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Internal audit is an essential component of the accountability structure in Ghana's local government system. Favourable conditions are required for its operation to assist management bodies to fulfil their responsibilities efficiently and effectively. Using Internal Control-Integrated Framework, this paper investigates the conditions under which internal auditing is carried out in four selected local governments in the Central Region of Ghana.

Based on interpretivism and qualitative approach, purposive sampling technique was used to select 14 key informants at various levels of governance for primary data by the use of key informant interview guide. The data were analysed using pattern matching and content analysis based on themes.

The findings of the study indicate that internal auditors faced unfavourable conditions including intimidation, threats and administrative interference in the course of performing their duties.

This paper is based on qualitative data from four selected local governments in the Central Region of Ghana. Hence these findings are specific to the local governments, internal auditors and management bodies in the country to benefit from them. The implication of the findings is closely related to the efforts to realise the ultimate goal of the recent government reforms and the need for further reforms to enhance independence, objectivity, effectiveness and efficiency.

This study helps management of local governments in finding out conditions under which internal auditing operates. This helps to enhance favourable conditions and minimise the unfavourable conditions for the purpose of efficient and effective utilisation of resources towards improvement of service delivery of local government system to meet the needs of the people.

The study contributes to the understanding and application of Internal Control-Integrated Framework to local government system in the Central Region. It also uses the agency theory to explain the conditions under which internal auditing is carried out in the selected local government institutions.

This study provides new insight into the conditions of carrying out internal auditing in local governments and raises awareness of stakeholders on the need to enhance service delivery to the people. It also introduces a novel idea of placing all internal auditors under a newly established Internal Audit Class to advance independence and objectivity.

The purpose of this paper is to map and analyse the literature from 1989 to 2016 on humanitarian supply chain management (SCM) responding to refugees. This literature review systematically assesses existing literature, thereby highlighting gaps, challenges and directions for future research.

The authors apply a structured content analysis method which has been recognised as a traceable, systematic and reproducible research tool to analyse qualitative and quantitative aspects of existing literature.

The relative scarcity of literature implies that the interface of the fields of Humanitarian SCM and refugees has been rarely addressed. More specifically, the quantitative content analysis highlights a dearth of research that focusses on both fields in a well-balanced manner. In particular, empirical, practice-led studies, as well as research on development aid operations are under-represented. The qualitative analysis finds that further research on logistics models as well as technological innovations is necessary to increase data availability, forecast accuracy and the efficiency of (local) supply network operations during disasters.

The review suggests a number of areas in need of future research, proposes possibilities of collaborations between different actors and provides a research agenda for Humanitarian SCM in the context of refugees.

This review is the first to analyse the literature on Humanitarian SCM related to refugees.

This paper aims to conceptualize the digital behavior of startups and investigate the emerging behaviors about digital strategies of the Italian startup firms enrolled in the Startup Act policy initiative. Digital technologies were divided into intra- and inter-organizational digital infrastructures, and this categorization offers startups the opportunity to identify a set of enabling technologies that could be used to improve their digital strategies.

An empirical analysis has been conducted to investigate the degree of adoption of digital intra- and inter-organizational digital infrastructures in the entire population of 6,178 Italian firms listed in the Register of Innovative Startups.

The paper proposes a taxonomy bringing together four startup behaviors for adopting digital technologies: digital follower, technical influencer, social influencer and digital leader. From the perspective of policy makers, considering the financial efforts that public authorities are supporting in the last decade, implications are mainly concerned with policy measures aimed both to reinforce the overall adoption of digital technologies and to develop a balanced adoption of intra- and inter-organizational digital infrastructures.

Measures addressed to support female and foreign entrepreneurship could be useful to support a more dynamic and well-balanced cultural and racial contamination, thus improving the adoption of digital tools.

In a current trend of a growing amount of short city trips, it becomes crucial to understand how local residents perceive the presence of tourists and tourism in their cities and how their socio-cultural context influences those perceptions. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this understanding which will enable the city planners to take actions to create the well-balanced and resilient communities in which the needs of residents and tourists are equally met.

