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Universities globally have faced the introduction of research performance assessment systems that provide monetary and ranking rewards based on publication outputs. This study aims to seek an understanding of the implementation of performance-based research funding (PBRF) and its impact on the heads of departments (HoDs) and accounting academics in New Zealand (NZ) tertiary institutions. The study explores NZ accounting academics’ experiences and their workload; the relationship between teaching and research in the accounting discipline and any issues and concerns affecting new and emerging accounting researchers because of PBRF.

Applying an institutional theoretical lens, this paper explores accounting HoDs’ perceptions concerning the PBRF system’s impact on their academic staff. The research used semi-structured interviews to collect data from NZ’s eight universities.

The key findings posit that many institutional processes, some more coercive in nature, whereas others were normative and mimetic, have been put in place to ensure that academics are able to meet the PBRF requirements. HoDs suggest that their staff understand the importance of research, but that PBRF is a challenge to new and emerging researchers and pose threats to their recruitment. New academics must “hit the ground running” as they must demonstrate not only teaching abilities but also already have a track record of research publications; all in all, a daunting experience for new academics to overcome. There is also a teaching and research disconnect. Furthermore, many areas where improvements can be made in the design of this measurement tool remain.

The PBRF system has significantly impacted on accounting academics. Central university research systems were established that subsequently applied coercive institutional pressures onto line managers to ensure that their staff performed. This finding offers scope for future research to explore a better PBRF that measures and rewards research productivity but without the current system’s unintended negative consequences.

The main aim of the study is to find out the level and trend of CSR disclosure pattern of industrial companies in Malaysia and its relationship with companies' characteristics.

Content analysis is used to analyse the data from the corporate annual reports of the companies from 1998 to 2003. Samples are selected using simple random sampling technique.

Research findings, inter alia, indicate that there is positive relationship between CSR and companies' turnover but no apparent relationship is noticed with companies' capital. Relationship between CSR and companies' profitability is also found to be positive but weak. More disclosure by local companies as compared to their foreign counterparts is another noteworthy finding. Overall, CSR level of industrial companies in Malaysia is increasing both in terms of amount of the disclosure and the number of participating companies.

The use of annual reports may not give a complete picture of the disclosure practices as the company may use other medium to disseminate the information. In addition, his study focuses on industrial companies in Malaysia. Thus all conclusions derived cannot be generalized to other industries.

The current research is the only study in Malaysia thus far that covers a disclosure pattern of six years thereby widens the horizon of CSR research. Besides that it extends the previous research to cover new variables such as individual and corporate ownership, influence of the chairman's race on the disclosure and exploring the disclosure pattern by paid‐up capital.