this paper is to examine franchisees’ business start-ups from an entrepreneurial perspective, adopting a process representative of entrepreneurship to examine opportunity identification and evaluation by franchisees and to analyse factors that influence this process.

A qualitative study was employed and data collected using semi-structured interviews with a sample of service industry franchisees in Macau.

The study identifies that social networks play a key role in opportunity identification and that franchisees’ goals influence the criteria used and information search activities undertaken while evaluating franchise opportunities.

The study makes two contributions to franchise literature. It identifies that social networks can serve as substitutes for lack of prior knowledge in franchise opportunity identification. It also identifies the interrelated nature of franchisees’ goals based on the activities and criteria used to evaluate franchise opportunities, and the importance of relational criteria when franchisees lack prior industry knowledge. It therefore also contributes to franchise/entrepreneurship literature by identifying the interrelated nature of the factors contributing to the dynamics of franchise chain growth.

Franchisors should explore how to better use franchisees’ social networks and identify the longer term goals of prospective franchisees to support market penetration and franchise chain growth. Franchisees are advised to use independent information sources to evaluate franchise opportunities using goal-informed objectives and demand and relational criteria.

The study presents a more comprehensive understanding of franchisees’ decision-making process when joining franchise chains by identifying the activities undertaken and criteria used to identify and evaluate franchise opportunities.

This paper aims to introduce the concept of Entrepreneurial Collective Intelligence (ECI) as a means of understanding how communities of entrepreneurial actors learn to act both collectively and knowingly. It explores how connections between processes of CI, agency and action can explain and enable the development entrepreneurial community organisations.

There is a selective literature review of prior works on the related fields of community and collective entrepreneurship; collectives and intelligence; agency and action. The review is used to propose a framework of collective entrepreneurial intelligence, agency and action. An interpretive approach is used to research four case studies of community organisations which use CI to generate entrepreneurial outcomes.

The cases are compared with themes from prior literature to develop a conceptual model of four ECI processes which enable intelligence, agency and action: collaborative processes; distributed working; intelligence representations and organisation of infrastructures. These are theorised to discuss ideas, challenges, methods and questions to enhance entrepreneurial actions, based on sharing knowledge and learning, in the context of collective agency, action and intelligence.

The four processes, both together and separately, represent a coherent framework useful for further studies on the role of collectives in enterprising communities.

The four processes each represent a central area of attention, not only for development, learning, decision-making and leadership within enterprising communities but also for entrepreneurship education in terms of alternative didactics, pedagogies and learning forms.

The improved knowledge on the role of collective agency and CI within entrepreneurial processes is useful for strengthening civil activism and other fruitful forms of entrepreneurial collective processes. This may help solve complicated societal problems where traditional conceptions of entrepreneurship fail.

The conceptual contribution is to explain the dynamic relationships between ECI and action, mediated by collective agency. The role of CI in informing entrepreneurial communities is explored and four enabling processes are proposed. This coherent framework is useful for further studies on the role of collectives in enterprising communities, whilst informing their learning, decision-making and leadership.

After decades of focus on disaster, crisis, and trauma itself, in recent years more attention has been devoted to the study of human strengths and resilience, as reflected in the rise of positive psychology and strengths-based social work. In particular, psychological growth after trauma has been increasingly studied, and one of the official terms referring to the phenomenon is posttraumatic growth (PTG). The PTG literature reflects work on positive psychology, trauma recovery, and resilience. The main components associated with PTG are new possibilities, interpersonal growth, personal growth, appreciation for life, and spiritual change (Calhoun & Tedeschi, 2014). These domains have been tested and measured with a scale, the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory. While PTG and related concepts such as resilience have been studied in various populations, they have not yet been investigated extensively in Southeast Asia (SEA) populations. This chapter explores the psychological examination of resilience and PTG in the SEA context, with some discussion of the background of both positive psychological concepts and PTG research cross-culturally, and their application to the SEA region specifically. Brief relevant trauma history of the region, such as human-made and natural hazards impacting the region’s individuals and communities, and similarities and differences in the results of these traumas will be described. Implications for broader international work as well as cultural and clinical implications also will be discussed in this chapter.