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In recent times, stakeholders have called on corporate organizations especially those charged with governance to embrace full disclosure on non-financial issues, especially sustainability reporting. Based on this premise, this study aims to examine the influence of corporate board and assurance on sustainability reporting practices (SRP) of selected 80 firms from 8 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

To measure the corporate board, the authors use both board variables and audit committee variables. Also, the authors adapted the sustainability score model as used by previous authors in the field of sustainability disclosure to measure SRPs. The analysis was done using both ordered logistic regression and probit regression models.

The results show that the combination of board corporate and assurance has a positive and significant impact on the sustainability reporting practice of selected firms in sub-Saharan Africa.

The study places emphasis on the need for strong collaboration between the corporate board and external assurance in evaluating and enhancing the quality of sustainability disclosure.

The study bridged the gap in the literature in the area of corporate board, assurance and SRP of corporate firms which has received little attention within sub-Saharan Africa.

The purpose of this paper is to seek to shed light on the influence of stakeholder pressure on carbon disclosure in an emerging economy.

The present study is based on Bombay Stock Exchange 100 Indian firms for the period of 5 years from 2016–17 to 2020–21. The association between stakeholder pressure and carbon disclosure, along with certain control variables, has been explored through a regression model.

The results of the study suggest that stakeholders exert a significant influence on corporate carbon disclosure. Further results confirm that regulatory and customer pressure have the most significant and positive influence, while shareholders and creditors exert a significant and negative influence on carbon disclosure. The study also finds that employee pressure does not have any association with carbon disclosure.

This study adds to the existing literature on climate change, carbon disclosure and stakeholder pressure.

The present study provides useful insights to corporate managers and policymakers as the study concludes that stakeholders exert a significant influence on carbon disclosure.

Previous studies examining the stakeholder pressure on carbon disclosure ignored emerging economies, while the present study has considered India, which is a developing as well as an emerging economy. Further, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the current study is the first of its kind to investigate the stakeholder pressure on carbon disclosure in the Indian context. The present study develops a comprehensive index to measure corporate carbon disclosure.

To address the absence of Lean in transportation logistics in the digital era, this study aims to investigate the application of Lean transportation (LT) tools to reduce waste and facilitate the digital transformation of dedicated road transportation in the offshore industry.

The study adopts action research with a multimethod approach, including a scoping review, focus groups (FG) and participant observation. The research is conducted within the offshore supply chain of a major oil and gas company.

Implementing LT’s continuous improvement tools, particularly value stream mapping (VSM), reduces offshore transportation waste and provides empirical evidence about the intersection of Lean and digital technologies. Applying techniques drawn from organisational learning theory (OLT), stakeholders involved in VSM mapping and FGs engage in problem-solving and develop action plans, driving digital transformation. Waste reduction in loading and unloading stages leads to control actions, automation and process improvements, significantly reducing downtime. This results in an annual monetary gain of US$1.3m. The study also identifies waste related to human effort and underutilised digital resources.

This study contributes to theory and practice by using action research and LT techniques in a real intervention case. From the lens of OLT, it highlights the potential of LT tools for digital transformation and demonstrates the convergence of waste reduction through Lean and Industry 4.0 technologies in the offshore supply chain. Practical outputs, including a benchmarking questionnaire and a plan-do-check-act cycle, are provided for other companies in the same industry segment.

This study aims to guide firms in emerging markets on whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagement facilitates their access to debt with the moderation of asset structure and firm performance. Considering the moderating effect analysis, this study explores the substitutive or complementary effect of these two contingencies on CSR-oriented firms in accessing debt financing.

Drawing on data collected for 16 emerging markets between 2008 and 2019, this study runs country–industry–year fixed-effects regression.

This study finds that CSR performance and reporting facilitate access to debt in emerging markets. However, CSR performance does not have an inverted U-shaped influence on firms’ access to debt financing. The moderation analysis of this study shows that asset tangibility has a negative moderating effect on the link between CSR engagements (i.e. both CSR performance and reporting) and access to debt, confirming a substitutive relationship between asset tangibility and CSR engagements in accessing debt. In contrast, firm performance is positively moderating the nexus between CSR engagement proxies and access to debt, which confirms a complementary type of relationship between firm performance and CSR engagements in accessing debt.

The empirical evidence of this study implies that creditors critically consider CSR engagements of firms in the loan-granting decision process. Similarly, the inverted U-shaped relationship between CSR and access to debt implies that there is an optimal level of CSR engagement creditors might consider in their decision. Likewise, the moderating effects analysis highlights that asset tangibility and firm performance are two conditions under which CSR performance and reporting are linked to access to debt.

