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This study aims to use institutional and upper echelons theories to comprehensively investigate the intricate interplay between TMT legal expertise and firms' adaptive strategies in legal contexts, notably within emerging economies. It explores how upper echelons experiences shape opportunistic compliance strategies, impacting value and risk perceptions. Drawing on upper echelons theory, the research probes how TMT legal expertise molds firms’ involvement in significant lawsuits, accounting for influential roles. It scrutinizes TMT’s impact on legal strategies, positing that managerial discretion emerges from environmental factors, organizational attributes and executive traits. The study underscores TMT’s internal incentives and external factors’ interplay, molding strategic legal engagement.

To validate this framework, statistical analysis is performed on data from 2,584 Chinese-listed firms. The data set spans 2010–2015, with 5,713 material lawsuits. Chosen due to reliable institutional-level incentives data from the China Market Index Database, years 2016–2019 are excluded for methodological disparities. Moreover, 2007–2009 is omitted to mitigate the potential financial crisis impact. This study’s 11,272 observations ensure robust empirical exploration, offering insights into the interplay of TMT legal expertise, institutional factors and firms’ legal strategies.

The study reveals that firms led by executives with legal expertise are more prone to engage in significant lawsuits, indicating strategic use of legal skills. TMT age moderates this, with older teams less likely to engage. TMT tenure’s effect remains unclear due to tenure-risk preference complexity. Institutional factors matter; less legally mature regions reduce managers’ legal risk intention. Results confirm hypotheses and highlight executive human capital’s impact on firms’ legal strategies.

This study acknowledges contributions while highlighting limitations, including the need for detailed distinctions in lawsuit roles and exploration of heterogeneous TMT power dynamics. Further research is proposed for nuanced power dynamics and comprehensive TMT legal background data. The study advances upper echelons theory by introducing TMT legal expertise as a factor influencing strategic lawsuit behavior. It challenges institutional theory by showing the adaptable legal context, beyond fixed constraints. Moderating factors – group risk attitude and external knowledge – deepen understanding of upper echelons’ impact. Enhanced data collection is encouraged to address limitations and refine findings.

This study’s implications extend to managerial practices. Firms should acknowledge the dynamic legal system, using TMT legal expertise for strategic legal challenges. Executives should pragmatically approach regulations. While legal professionals enhance compliance, caution is needed in selecting TMT members with legal expertise due to the risk of misusing it for unnecessary litigation, potentially misaligned with financial performance goals.

This study combines institutional and upper echelons theories to explore TMT legal expertise’s impact on firms’ adaptive strategies in emerging economies. It challenges the idea of a universally constraining legal environment and highlights how TMT legal expertise enhances firms’ management of complex legal risks. The research introduces TMT legal expertise as an influencing factor in strategic lawsuits, revealing nuanced relationships between legal contexts and strategic decisions. The findings enrich upper echelons theory, challenge conventional institutional views and identify moderating factors that deepen the understanding of upper echelons’ influence in legal landscapes.

The purpose of this research is to investigate how the negative effect of litigation risk on firm performance could be controlled through the channel of voluntary disclosure and under the condition of institutional ownership.

To get the objectives, the study analyzed an unbalanced panel of 918 non-financial listed Chinese firms from 2010 to 18. To capture any expected unobserved heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation in the unbalanced sample, the authors have applied fixed effect regression with robust standard errors clustered at the firms' levels as suggested by Newey and West (1987).

The research provides that the good disclosure practices and presence of institutional ownership in corporations raise the trust of the investors by making the corporate operation clear in the eyes of the stakeholders. This increases the corporate credibility and as consequence corporations are protected against litigation risk. Thus, in the light of the information asymmetry and signaling theories, voluntary disclosure practices, and financial institutions' ownership, bridges the information gap and transmit a positive signal in the market regarding the better financial performance of the corporations.

These findings are helpful for the corporate managers for effective strategic decisions, regulatory authorities for policy formulation, and individual investors for developing a diversified investment portfolio.

By applying the mediation and moderation effects, the research enhances the understanding of the underlying causes of the association between a firm's litigation risk and its performance. The current research contributes to the literature, that agency issues which create litigation risk could be settled internally with voluntary disclosure practices and externally with institutional ownership.

