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This paper aims to review the research on accounting professionalisation in China to develop insights into how the research is developing, offer a critique of the research to date and outline future research directions and opportunities.

This paper adopts a methodological approach of systematic literature review, as suggested by Tranfield et al. (2003) and Denyer and Tranfield (2009), to identify, select and analyse the extant literature on the Chinese public accounting profession. In total, 68 academic works were included in the review process.

This paper finds that the extant literature has produced fruitful insights into the processes and underlying motivation of accounting professionalisation in China, demonstrating that the Chinese experience has differed, to a large extent, from the hitherto mainly Anglo-American-dominated understandings of accounting professionalisation. However, due to the lack of common theoretical vernacular and an agreed upon focus, the extant literature illustrates a fragmented and contradictory picture, making attempts to accumulate prior knowledge in the field increasingly difficult.

This paper focusses only on research published in English. Consequently, the scope of review has been limited as some works published in languages other than English may be excluded.

This paper provides one of the pioneering exercises to systematically review the research on accounting professionalisation in China. It explores significant issues arising from the analysis and provides several suggestions for furthering the research effort in this field.

The purpose of this paper is to offer reflections and critique not only on the current state of the art for intellectual capital research (ICR) from an interdisciplinary accounting research (IAR) perspective, but also its future directions.

This paper offers a critical reflection based on the author's observations as an IC researcher, reviewer and editor. The author also supports the arguments with some evidence from the research about IC research.

The author argues that most ICR is falling short of achieving “the most advanced level of knowledge and technology” of the art because it inherits flaws from prior research, thus threatening its legitimacy and impact.

The author argues that researchers need to go back to the methodological drawing board when designing IAR so future research can achieve its full potential. To do so researchers also need their research to be transformational to engender change, and to be transdisciplinary, which encompasses research beyond the current boundaries of accounting and management.

The author identifies and introduces three research shortcuts that prevent ICR projects from being state of the art being copycat, Furphy and technophobic research which provide insights into why not all ICR research is not “state of the art”.

The purpose of this paper is to address the key developments concerning innovation at universities at a macro level. It describes the key trends and changes in the governance of universities and the transformation of universities into organizational actors. This also affects the governance on academic research in the sense that it leads to a gradual evolution of the specific public science system in which research is being initiated and executed.

Cultural evolution involves social articulation and transmission of knowledge. What makes a culture distinctive is how it distributes interactions in the information-space.

The innovation policies of the European Union play a noticeable, but not yet dominant, role in the EU member states, at least not in the large member states. The wide gap between the North of Europe and the South and East of Europe in innovative performance is – despite the innovation policies of the European Union – still difficult to overcome.

The actual innovative performance of ten European countries has been evaluated. Northern European countries show a higher score on the Innovation Index, whereas countries in Southern Europe score relatively low. Can we relate this difference to cultural factors?

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and discuss possible future pathways of the Finnish science, technology and innovation (STI) system. The paper sketches three speculative pathways for the Finnish STI system.

Theoretical considerations behind the pathways are based on analyses of the determinants and behaviour of small open economies, their innovation systems and governance. The empirical background of the paper is in the current trends of the Finnish economy and STI system. The analysis of pathways is based on three dimensions: institutionalized policy environment and economy, domestic interest groups and policy and STI institutions and funding. Changes in these dimensions are analysed by paying special attention to two variables: the position of the nation state and the general economic development.

The first future pathway outlined is based on an optimistic view by setting Finland on the basis of past success factors as an European and global STI hotspot. The second pathway is based on the assumption that the Finnish STI system will be increasingly subordinated to international structures and decision-making. The third one is geared around the assumption that the Finnish STI system will be dominated by industries.

While Finland has been seen as a European showpiece of innovation since the early 2000s, currently the country’s national economy and STI system are undergoing a critical period. The paper sheds light on this transformation and its potential future outcomes and attempts to raise debate on the options policy makers may face in the increasingly complex global environment in small countries.

The paper introduces potential future avenues for the Finnish STI system and provides a contribution to the debate of the future of small countries’ STI systems and innovation policies by emphasising the limited space of the STI policy choices and how the development paths and space for policy making evolve from the interaction of socio-economic factors between domestic and wider international context.