Emerging countries are a different set of countries than developed ones; they have high growth rates and hence need financing, have a weaker institutional environment and have weaker stakeholder power. These particularities motivated the authors to conduct a separate study focusing on CSR and debt financing links drawing on a wide range of emerging countries. Thus, this study adds to the ongoing debate by examining the conditions under which CSR-oriented firms can access debt financing in emerging economies.

This paper aims to examine the effect of critical mass of women managers on corporate boards on the voluntary disclosure of climate change in a developing country in which the regulations on climate change disclosure is an area of growing research interest.

This study uses logistic panel regression models with a sample of 1,001 firm-years for companies in the Borsa Istanbul 100 Index that were asked to disclose voluntary climate change indicators over the seven-year period from 2014 to 2020 through the Carbon Disclosure Project.

This paper provides evidence from an emerging country that the critical mass of women on the board has no impact on voluntary climate change disclosure. In addition, the presence of independent managers on the board was found to have a significant impact on climate change disclosure. In addition, the results show that larger companies are more likely to report their climate change activities. Large companies are more visible due to their size, are perceived by stakeholders as more polluting and are, therefore, more likely to report on the environment.

The results show that the critical mass of women on the board has no effect on voluntary disclosure of climate change. Empirical tests are still needed to strengthen the overall validity of the critical mass of at least three women on boards in Türkiye.

Despite many valuable insights provided by critical mass theory, very few studies directly address critical mass and voluntary disclosure of climate change. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first empirical and comprehensive paper in the Turkish context evaluating critical masses and voluntary corporate climate change giving a comparison between firms listed on financial industry and nonfinancial industry.

The implementation of BIM in the construction industry requires the coevolution of the various aspects of the BIM ecosystem. The human dimension is a very important dimension of the ecosystem necessary for BIM implementation. It is imperative to study this aspect of the BIM ecosystem both from the employer perspective and employee availability to provide insights for stakeholders (job seekers, employers, students, researchers, policymakers, higher education institutions, career advisors and curriculum developers) interested in the labour market dynamics.

To understand the BIM actor roles through the employer lens and the actual BIM actors in the construction industry, this study employed data mining of job adverts from LinkedIn and Mncjobs website. Content analysis was employed to gain insights into the data collected. Also, through a quantitative approach, the existing BIM actor roles were identified.

The study identified the employers' expectations of BIM actors; however, it is noted that the BIM actor recruitment space is still a loose one as recruiters put out open advertisements to get a large pool of applicants. From the data analysed, it is concluded that the BIM actor role is not an entirely new profession. However, it simply exists as construction industry professionals with BIM tool skills. Also, the professional development route is not well defined yet.

This study presents a realistic angle to BIM actor roles hence enhancing BIM implementation from the human perspective. The findings present an insight into the preferred against the actual.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and innovation are the two main approaches firms utilize to promote sustainable development. However, as yet, scholars have reached no consensus regarding their precise impact on construction firm performance (CFP), hindering efforts to implement effective sustainable development strategies that improve CFP. In view that a simple linear relationship may not be sufficient to capture their precise pattern, this study aims to unveil the nonlinear impact of CSR and innovation on CFP, especially when construction firms take up a distinct competitive position.

This study first proposed four hypotheses to establish a new theoretical model by incorporating CSR, innovation, CFP and construction firms' competitive position (CFCP). Then the model was tested by using 292 annual observations collected from 75 construction firms in China. A multiple regression model analysis was carried out to analyze the survey data and validate the hypotheses.

The results reveal that both CSR and innovation have a U-shaped impact on the price-to-book ratio of a construction firm, a specific CFP measure. CFCP negatively moderates the U-shaped relationship between CSR and CFP, but positively moderates the U-shaped relationship between innovation and CFP.

This study goes beyond a simple linear view, instead of unveiling the nonlinear U-shaped effects of CSR and innovation on CFP that deepen the understanding of their complex relationships in the construction industry and makes construction firms aware that CSR and innovation can only improve performance if they reach a certain level. The moderating role of CFCP provides important implications for construction firms seeking to adopt appropriate competitive strategies related to social responsibility and innovation that both promote CFP and achieve sustainable development.

Traditionally, life cycle assessment (LCA) has focused on environmental aspects, but integrating social aspects in LCA has gained traction among scholars and practitioners. This study aims to review key social life cycle assessment (SLCA) themes, namely, drivers and barriers of SLCA implementation, methodology and measurement metrics, classification of initiatives to improve SLCA and customer perspectives in SLCA.

A total of 148 scientific papers extracted from the Web of Science database were used and analyzed using bibliometric and content analysis.

