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The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors explaining voluntary occupational health and safety disclosures (OHSDs).

Annual report disclosures of 223 Indonesia Stock Exchange listed companies for the year ending 2007 are analyzed. The OHSD components of the 2006 Global Reporting Initiative guidelines are used as the disclosure index checklist.

The results show that approximately 30 percent of Indonesian listed companies provide OHSD. The most disclosed item is health and safety programs. Logistical regression analysis reveals that industry type and international operations significantly influence the propensity to provide OHSD. These findings suggest that coercive isomorphism partially explains OHSD practices in Indonesia.

The main implications of the findings are that Indonesian listed companies generally have poor health and safety information disclosure sets and largely ignore the potential roles of their workers in any health and safety committees.

This paper provides insights into the disclosure practices of occupational health and safety issues, a vital subset of corporate social responsibility disclosure which is still under-researched. The paper also empirically investigates the key determinants of OHSD, an empirical test which is largely ignored in past OHSD-related studies.

As the business environment increases in its scope, dynamics and complexity, the task of grasping its changes becomes increasingly demanding. The increased availability of electronic data threatens to exceed the human capacity to cope with and assimilate them. This research aims to provide a support tool that would be able to contribute to a more systematic, intensive, extensive and faster scanning process than the human process alone. This paper serves to build the foundations of such a support system by giving a detailed examination of both the domain and the technology. It is presented in two parts. The first part analyzes the concept of strategic scanning and presents a comprehensive review of its context. It helps us to understand the complicated, interrelated phenomena and reveals useful observations that are relevant to the construction of the system. A scanning‐based strategic management framework is formulated, which guides the system design. The second part will introduce the fundamentals of software agent approach, examine its relevance in offering the needed support, and describe an agent system that is currently under development.

This study aims to advance explanations of the communication level of labor disclosures of Indonesian listed companies.

Year‐ending 2007 Annual report disclosures of 223 Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) listed companies are analyzed. The labor practices and decent work disclosure component of the 2006 Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines are used as the benchmark disclosure index checklist.

The results show a low level of voluntary disclosure (17.7 per cent). The highest level of communication is for issues related to skills management and lifelong learning programs for employees. Very few companies disclosed information about health and safety committee and agreements, and salary of men to women. Statistical analysis reveals that government ownership and international operations are positively significant predictors of “labour” communication. Isomorphic institutional theory partially explains the variability of these disclosures. Bigger companies also provide more labor practices and decent work disclosures.

The main implications of the findings are that Indonesian companies are not clearly communicating labor responsibility issues as a key precondition of corporate social responsibility (CSR). They may be obfuscating some information to protect their image and reputation.

This paper provides insights into the disclosure practices of labor issues, a specific social disclosure theme which is rarely examined in prior literature, under the umbrella of institutional theory. The research also includes “goal factor” to be tested as one of the independent variables.

This paper aims to focus on corporate social responsibility and workplace well-being by examining Indonesian Stock Exchange (IDX)-listed companies’ labour disclosures.

Year-ending 2007 and 2010 annual report disclosures of 31 IDX-listed companies are analysed. The widely acknowledged Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines are used as the disclosure index checklist.

The results reveal that the overall labour disclosure level increases from 21.84 per cent in 2007 to 30.52 per cent in 2010. The levels of four of the five specific labour disclosures also increase with employment being the exception. The results further show that the Indonesian Government does not influence the increase in the levels of the overall labour disclosure or the four categories showing increased disclosure but, surprisingly, does significantly affect the decrease in the level of the employment category.

It is implied that the government is at best ambiguous given that, on one side, the government regulates all corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities and reporting but appears to coercively pressure companies to hide employment-specific issues.

It is implied that Indonesian companies need to have “strong and influential” independent commissioners on the boards to counter any possible pressures from the government resulting in lower disclosure levels.

This paper provides insights into the “journey” of labour-related CSR disclosure practices in Indonesia and contributes to the literature by testing one specific variant of isomorphic institutional theory, namely, coercive isomorphism.

The paper aims to evaluate the effectiveness of ethics courses provided to Malaysian accounting students and their impact on ethical judgement‐making ability.

Third‐year accounting students from six Malaysian universities participated in a pre‐ and post‐ethics course study. The sample consisted of four universities which provide an ethics course (experiment group) and two universities which do not provide an ethics course (control group). Rest's Defining Issues Test instrument was employed and the p‐score was calculated. Univariate tests were used to compare levels of ethical judgement‐making ability.

Students who attended an ethics course improved significantly in their ethical judgement‐making ability compared to students who did not attend the course. Male students, non‐Muslim students and students in private universities benefit more from attending an ethics course compared to their female and Muslim students and those students in public universities.

The findings indicate that providing ethics courses reshapes the ethical thinking of future accountants and thus are likely to improve the local ethical climate amongst professionals in the field. Results indicate significant improvements in cognitive moral development, although many students continue to apply conventional (Stage 4) reasoning skills when dealing with issues. The research provides a positive signal to the accounting faculties indicating that their effort in inculcating ethical values is worthwhile and this endeavour has to continue.

This study involves a controlled field study of a unique group of Malaysian accounting students and applies Kohlberg's theory of moral development to demonstrate the effect of an ethics intervention. Particular attention was given to examining conventional (Stage 4) judgment‐making processes and how this appears to be influenced by religious affiliation and university type. This adds value to the ethics literature as there are only a few studies examining the merits of Stage 4 reasoning. Most importantly, it helps to fill a gap in the literature by providing both cross‐sectional and longitudinal data from multiple samples of ethics classes, using both experiment and control groups.