The purpose of this paper is to present the findings from research that explored the influence of contextual factors on the adoption and development of Electronic Theses and Dissertation (ETD) programmes in the Arab Gulf States.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with representatives of five groups of stakeholders with an interest in the implementation of ETD programmes. The groups were postgraduate students, academic staff, library managers, system administrators, and postgraduate officers from five Gulf States universities. In addition, an online survey was conducted with 309 participants in order to test and explore, in a larger sample, the issues identified in the interviews.

Research participants identified three levels of factors; contextual, institutional, and personal. In addition, they highlighted that contextual factors have an influence on institutional factors. These contextual factors include misunderstanding of plagiarism, strong economy, recencey of research programmes, and younger societies. For example, due to the recencey of postgraduate programmes in the Arab Gulf States, some of the theses and dissertations are low in quality and quantity. The Arab Gulf States have strong economies and this helped to provide the necessary technological infrastructure needed for adopting ETD programmes. Since the Gulf societies are quite young they are more likely to adopt new technologies. In addition, people at these states appear to have a weak understanding of plagiarism issues and thus they have more concerns about these issues.

This paper provides insights about the factors influencing the adoption and development of ETD programmes in the Arab Gulf States.

The purpose of this paper is to present a method for a structured literature review (SLR). An SLR is a method for examining a corpus of scholarly literature, to develop insights, critical reflections, future research paths and research questions. SLRs are common in scientific disciplines dominated by quantitative approaches, but they can be adapted in accounting studies since quantitative and qualitative approaches are commonly accepted.

A literature review, as a piece of academic writing, must have a logical, planned structure. The authors also argue it requires tests based on qualitative and quantitative methods. Therefore, the authors describe ten steps for developing an SLR.

The SLR method is a way that scholars can stand “on the shoulders of giants” and provide insightful and impactful research that is different to the traditional authorship approaches to literature reviews.

Traditional literature reviews can have varied results because of a lack of rigour. SLRs use a process that, through a set of rules, potentially offers less bias and more transparency of the execution and measures and techniques of validation and reliability.

SLRs provide an approach that can help academics to discover under-investigated topics and methods, nurturing, therefore, the development of new knowledge areas and research approaches.

The paper presents accounting researchers with an opportunity to develop insightful and publishable studies, and also serves as a basis for developing future research agendas in the accounting field. The authors advocate the SLR method especially to higher degree research students and emerging scholars as a way of potentially developing robust and defensible research agendas and questions.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a selected bibliography of recent resources on library instruction and information literacy.

The paper introduces and annotates periodical articles, monographs, and audiovisual material examining library instruction and information literacy.

Information is provided about each source, and the paper discusses the characteristics of current scholarship, and describes sources that contain unique scholarly contributions and quality reproductions.

The information may be used by librarians and interested parties as a quick reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.

This paper aims to systematically review the field of non-financial reporting (NFR) in hybrid organizations, focusing on state-owned enterprises, third-sector organizations and public–private partnerships. This is a timely attempt to identify the state of the art in the literature and outline the future research agenda. The paper answers two research questions: RQ1. What can be learned about NFR in hybrid organizations from the existing literature? RQ2. What are the future avenues for research on the topic?

A systematic literature review method was applied in this paper to summarize evidence from extant literature on NFR in hybrid organizations. The Scopus and Web of Science Core Collection databases were used to locate 92 articles for the review.

Recent years have witnessed a sharp increase in the number of articles on the topic. Regarding the implications of NFR for hybrid characteristics, NFR has some potential to strengthen the influence of non-market (i.e. state, community and social) logics in hybrid organizations. However, this potential may be limited due to the effect of market logics and the tensions that arise between the multiple logics in hybrid organizations. Regarding the implications of hybrid characteristics for NFR, these characteristics can not only affect the extent, the quality, the likelihood and the institutionalization of NFR but also result in the development of new NFR frameworks. The review calls for more research on the implications of NFR for multiple institutional logics and the implications of these logics for NFR in hybrid organizations.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first literature review that mobilizes insights from hybridity research to analyze NFR literature on diverse hybrid organizations.

This article is a review of research on the theme of Soviet product quality and Soviet state standards. The first section surveys previous research by Western scholars on the topic of Soviet product quality, paying particular attention to their sources of information. This is followed by a discussion of the availability of Soviet state standards as data sources on Soviet product quality. The third section of the article consists of a case study of the use of Soviet state standards to assess product quality, paying particular attention to machine tools. The article concludes with a discussion of the results and suggests avenues for further research.