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The qualitative study was conducted to examine work-family (W-F) balance practices in the collectivist culture of Pakistan. Keeping in view the context of Pakistan, three W-F practices, flexibility, childcare arrangement and social support, were studied by applying the theory of W-F balance.

In total, 16 In-depth interviews from the bank operating in three different cities in Sindh, Pakistan.

Data analysis showed that providing economic benefits and short working hours can achieve W-F balance. Nevertheless, the provision of flexibility in terms of short working hours is more important than economic benefits in balancing both domains of life. Secondly, the provision of childcare arrangements helps to balance work and home life. This practice favors females more compared to males. Thirdly, supervisor and co-worker support is most important in creating W-F balance than family support.

It is crucial to understand the W-F balance practices in developing countries; the bank should encourage policies related to flexibility, childcare arrangement and social support in Pakistan. In addition, banks should take the initiative to develop a way that facilitates the employees' social support, which should consequently help to achieve the W-F balance.

It is crucial to understand the W-F balance practices in developing countries; the bank should encourage policies related to flexibility, childcare arrangement and social support in Pakistan. Banks should take an initiative to develop a way that facilitates the employees' social support which should consequently help to achieve the W-F balance.

This research has a tremendous impact on society due to current changes in South Asian countries including Pakistan constitute a socio-cultural transition that directly affects working and family life.

Given the importance of W-F balance in recent times, the authors identified and extended the W-F balance practices in the collectivist culture of Pakistan. This study is novel and contributes to the W-F balance literature by considering most primary W-F balance practices that employees require.

This paper studies the factors affecting digital transformation in accounting of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and then influencing accounting information quality.

The research model includes seven independent variables, namely organizational culture, competitive pressure, employee's awareness, readiness of the information technology systems, organization's mindfulness, alignment of the organization’s strategy and top management support, which affect digital transformation in accounting. Besides, the research model proposed to examine the relationship between digital transformation in accounting and accounting information quality. The paper uses a survey (with 253 respondents) and applies exploratory factor and regression analysis to examine Vietnamese SMEs.

This paper aims to examine the antecedents of the digital transformation in accounting and its positive impact on the accounting information quality. The research results highlight three factors: the organization's mindfulness, alignment of the organization’s strategy and top management support. In the SMEs, top management may be the one, so the top management in SMEs has a strong influence on the digital transformation in accounting.

There are small sample sizes and not yet guaranteed to cover all business areas of Vietnamese SMEs. Control variables will be added to the research model to evaluate, such as firm size, operation time, sex of top management and age of top management.

The results of this paper provide practical insights into the digital transformation in accounting for business managers, researchers and other stakeholders. Vietnamese SMEs should communicate and educate employees and spend resources to improve the information technology system. It helps to improve the financial accounting quality for SMEs.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to examine factors affecting digital transformation in accounting and the relationship between digital transformation in accounting and the financial accounting quality of SMEs in Vietnam.

This paper expects to analyze the connection between occupational stigma and job meaningfulness among Chinese takeaway riders, the mediating role of occupational identity and relative deprivation, and the moderating effect of job stress based on resource conservation theory.

The sample was derived from 371 takeaway riders across China. PLS-SEM was mainly utilized for the data analysis.

The findings of the study indicated a significant negative correlation between occupational stigma and job meaningfulness. Furthermore, it is worth noting that relative deprivation and occupational identity served as mediators and masks, respectively, in the relationship between occupational stigma and job meaningfulness. Furthermore, job stress amplifies the association between occupational stigma and occupational identity. Additionally, job stress diminishes the connection between occupational stigma and relative deprivation.

This study proposes a positive correlation between occupational stigma and occupational identity in the Chinese context. It also enriches the empirical research based on resource conservation theory. Furthermore, it holds practical implications for takeaway riders in China, offering insights to bolster their job meaningfulness.

New digital technologies are reshaping the business landscape and accounting work. This paper aims to investigate how incorporating more data and new data analytics (DA) tools impacts the role and use of judgment in financial due diligence (FDD).

The paper reports findings from a field study at a Big Four accounting firm in Sweden (“DealCo”). The primary data includes semi-structured interviews, observations and other meetings. Theoretically, it draws on Dewey’s The Logic of Judgments of Practise and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry and distinguishes between theoretical (what is probably true) and practical judgment (what to do).