This study aims to examine the strategies that auditors in Bangladesh follow in identifying and reporting key audit matters (KAMs). The study also examines the factors affecting auditors’ strategies in the identification and disclosures of KAMs.

The authors have conducted interviews with audit partners, chief financial officers (CFOs) and regulators involved in KAMs reporting and monitoring. The authors have used the lens of institutional theory of coercive, mimetic and normative isomorphism and the concept of decoupling.

Auditors have used a decoupling strategy by identifying and reporting greater number of industry-generic KAMs than that of other countries in an effort to minimize risks and avoid regulatory scrutiny, although they disclose remote risks as KAMs and mask severe problem areas of the client. Because of the principle-based approach of International Standards on Auditing (ISA) 701 and because of the pressure and misunderstanding from the audit committee, auditors report industry-generic items and generic descriptions of KAMs.

The findings have important implications for the standard setters and local and global audit firms for the diffusion of new auditing standards in different jurisdictions. Without the development of audit firm-level capability and the corporate governance environment, changes in standards may not be effective in achieving the objectives of the standards.

Although auditors consider that the KAMs reporting requirements provide with opportunities to enhance audit profession’s legitimacy and public trusts, the actual KAMs reporting practices are driven by the market logic, an urge to maintain the status quo with clients and eventual rationalization of the impairment of professional independence.

Given the dearth of prior research on the implementation and diffusion patterns of ISA 701 KAMs reporting, this study fills the gap in the literature. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first known study to examine auditors’ strategic responses to balance among conflicting priorities in reporting KAMs.

The world is experiencing democratic backsliding such that the situation is down back to 1986. This has resulted in the global shrinking of civic space for civil society organizations (CSOs). NGOs engaging in advocacy activities are seen to be among the CSOs affected. Using four NGOs cases from Tanzania, the study contributes to the civic space debate by uncovering how advocacy NGOs become resilient.

The study is anchored in interpretivism and a cross-sectional case study design, following a qualitative approach path. Data were collected through interviews and a documentary review.

Results show that several strategies such as complying, building community back-up, collaboration, strategic litigation, using digital media and changing the scope are applied. However, strategies face obstacles including scope limitations, expected democratic roles, high cost, changes in the scope and being outsmarted by the government, and hence their effectiveness is questionable.

This study focused on advocacy NGOs. More studies can be conducted for other advocacy-related CSOs on how they become resilient.

While NGOs are allowed to exist in the country, their freedom continue to be curtailed. Even the effectiveness of resiliency becomes temporary and depends on the political will of the existing regime.

Tanzania NGOs have to build strong bonds with citizens, expand the scope of strategies and use deliberative democratic principles to educate the government to change laws and tolerate plural political culture. Also, NGOs in other countries with confined civic space can apply the same.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether repeated alliances between two members of a patent pool boost enterprise innovation. Furthermore, this paper intends to determine whether the innovation performance becomes higher or lower based on the partnership characteristics.

In this empirical study, hierarchical regression is used to analyze the longitudinal data obtained from 12 patent pools managed by MPEG LA during a time period ranging from 2006 to 2018. The members of patent pools comprise research institutions, firms and universities. Research analyses are performed based on a sample of 68,400 member pairs who had established repeated alliances. The information regarding such pairs is gathered from public databases.

Repeated alliances positively correlate with enterprise innovation performance in patent pools; this performance is higher when the two enterprises have exploratory collaborations. Conversely, the performance is lower when the partners have a similar technology base and are engaged in a technological competition (competitive learning and patent litigation). Moreover, the performance is lower when one partner demonstrates higher network centrality and richer structural holes than the other partner.

Patent pools play an instrumental role in eliminating patent-licensing barriers, thereby allowing mutual acquisition of complementary technologies, and cooperatively strengthening technology development. From the perspective of theories of coopetition, knowledge management and social network, this study explores the impact of patent pools on enterprise innovation performance and ascertains the moderating roles of technology coopetition, technology similarity and network position, thereby expanding the scope of innovation effect in the context of patent pools.

This paper aims to explore how the argument of “eco-reproductive” concerns was mobilized in climate change trials in Switzerland. Looking at social movements' advantages and constraints when having recourse to the law, the authors interrogate why the symbolism of reproduction and kinship represented a political opportunity to defend the activists in a judicial system where judging is seen as an apolitical act.

