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This paper aims to offer insight into how strategies within the accounting profession, which has been becoming more global, might be changed by the recent outbreak of the Second Cold War between the West and the Rest of the World.

We explore the strategies of those who called themselves “Confucian accountants” in China, a country which has recently discouraged its state-owned enterprises from using the services of the Big 4. We do this by employing qualitative research methods, including reflexive photo interviews, in which Big-4 accountants, recognised as the most Westernised accounting actors in China, and Confucian accountants are asked to take and explain photographs representing their professional lives. Bourdieu’s notions of “economy of practices” and “vision-of-division strategy” are drawn upon to understand who the Confucian accountants are and what they do strategically in their pursuit of a higher revenue stream and improved social standing in the Chinese social space.

The homegrown Confucian accountants share cultural-cognitive characteristics with neighbouring social actors, such as their clients and government officials, who have been inculcated with Confucianism and the state’s cultural confidence policy in pursuit of a “socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics”. Those accountants try to enhance their social standing and revenue stream by strategically demonstrating their difference from Big-4 accountants. For this purpose, they wear Confucian clothes, have Confucian props in their office, employ Confucian phrases in their everyday conversations, use Confucian business cards and construct and maintain guanxi with government officials and clients.

This paper is the first attempt to explore Confucian accountants’ strategies for increasing their revenue and social standing at the start of the Second Cold War.

This paper examines firm-level accountability and performance implications under a state-dominated institutional environment, China, for firms engaged in the space economy. Extant studies on the rapidly evolving civil space economy predominantly focus on developed Western economies at national or sector levels, frequently ignoring alternative institutional contexts. Additionally, limited attention has been given to firm-level empirical evidence and analysis, including corporate social responsibility (CSR) practice-R&D quality relationships in the space economy. The paper addresses each of these areas.

This paper utilises multiple regression, propensity score matching and split sampling methods applied to a proprietary dataset of Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchange-listed A-share firms. Results are robust to endogeneity issues, alternative measurement of dependent variables and sampling.

China’s space firms demonstrate superior CSR performance to their counterparts in other sectors, supporting CSR‘s role in maintaining legitimacy. Their CSR practices also positively contribute to firm patent quality. The link is more pronounced among firms facing higher economic policy uncertainty and for state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The latter is due to SOEs’ government support, advantages in financing and attracting and retaining a high-quality workforce.

This paper adds to discussion on major space power’s, by examining China’s state-dominated civil space sector. It also addresses a lack of empirical firm-level evidence on space firm behaviour by examining the impact of firm-level CSR practices on R&D quality outcomes, areas in which there is a limited literature.

This study investigates the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on corporate innovation. We selected the listed nonfinancial firms of South Asian Economies. The sample of the study comprised a total of 426 listed manufacturing firms of South Asian Countries for period spans 10 years from 2012 to 2021. In this study, descriptive statistics, multicollinearity diagnostic tests, correlation analysis and two-step dynamic panel system generalized method of moments (GMM) were applied to analyze the data. CSR measured with three proxies' social indicators, environmental indicators, and CSR composite index of social and environmental indicators. However, corporate innovation is captured with number of citations received in a year and number of patents filed in the year. Overall, findings of the study using all measures of CSR shows that CSR significantly and positively related with corporate innovation. Our results find support for CSR-innovation view with all measures of CSR. The findings suggest that the current study is helpful for managers, regulators, policymakers, and researchers. For managers, the study helps them to make the CSR and innovation decision. The policymakers should take appropriate innovative decision while considering factors such as CSR. This study can also be extended by considering this study for developed and emerging economies sample.

Social entrepreneurship (SE) is a complex phenomenon designed to resolve numerous societal challenges while remaining economically viable. However, how social entrepreneurs in developing countries have deployed digital technologies to address communal challenges during the Covid-19 crisis is largely undocumented. This research examines social entrepreneurs' adoption of digital technologies, the multi-level organisational conditions, and associated innovative outcomes of engaging digital technologies.