To understand residents’ perceptions’ about tourism in Bruges, this research applied photo-elicitation interviews with 28 residents who lived in various locations in the historical center to understand socio-cultural background of residents, their tourism-related concerns and whether they are in line with what is commonly perceived as problematic in Bruges.

Results show that as long as residents can benefit from tourism and tourism-related infrastructure, they support tourism. On the other hand, tourism decreases the liveability of the historical center due to supersession of infrastructure serving the residents by tourist-oriented amenities.

To build a sustainable and resilient city in the future, the authorities of Bruges should cease further “museumification” of the historical city by breaking the hegemony of tourism industry, providing affordable housing and rethinking the concentration model of tourism.

The photo-elicitation method proved to produce rich content and good-quality data by stimulating respondents’ memories and evoking experiences and emotions. Thus, this paper recommends that future research about residents’ attitudes is developed around visual methods as they give voice to the residents and are able to uncover issues which are difficult to capture with other methods.

This paper aims to add to the theorization of the gender dynamic in rural areas by investigating the motives of women who join their family firm (or their spouse's family firm) and thereby defy the demographic trend of rural flight. The context of this study is the depopulation of rural areas with the closing of basic services and relocation of the younger population, and educated women in particular, to urban areas. Consequently, rural family businesses risk failing to find successors and suffering forced closure or relocation. The empirical site of the study is rural family firms in Sweden, a context characterized by a high level of gender equality in legislation and culture but gender-conservative business structures in rural regions.

The empirical case in this paper builds on a qualitative study of nine (9) life course narratives of women entrepreneurs in a rural region of Southern Sweden who have returned to rural areas to join their family business. The authors follow the view established by gender scholars that women are active agents in navigating their lives, and their life story narratives offer insight into the considerations that inform their choice to stay or return to rural locations. In Sweden, the setting for the study, gender equality is widely supported by legislation, policy and institutional frameworks and popular understanding of gender relations. In contrast to the gender-progressive policies of Sweden at large, women's entrepreneurship in rural regions of Sweden tends to follow traditional gender hierarchies and face similar constraints as in rural areas of other countries. The juxtaposition of these competing sets of ideals makes Sweden an important and interesting place to study and draw insights from the experiences of women entrepreneurs.

The findings reveal that women who choose to join rural family firms view them primarily in a positive light and see this choice as aligned with their need for professional flexibility and assertiveness, rewarding relationships, and a calm, secure, well-balanced life. Theoretically, the study implies that women choosing to engage in rural family firms seek non-material benefits, such as work–life balance and social support, and may be driven in part by a sense of psychological ownership that extends to the rural community.

The findings provide novel insights on women as active agents in navigating their lives and the intrinsic (e.g. alignment of personal values) and extrinsic (e.g. community support) motives that inform their decisions. The study also raises questions regarding how women perceive themselves as “fitting in” to rural settings and to what extent the sense of security within these settings that the women describe may be contingent upon factors such as their families' embeddedness within the community as well as their conformity to the local social norms.

In retrospectives on Brunei’s first feature film Gema Dari Menara (1968), commentators have tended to focus on either its historical representation of Brunei’s booming post-curfew years in the late 1960s as ‘a time capsule of Brunei’s lost pop history’, or the film’s propagandistic nature for Da’wah (religious propagation). In this paper, however, I will concentrate my observations on the aesthetic values of the film itself, including the narrative structure, plot design, camerawork, characterisation and character relationships, as well as the resulting artistic effects manifested by these production elements as a whole.

Putting all the propagandistic elements aside, I would like to argue that Gema Dari Menara, as a family melodrama, is carefully constructed and propelled by the above-mentioned filmmaking techniques. The drama not only tells the story of an intense familial conflict revolving around the theme of faith rooted in the Bruneian tradition, it also implies the necessity of an internal negotiation between the predominant Islamic ideology and the increasingly secularised Bruneian civil society at the time. While the implied negotiation may have been unintended or subconscious in the original making of the film, it is well-balanced and reflective of the political and social reality of Brunei as a British Protectorate in the late 1960s, foreshadowing the current coexistent status quo of the dominance and sacredness of MIB and the secular popular culture in Brunei.