This paper is grounded in legal research and research on social movements. While legal research focuses mainly on the study of legal and written sources, the authors used ethnography and conducted interviews to cross the perspectives of activists, their lawyers and judges.

In a context where positivist legal tradition remains strong, the “eco-reproductive” argument represented the advantage of being “apolitical,” thus audible in court. Used as socio-political tools, “eco-reproductive” concerns translated the activists' political claims into the legal arena. However, judges' conservative beliefs on family reinforced the depoliticization of activists' claims.

While research on “eco-reproductive” concerns has been significantly quantitative and exploratory, the authors look in depth at one case of application and highlight the limits of “eco-reproductive” concerns to appeal to decision-makers.

Misconduct allegations have been found to not only affect the alleged firm but also other, unalleged firms in form of reputational and financial spillover effects. It has remained unexplored, however, how the number of prior allegations against other firms matters for an individual firm currently facing an allegation. Building on behavioral decision theory, we argue that the relationship between allegation prevalence among other firms and investor reaction to a focal allegation is inverted U-shaped. The inverted U-shaped effect is theorized to emerge from the combination of two effects: In the absence of prior allegations against other firms, investors fail to anticipate the focal allegation, and hence react particularly negatively (“anticipation effect”). In the case of many prior allegations against other firms, investors also react particularly negatively because investors perceive the focal allegation as more warranted (“evaluation effect”). The multi-industry, empirical analysis of 8,802 misconduct allegations against US firms between 2007 and 2017 provides support for our predicted, inverted U-shaped effect. Our study complements recent misconduct research on spillover effects by highlighting that not only a current allegation against an individual firm can “contaminate” other, unalleged firms but that also prior allegations against other firms can “contaminate” investor reaction to a focal allegation against an individual firm.

In the case of Poiret & Anor v Seychelles Pension Fund & Anor (2022), the Court of Appeal, the highest court in Seychelles, took judicial notice of the fact that “[c]ommon law relationships are more prevalent in our society than those between married persons.” In this chapter, the author discusses the law relating to common law marriages in Seychelles by focusing on the following issues: the right to form a family (as a background to understanding common law marriages); requirements for a valid common law marriage; and the rights of parties in a common law marriage. These rights include “court granted” rights and “statutory rights” such as property rights (parties invoking the claim of unjust enrichment in the 1979 Civil Code and property orders and succession under the 2021 Civil Code at the dissolution of common law marriages). I also deal with the remedy of unjust enrichment in the context of the 2021 Civil Code; marital privilege (in case where one of the parties in a common law relationship is accused of committing an offence); and termination of a common law marriage. The author demonstrates the measures taken by courts and the legislators to protect some of the rights of people in common law marriages. The author suggests ways in which courts can interpret the relevant provisions of the 2021 Civil Code. Where necessary, the author highlights how courts or legislators in some African countries such as Kenya, Mauritius, Malawi, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Zambia, South Africa, Namibia, Rwanda, and Uganda have approached some of the issues above.

This study aims to examine how chief executive officer's (CEO) personality traits influence the corporate sustainability performance (CSP) of firms. The paper also examines the moderating effect of board power on this relationship.

Using a linguistic tool (IBM's Watson Personality Insight Service), the authors measured the personality traits of 229 CEOs from 176 firms from 2009 to 2018. Firm-level CSP are obtained from the Sustainalytics database. The hypotheses are tested using multiple regression analysis. The robustness of the results of the study is confirmed by addressing endogeneity concerns and by validating the measurement of CEO personality traits using Personality Recognizer, an alternative linguistic tool.

The results show that CEO personality traits of extraversion and neuroticism are significant predictors of CSP. The paper also identifies board power as a contingent factor that influences the suggested relationships.

Using upper echelon theory and cybernetic big five theory, this paper identifies CEO personality traits as important antecedents of corporate sustainability performance and adds to the micro-foundations of corporate sustainability literature. To the authors’ understanding, this is the first study that examines the influence of CEO personality on CSP using a comprehensive trait framework. The paper also demonstrates the usefulness of text-analytic tools to measure CEO personality traits, thereby contributing to the progress of upper echelon theory.