The findings suggest that the existing research ignores several aspects of SCLA, which impedes positive growth in topical scholarship, and the study proposes a classification of SLCA research paths to enrich future research. This study contributes positively to SLCA by further developing this area, and as such, this research is a primer to gain deeper knowledge about the state-of-the-art in SLCA as well as to foresee its future scope and challenges.

The study provides an up-to-date review of extant research pertaining to SLCA.

The purpose of this study is to determine what technological strategies were used within each of the phases of the ADDIE framework when developing content for professional training. The study also examined the affordances of those technologies in training.

A PRISMA systematic review methodology (Moher et al., 2015) was utilized to answer the four questions guiding this study. Specifically, the PRISMA extension Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis for Protocols (PRISMA-P, Moher et al., 2015) was used to direct each stage of the research, from the literature review to the conclusion. In addition, the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA principles; Liberati et al., 2009) are used to guide the article selection process.

The findings reveal that the majority of the studies were in healthcare (36%) and education (24%) and used an online format (65%). There was a wide distribution of ADDIE used with technology across the globe. The coding for the benefits of technology use in the development of the training solution revealed four trends: 1) usability, 2) learning approaches, 3) learner experience and 4) financial.

This systematic review only examined articles published in English, which may bias the findings to a Western understanding of how technology is used within the ADDIE framework. Furthermore, the study examined only peer-review academic articles from scholarly journals and conferences. While this provided a high level of assurance about the quality of the studies, it does not include other reports directly from training providers and other organizations.

These findings can be used as a springboard for training providers, scholars, funders and practitioners, providing rigorous insight into how technology has been used within the ADDIE framework, the types of technology, and the benefits of using technology. This insight can be used when designing future training solutions with a better understanding of how technology can support learning.

This study provides insight into the uses of technology in training. Many of these findings and uses of technology within ADDIE can also transfer to other aspects of society.

This study is unique in that it provides the scholarly community with the first systematic review to examine what technological strategies were used within each of the phases of the ADDIE structure and how these technologies provided benefits to developing a training solution.

Healthcare providers are under pressure due to increasing and more complex demands for services. Increased pressure on budgets and human resources adds to an ever-growing problem set. Competent leaders are in demand to ensure effective and well-performing healthcare organisations that deliver balanced results and high-quality services. Researchers have made significant efforts to identify and define determining competencies for healthcare leadership. Broad terms such as competence are, however, inherently at risk of becoming too generic to add analytical value. The purpose of this study is to suggest a holistic framework for understanding healthcare leadership competence, that can be crucial for operationalising important healthcare leadership competencies for researchers, decision-makers as well as practitioners.

In the present study, a critical interpretive synthesis (CIS) was conducted to analyse competency descriptions for healthcare leaders. The descriptions were retrieved from peer reviewed empirical studies published between 2010 and 2022 that aimed to identify healthcare services leadership competencies. Grounded theory was utilised to code the data and inductively develop new categories of healthcare leadership competencies. The categorisation was then analysed to suggest a holistic framework for healthcare leadership competence.

Forty-one papers were included in the review. Coding and analysing the competence descriptions resulted in 12 healthcare leadership competence categories: (1) character, (2) interpersonal relations, (3) leadership, (4) professionalism, (5) soft HRM, (6) management, (7) organisational knowledge, (8) technology, (9) knowledge of the healthcare environment, (10) change and innovation, (11) knowledge transformation and (12) boundary spanning. Based on this result, a holistic framework for understanding and analysing healthcare services leadership competencies was suggested. This framework suggests that the 12 categories of healthcare leadership competencies include a range of knowledge, skills and abilities that can be understood across the dimension personal – and technical, and organisational internal and – external competencies.

This literature review was conducted with the results of searching only two electronic databases. Because of this, there is a chance that there exist empirical studies that could have added to the development of the competence categories or could have contradicted some of the descriptions used in this analysis that were assessed as quite harmonised. A CIS also opens for a broader search, including the grey literature, books, policy documents and so on, but this study was limited to peer-reviewed empirical studies. This limitation could also have affected the result, as complex phenomenon such as competence might have been disclosed in greater details in, for example, books.

The holistic framework for healthcare leadership competences offers a common understanding of a “fuzzy” concept such as competence and can be used to identify specific competency needs in healthcare organisations, to develop strategic competency plans and educational programmes for healthcare leaders.

This study reveals a lack of consensus regarding the use and understanding of the concept of competence, and that key competencies addressed in the included papers are described vastly different in terms of what knowledge, skills and abilities they entail. This challenges the operationalisation of healthcare services leadership competencies. The proposed framework for healthcare services leadership competencies offers a common understanding of work-related competencies and a possibility to analyse key leadership competencies based on a holistic framework.