The involvement of clients in service encounters and service development has become a central principle for contemporary health and social care organizations. However, in day-to-day work settings, the shift toward client involvement is still in progress. We examined how health and social care professionals, together with clients and managers, co-develop their conceptions of client involvement and search for practical ways in which to implement these in organizational service processes.

The empirical case of this study was a developmental intervention, the client involvement workshop, conducted in a Finnish municipal social and welfare center. The cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) framework was used to analyze the development of client involvement ideas and the modes of interaction during the intervention.

Analysis of the collective discussion revealed that the conceptions of client involvement developed through two interconnected object-orientations: Enabling client involvement in service encounters and promoting client involvement in the service system. The predominant mode of interaction in the collective discussion was that of “coordination.” The clients' perspective and contributions were central aspects in the turning points from coordination to cooperation; professionals crossed organizational boundaries, and together with clients, constructed a new client involvement-based object. This suggests that client participation plays an important role in the development of services.

The CHAT-based examination of the modes of interaction clarifies the potential of co-developing client-involvement-based services and highlights the importance of clients' participation in co-development.

The aim of this study was to explore the organizational and social prerequisites for employees' participative and rule-compliant information security behaviour in Swedish nuclear power production and its related industry. These industries are high-risk activities that must be meticulously secured. Protecting the information security in the related organizations is an essential aspect of this.

Individual in-depth interviews were conducted with 24 employees in two organizations within the nuclear power industry in Sweden.

We found that prerequisites for employees' participative and rule-compliant information security behaviour could be categorized into structural, social and individual aspects. Structural aspects included well-adapted rules, knowledge support and resources. Social aspects included a supportive organizational culture, collaboration and adequate resources, and individual aspects included individual responsibility.

The qualitative approach of the study provided comprehensive descriptions of the identified preconditions. The results may thus enable organizations to better promote conditions important for information security in a high-risk industry.

UK fellowship schemes have been set up to address low-level engagement of doctors with leadership roles. Established in 2013, the Welsh Clinical Leadership Fellowship (WCLF) programme aims to recruit aspiring future clinical leaders and equip them with knowledge and skills to lead improvements in healthcare delivery. This paper aims to evaluate the 12-month WCLF programme in its first two years of operation.

Focused on the participants (n = 8), the authors explored expectations of the programme, reactions to academic components (provided by Academi Wales) and learning from workplace projects and other opportunities. The authors adopted a qualitative approach, collecting data from four focus groups, 20 individual face-to-face or telephone interviews with fellows and project supervisors and observation of Academi Wales training days.

Although from diverse specialties and stages in training, all participants reported that the Fellowship met expectations. Fellows learned leadership theory, developing understanding of leadership and teamwork in complex organisations. Through workplace projects, they applied their knowledge, learning from both success and failure. The quality of communication with fellows distinguished the better supervisors and impacted on project success.

Small participant numbers limit generalisability. The authors did not evaluate longer-term impact.

Doctors are required to be both clinically proficient and influence service delivery and improve patient care. The WCLF programme addresses both the need for leadership theory (through the Academi Wales training) and the application of learning through the performance of leadership roles in the projects.

This work represents an evaluation of the only leadership programme in Wales, and outcomes have led to improvements.

The purpose of this study is to develop and describe a process which can be applied to develop new methods in the context of preliminary aircraft sizing in a successful and efficient way.

The tasks to development new aircraft sizing methods are systematically analyzed. In particular, repeating and nonrepeating tasks and common or unique tasks. Then ordered in a sequence and described generically.

A development process for new aircraft design methods which are necessary for new technologies or configurations is introduced and explained step by step.

Introducing the capability to deal with new technologies or configurations, aircraft design tools or aircraft concepts requires new sizing methods.

The paper presents a systematic approach which can be used to develop a great amount of new sizing methods with a comparable usability and quality standard in an efficient and effective way.