Based on the organisational resilience theoretical framework, this research employs a qualitative methodology, comprising 38 semi-structured interviews with Nigerian SE firms, to investigate social entrepreneurs' engagement with digital technologies.

The study’s findings reveal 19 pathways through which digital technologies enabled organisational resilience outcomes by Nigerian SE firms during the Covid-19 pandemic. This allows the authors to show, via a 3 × 3 matrix, how social entrepreneurs deploy digital technologies to build proximate, dynamic, and continuous resilience in a weak institutional context.

The study’s findings enables the authors to advance the SE – digital technologies – resilience scholarship in a developing economy.

This study aims to investigate the relationships between managers’ cognitive styles, dynamic managerial capabilities and firms’ perceived international performance. The study is based on cognitive-experiential self-theory, dynamic managerial capabilities and international entrepreneurship.

Data were collected from 283 managers of small medium enterprises (SMEs) in Türkiye, an emerging economy. The research was conducted using quantitative methods, and Smart partial least squares (PLS) 4 software was used for data analysis. The data were examined through structural equation modelling and mediation analyses.

Findings indicate that rational cognitive styles positively influence managerial human capital, managerial social capital, managerial cognition and perceived international performance. However, the effect of intuitive cognitive styles was confirmed only on managerial cognition. Additionally, it was found that managerial cognition positively affects perceived international performance, whereas managerial social capital has a negative impact. However, the effects of managerial human capital could not be confirmed. Moreover, a full mediation relationship of managerial cognition between intuitive cognitive styles and perceived international performance was identified.

This research carves out a unique niche by synergizing cognitive-experiential self-theory with dynamic managerial capabilities to investigate their conjoined effect on firms’ international performance, an area previously underexplored. Unveiling insights from burgeoning economies like Türkiye enriches the existing body of knowledge, offering substantial contributions to the field of international business.

This study aims at investigating the effect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) on corporate financial performance (CFP) in firms headquartered in developed versus emerging countries. Drawing upon stakeholder and legitimacy perspectives, the authors argue that the CSR/CSI–CFP relationship differs depending on the home-countries’ level of economic development as this reflects their different sensitivity to sustainability. Indeed, as emerging economies are normally characterized by weaker regulations, they are likely to place lower pressures on companies for superior CSR practices. Therefore, the authors expect the effect of CSR on CFP to be more positive for firms headquartered in advanced than in emerging countries. At the same time, the authors propose a more negative relationship between CSI and CFP for firms headquartered in developed countries due to the higher overall sustainability expectations required to gain legitimacy. The empirical analyses, run on a sample of 1,971 publicly listed firms between 2010 and 2020 from developed and emerging economies, support the expectations, thus confirming that country-specific contextual factors do play a role in shaping both the positive and the negative impact of CSR and CSI on CFP, and that the reactions of stakeholders to responsible and irresponsible behavior are stronger when their sensitivity to sustainability is higher.

This study aims to empirically examine environment, social, and governance (ESG) as an effective strategy to reduce major impediments for a corporation in the form of costs of capital (COC) and systematic risk, especially for emerging markets such as India.

A sample of 114 Indian firms from eight prominent industries based on Thomson Reuters classification (TRBC) are used in the study. A panel regression with industry-fixed effects is carried out to account for industry heterogeneity. For robustness, the authors also carry out a matched sample analysis.

The authors observe a negative and significant relationship between ESG performance with COC and systematic risk, respectively. For the pillar-wise analysis, the authors observe that only governance performance is negatively and significantly related to COC whereas the environmental and social performances are negative and insignificant. For ESG pillar level analysis for beta, the authors observe that all pillars are negative and significant, thus making a case for how firms can fine-tune their ESG strategies according to each pillar.

As the ESG concept is still in a very nascent stage, data availability is a definite challenge in India.

As ESG is increasingly becoming relevant for multiple stakeholders, this study aims to provide evidence that can potentially guide the regulators, practitioners, and academicians to address the contemporary needs of these stakeholders, while also doing good for the firm in the traditional sense.