In DealCo’s FDD practice, using more data and new DA tools meant that the realm of possibility had expanded significantly. To manage the newfound abundance and to use DA effectively, DealCo’s advisors invoked practical and theoretical judgments in different stages and areas of the data-driven FDD. The paper identifies four critical uses of judgment: Setting priorities and exercising restraint (practical judgment) and forming hypotheses and doing sense checks (theoretical judgment). In these capacities, practical judgment and theoretical judgment were essential in transforming raw data into actionable insights and, in effect, an indeterminate situation into a determinate one.

The study foregrounds the practical dimension of knowledge production for decision-making and contributes to a better understanding of the role, use and importance of accounting professionals’ judgment in a data-driven world.

The objective of this paper is to investigate the effect of working capital efficiency (WCE) and its components on the composite financial performance of a sample of Indian firms.

Our sample includes 796 non-financial listed firms from 2015–16 to 2021–22. Sample firms’ profitability, liquidity, solvency, cash flow management, and financial and operational leverage have been used to classify them into companies with high composite financial performance (HCFP) and with low composite financial performance (LCFP) by using K-Means Clustering technique. A composite financial performance score (CFPS) of 1 has been assigned to HCFP and 0 to LCFP. We have used logistic regression models with fixed effect to estimate the effect of cash conversion cycle (CCC) and its components, i.e. inventory days, accounts receivable days and accounts payable days on CFPS in the presence of control variables such as growth, leverage, firm size, and age.

The study finds that CCC and inventory days are inversely associated with CFPS. This finding shows that the firms’ WCE leads to superior financial performance on a composite basis.

The research findings are based on samples drawn from the population of the listed Indian non-financial companies. Since the operation, financial practices, working capital policies, and management styles of firms vary greatly among nations, the results of this study should be extended to firms in other countries after taking into account the degree of resemblance to the sample firms.

The findings of this study hold significant value for industry practitioners, as they provide guidance in determining the optimal allocation of funds for working capital and devising strategies for effectively managing inventory levels, credit sales, and vendor payments in order to increase the overall value of the company. This study aims to help investors in building their investment portfolios by identifying companies with superior composite financial performance. Investors can enhance the construction of their investment portfolios by strategically selecting companies that demonstrate superior overall performance.

The results of our study will help companies improve their WCM strategies to enhance their overall value, and their significance increases manifold during economic downturns. Business firms that perform well by efficiently managing their working capital have a multiplier effect on the economy and society at large in the form of GDP contribution, labor income, taxes to the government, investment in capital assets, and payments to suppliers.

To understand the impact of WCE on firms’ performance, the extant working capital literature focuses on some specific characteristics such as profitability, valuation, solvency, and liquidity. The limitation of employing a single parameter is its inability to present the comprehensive performance evaluation of firms. This study is among the earliest studies that focus on the holistic evaluation of WCE's impact on the composite performance of a company.

This study aims to better understand the emotional challenges that inexperienced accounting researchers may face in conducting ethnographies. To do so, the authors use Arlie Russell Hochschild’s (1979, 1983) notions of “feeling rules” and “emotion work” to shed light on the possible nature and impact of these challenges, and how her ideas may also become fruitful for academic purposes.

The authors take a reflective approach in sharing the raw observation notes and research diaries as first-time ethnographers in the area of management accounting. The authors use these to analyze “unprocessed” experiences of emotional challenges from the fieldwork and how the authors learned to cope with them.

The authors illustrate how emotional challenges in conducting ethnographies can be rooted in a clash with prevalent feeling rules of certain study situations. The authors explore the conditions under which these clashes occur and how they may prompt researchers to respond through means of emotion work to (re-)stabilize those situations. Based on these insights, the authors also discuss how wider conventions of the accounting academy may contribute to emotional challenges as they stand in contrast to principles of ethnographic research.

There remains a tendency in the accounting domain to largely omit emotional challenges in the making of ethnographies, especially in writing up studies. In this paper, the authors are motivated to break this silence and openly embrace such challenges as an asset when the authors talk about the process of creating knowledge.

The purpose of this essay is to explore the opportunities and challenges that early-career researchers (ECRs) face when they seek to contribute to academic knowledge production through research activities “other than” those directly focused on making progress with their own, to-be-published, research papers in a context associated with the “publish or perish” (PoP) mentality.