Can leadership be taught? Those of us who offer courses on leadership, as part of an academic program, face this question quite often. It is my belief that acquiring more knowledge on leadership does not readily translate into becoming a better leader – especially so at a time in history where leaders have to deal with more complexity and change than ever before (Snowden & Boone, 2007; Malloch & Porter-O’Grady, 2009). Leadership is a process of becoming rather than a process of acquiring. In this paper, I argue the need to ground our teaching practices in complex responsive processes (Stacey, 2003), share one such practice we employ in a graduate program for health care professionals, and discuss the implications.

Porter's activity‐based view of the firm is a comprehensive strategic framework which analyzes firm‐level competitive advantage. Although Porter's activity‐based view is widely cited by academics, taught to students, and applied by practitioners, little is known about its intellectual roots. Given that a framework's intellectual antecedents not only determine its current content, but also its future development, this paper aims to examine the intellectual roots of Porter's activity‐based view and the value chain.

The paper examines Porter's writings in an effort to document his influences while developing the activity‐based view and value chain. Porter's and other scholars' explanations are found to be lacking, so the paper ventures further down paths first suggested by Porter and others.

Whereas Porter's five forces framework built on the existing industrial organization paradigm, the activity‐based view is not derived from any existing paradigms. While consultants of the 1970s impacted Porter's development of the value chain and the activity‐based view, its deeper roots lay in operations research, particularly activity analysis; and the work of Arch Shaw, who was the first to teach a business policy course at Harvard Business School. Porter's contribution is to bring the diverse threads together into a coherent whole which managers can apply to analyze and improve their competitive positions.

Following Porter, the authors argue that activities are a key link between resource holdings and strategic positions. Therefore, it is only when the activity‐based and resource‐based views are integrated that they provide a comprehensive explanation of firm value creation.

The paper is the first to critically examine the intellectual antecedents of the activity‐based view.

Co‐operation and competition characterise the inter‐firm relationships in strategic alliances. This article proposes a paradox approach to studying co‐operation and competition. It explains the paradox perspective and provides an analytic framework for the paradox of co‐operation and competition. In the light of the paradoxical nature, it advocates a multi‐paradigm approach to co‐operative and competitive strategies, which combines strategic positioning, the resource‐based view and game theory. The article suggests that the multi‐paradigms can not only encompass the contradictions of the paradox from the different perspectives, but also emulate the individual ones and provide a holistic picture. The multi‐paradigm approach therefore establishes a better methodology basis than fragmented orthodox theories in exploring the contradictory, interactive and dynamic nature.

The dominant strategy discourse projects strategy as rational and calculable. However, leading academics conclude that strategy is “elusive” and “complex”. The purpose of this paper is to unravel strategy's elusiveness and unpack its complexity through empirical hermeneutic investigation.

Strauss' grounded theory is used to investigate leisure and cultural managers' understanding of strategy‐making. Data were collected through multiple interviews with senior managers of a local authority, and the organisation's strategy documents were examined. The grounded theory's transferability to organisations in, and outside, public leisure and culture was provisionally tested.

It was found that in making strategy, managers engage in purposeful, complex processes, here termed “navigational translation” which have mutually impacting relationships with organisational resources, the environment and managers' character, explaining its complexity and elusiveness. The provisional testing of navigational translation's transferability suggests that it has scope beyond public sector leisure and cultural strategy.

As this research focused on theory generation, a main limitation is its small‐scale testing of navigational translation's transferability. Future research could test transferability with more organisations in leisure, culture and other fields.

This explanation provides a robust understanding of strategy that could improve practice. It empowers managers so that they are no longer subjugated to unrealisable expectations that rationalistic strategy tools will work in a complex world.

Navigational translation offers a richer, practitioner‐oriented understanding of strategy, which utilises leading academic explanations from the various, competing and divergent strategy schools into a pragmatic, multiparadigmatic framework.

The paper aims to explore the social origins of Scottish chartered accountants and the accounting stereotype as portrayed in popular fiction.

The detective novels of the Scottish chartered accountant Alexander Clark Smith are used as a lens through which to explore the social origins of accountants and the changing popular representations of the accountant.

The novels contribute to our understanding of the construction of accounting stereotypes and of the social origins of Scottish accountants. They suggest that, while working class access to the profession was a reality, so was class division within it. In addition, Smith was ahead of contemporary professional discourse in creating a protagonist who combines the positive aspects of the traditional stereotype with qualities of a private‐eye action‐hero, and who uses accounting skills to uncover corruption and address (social) wrongs. However, this unconventional portrayal may have been incongruent with the image the profession wished to portray. The public image (or stereotype) portrayed by its members would have been as important in signalling and maintaining the profession's collective status as the recruitment of its leadership from social elites.

Smith's portrayal of accountants in personal and societal settings at a time of profound social change, as well as his background in the Scottish profession, provide a rich source for the study of social origins of Scottish chartered accountancy during the first half of the twentieth century. Further, Smith's novels are of a popular genre, and innovative in the construction of their hero and of accounting itself; as such they merit attention because of their potential to influence the construction of the accounting stereotype(s) within the popular imagination.