The transition to a sustainable economy is a challenge for emerging economies, especially for a country like India where stakeholders are not only varied but also huge in number. With this study's contribution towards an incremental understanding of ESG, Indian regulators and policymakers can bring forward mandates as to ESG compliances that are rewarding for the firms and give them enough impetus towards complying with ESG norms.

The extant literature on ESG majorly discusses the relationship between ESG performance and financial performance. This study addresses the lacuna of the relationship of ESG with COC and beta in the Indian context.

A major obstacle regarding the measurement of an organization's sustainability and accountability in the space economy is defining the context and boundaries of commercial activity in outer space. Here, we introduce an ecosystem framework to address this obstacle. We utilize this framework to analyze the space mining sector. Our ecosystem framework sets the space mining sector's boundaries and helps a firm identify key stakeholders, activities, policies, norms and common pool resources in that sector and the interactions between them; a significant step in structuring how to measure space sustainability and accountability.

Borrowing theories and perspectives from a wide range of academic fields, this paper conducts a comprehensive context analysis of the space mining ecosystem.

Using our ecosystem framework to define the context and set boundaries for the space mining sector allowed us to identify sustainability-related issues in the sector and offer roadmaps to develop sustainability measures and standards.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first papers to introduce a framework to define boundaries in the global space economy and provides a tool to understand, measure and evaluate the space mining sector's environmental, social and economic issues.

This study employs firm-level data to evaluate how the knowledge economy impacts the financing constraints of businesses across 106 low- and middle-income nations, focusing on the influence of technological transformation on corporate financing choices.

The research centers on privately held, unlisted firms and examines the distinct effects of knowledge at both the within-country and between-country levels using a panel dataset. Rigorous sensitivity and endogeneity analyses are conducted to ensure the reliability of the findings.

The findings indicate that greater levels of the knowledge economy correlate with reduced financing constraints for firms. However, this effect varies depending on the location within a country and across different geographical regions. Firms situated in larger urban centers and more innovative regions reap the most significant benefits from the knowledge economy when seeking external funding. Conversely, firms in smaller cities, rural areas and regions characterized by structural and institutional inefficiencies in knowledge generation experience fewer advantages.

The impact of knowledge exhibits variability not only within and among countries but also between poor and affluent developing nations, as well as between larger and smaller countries. The knowledge effect on firms' access to external finance is influenced by factors such as financial openness and development, educational quality, technological absorption capabilities and agglomeration conditions within each country.

The shift toward a circular economy (CE) represents a collaborative endeavor necessitating the presence of efficient frameworks, conducive contexts and a common comprehension. This research serves as a pivotal stride towards this goal, presenting an exclusive prospect for the investigation and fusion of these frameworks, with particular emphasis on the Quintuple Helix Model (5HM), into a unified theoretical framework that underscores the core principles of the CE. This study is centered on three pivotal questions aimed at decoding the CE transition in specific regional settings.

Adopting an abductive approach firmly anchored in a two-stage qualitative process, this study specifically merges the foundational principles from institutional theory, entrepreneurship literature and CE frameworks to provide insights into the dynamics of circular ecosystems, with a specific focus on the Huelva region in Spain.

The findings demonstrate significant potential in the CE, ranging from the integration of product and service systems to innovations in eco-industrial practices. Yet, a notable deficiency exists: the absence of institutional entrepreneurs, highlighting the essential role that universities can play. As recognized centers of innovation, universities are suggested to be key contributors to the transformation toward a CE, aligning with their societal and economic responsibilities.

This study highlights the importance of managing relationships with entities like SMEs and policymakers or academia for effective CE adoption. Policymakers can refine strategies based on the research’s insights, while the impact of university-driven circular ecosystems on sustainable societies is another crucial area for research.

The sustainability models cited in CE literature may not be comprehensive enough to prevent problem shifting, and it can be argued that they lack a sound theoretical and conceptual basis. Furthermore, the connections between sustainability objectives and the three levels of the CE operating system remain vague. Additionally, there is insufficient information on how regions foster the involvement of the environment in fivefold helix cooperation and how this impacts the CE.