Drawing broadly on the notion of technologies of humility (Jasanoff, 2003), this reflective essay develops upon the experiences of the authors in organizing and participating in a series of nine workshops undertaken between June 2013 and April 2021, as well as the arduous process of writing this paper itself. Retrospective accounts, workshop materials, email exchanges and surveys of workshop participants provide the key data sources for the analysis presented in the paper.

The paper shows how the organization of the workshops is intertwined with the building of a small community of ECRs and exploration of how to address the perceived limitations of a “gap-spotting” approach to developing research ideas and questions. The analysis foregrounds how the workshops provide a seemingly valuable research experience that is not without contradictions. Workshop participation reveals tensions between engagement in activities “other than” working on papers for publication and institutionalized pressures to produce publication outputs, between the (weak) perceived status of ECRs in the field and the aspiration to make a scholarly contribution, and between the desire to develop a personally satisfying intellectual journey and the pressure to respond to requirements that allow access to a wider community of scholars.

Our analysis contributes to debates about the ways in which seemingly valuable outputs are produced in academia despite a pervasive “publish or perish” mentality. The analysis also shows how reflexive writing can help to better understand the opportunities and challenges of pursuing activities that might be considered “unproductive” because they are not directly related to to-be-published papers.

The authors passively apply a researcher profile pitch (RPP) template tool in accounting and across a range of Business School disciplines.

The authors document a diversity of worked examples of the RPP. Using an auto-ethnographic research design, each showcased researcher reflects on the exercise, highlighting nuanced perspectives drawn from their experience. Collectively, these examples and associated independent narratives allow the authors to identify common themes that provide informative insights to potential users.

First, the RPP tool is helpful for accounting scholars to portray their essential research stream. Moreover, the tool proved universally meaningful and applicable irrespective of research discipline or research experience. Second, it offers a distinct advantage over existing popular research profile platforms, because it demands a focused “less”, that delivers a meaningful “more”. Further, the conciseness of the RPP design makes it readily amenable to iteration and dynamism. Third, the authors have identified specific situations of added value, e.g. initiating research collaborations and academic job market preparation.

The RPP tool can provide the basis for developing a scalable interactive researcher exchange platform.

The authors argue that the RPP tool potentially adds meaningful incremental value relative to existing popular platforms for gaining researcher visibility. This additional value derives from the systematic RPP format, combined with the benefit of easy familiarity and strong emphasis on succinctness. Additionally, the authors argue that the RPP adds a depth of nuanced novel information often not contained in other platforms, e.g. around the dimensions of “data” and “tools”. Further, the RPP gives the researcher a “personality”, most notably through the dimensions of “contribution” and “other considerations”.

The purpose of this study is to explain gender imbalance by theorising how guilt arises as an externally imposed negative emotion that subsequently impairs women's performance in the accounting academia.

The method involves an analysis of gender distributions at junior and senior levels in New Zealand universities in 2019 and 2024 and relevant case studies of junior academics using unstructured interviews.

This paper unpacks the nuances of gender imbalance in a “gender-neutral” subject and provides empirical evidence that many women academics may internalise a sense of externally imposed guilt for various reasons. Such feelings of guilt, where they are imposed by workplace expectations and social constructions, may make women more concessionary with regard to a greater teaching workload substituting for research expectations. The more prolonged-term effect on career prospects of such substitutions as practiced in New Zealand may account for the imbalance that exists and seemingly will continue to exist.

This paper sets out first to discover the gender balance in accounting in universities in New Zealand. It contributes to the literature on gender and accounting education in understanding how negative emotions are externally imposed and become career-negating obstacles for women in the accounting academic.

This study aims to investigate how work overload, resulting from full-time telecommuting, aggravates telecommuting accounting professionals’ burnout via the mediation of work exhaustion. Further, the study also tests the conditional moderation effect of psychological capital on the association between work exhaustion and burnout, proposing that it becomes least severe for employees who perceive a high level of psychological capital.

The research was conducted using a sample of 322 employees from Big Four accounting firms, and the measurement model was established using confirmatory factor analysis. Hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling and model-14 in the PROCESS Macro for SPSS.

The results confirmed that work overload directly and indirectly (via the mediation of work exhaustion) aggravates employees’ burnout. However, psychological capital negatively conditions the mediating effect of work exhaustion on burnout such that the aggravating effect of work overload on burnout, via the mediation of work exhaustion, gets least severe (insignificant) for those employees who perceive a high level of psychological capital.

The study contributes to the literature on work overload-induced “work exhaustion burnout” association and offers suggestions for implications.