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This study provides insights into the external powers that can influence business leaders' communication on sustainability. It shows how the socio-political context manifested in national and transnational policies, regulations and other socio-political events can influence the CEO talk about sustainability.

This study adopts an interpretative and qualitative method of analysis using the lenses of the theoretical concepts of framing and legitimacy, analysing CEOs’ letters from 10 multinational industrial companies based in Sweden, over the period of 2008–2019.

The results show that various discourses of sustainability, emerging from policies and regulatory initiatives, socio-political events and civil society activism, are reflected in the ways CEOs frame sustainability over time. This article reveals that CEOs not only lead the discourse of profitable sustainability, but they also slowly adapt their sustainability talk to other discourses led by the policymakers, regulators and civil society. This pattern of a slow adaptation is especially visible in a period characterised by increased discourses of climate urgency and regulations related to social and environmental sustainability.

The theoretical frame is built by integrating the concepts of legitimacy and framing. Appreciating dynamic notions of legitimacy and framing, the study suggests a novel view of reporting as a film series, presenting many frames of sustainability over time. It helps the study to conceptualise CEO framing of sustainability as adaptive framing. This study suggests using a dynamic notion of adaptive framing in future longitudinal studies of corporate- and accounting communication.

The results show that policymakers, regulators and civil society, through their initiatives, influence the CEOs' framing of sustainability. It is thus important for regulators to substantiate sustainability-related discourses and develop conceptual tools and language of social and environmental sustainability that can lead CEO framing more effectively.

The study engages with Goffman's notion of dynamic framing. Dynamic framing suggests a novel view of reporting as a film series, presenting many frames of sustainability over time and conceptualises CEO framing of sustainability as adaptive framing.

This study offers a Bourdieu-oriented analysis of the tax compliance practice for indigenous entrepreneurs in New Zealand. It examines the intersection of accounting and tax for Māori entrepreneurs and their relational interactions with the Inland Revenue Department (IRD)/state/Crown and accountants by considering the contextual factors of history, culture and society of Māori.

Qualitative research was adopted using face-to-face in-depth interviews with 34 participants and reviewing government documents. The authors analyse the tax compliance practice by drawing on Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital and habitus to conceptualise the tax field as a site of struggle for power and control by the IRD, accountants and indigenous entrepreneurs.

This study demonstrates how the tax field is structured as a game between tax reporting, taxpaying and monitoring functions. The position within the field is determined by the actor's access to the relevant capitals and habitus. It identifies how accounting, given its centrality to tax compliance, facilitates the power relations between the IRD, accountants and Māori entrepreneurs. The Eurocentric accounting-based tax reporting and the contextual factors illuminate how indigenous entrepreneurs are being dominated in the tax field. They experienced cultural dissonance with conflicting responsibilities when traversing the collectivistic indigenous and tax fields. Their collectivism involves sharing resources as they cherish whanaungatanga (relationship, kinship) and manaakitanga (kindness, generosity), which are at odds and are not valued in the tax field.

It is an empirical illustration of the connection between accounting, tax and power for indigenous taxpayers and their relationship with the IRD/Crown and accountants. It has practical implications for developing and enhancing tax compliance in jurisdictions with indigenous taxpayers. Such an understanding is helpful for policymakers, government, business agencies and the accounting professions when assisting, empowering and educating indigenous groups regarding tax compliance.

This paper responds to the call for accounting research with modern-day indigenous peoples rather than historical ones. The paper fills a gap in the accounting and tax literature by examining the tax compliance practice of indigenous small and medium enterprise (SME) entrepreneurs using Bourdieu's framework. It identifies how the role of accounting creates, maintains and reinforces power structures in the tax field. Tax/accounting reporting based on Eurocentric rules disempowers and alienates indigenous entrepreneurs. They misrecognise their actions in reproducing the existing power structures in the tax field due to deeply held historical and cultural factors about the fear of the Crown/state and their practice of rangitaratanga (esteeming authorities).

This paper aims to investigate the practice of accounting in the Seventh-day Adventist church of the Pacific Islands and pays particular attention to the coexisting of two control devices: accounting and religion.

This paper implemented a qualitative field study design collecting interview data from church members from the Solomon Islands, Tonga and Fiji. Data were also collected through focus group discussions, document reviews, website analysis and participant observations. Pierre Bourdieu’s thinking on symbolic violence, doxa and capital are used to interpret the findings.

This paper’s main contribution shows that while there is a divine and profane divide, social agents, given their agency, can move back and forth from one side of the divide to the other. Accounting as a control device does not include features such as faith, which is helpful for decision-making; accordingly, religion is relied upon when it comes to decision-making. In contrast, accounting has features that are useful for stewardship purposes. Accordingly, when it comes to the church’s stewardship function accounting in the form of financial reports is relied upon.

Pacific Island culture almost permeates all facets of life, including church life; however, this study did not clarify this. Later studies can explore the implications of culture on the deployment of accounting in a religious setting.

This rich empirical study describes the control dynamics and the tension between accounting and religion in a religious organisation. Accounting needs to adapt to churches’ unique characteristics, whereby religious/doctrinal beliefs must be accounted for and respected. Unlike in the corporate world, accountants in churches cannot fully practice their training or exercise the kind of influence they usually hold in organisations due to their religious belief systems.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is one of a few studies on the religion-accounting relationship. While the focus of earlier studies was generally on a secular and sacred divide, this study looks at coexisting of accounting and religion. This study adds to the sparse literature on accounting and religion and their controlling influence.

In this paper, the authors examine the strategies used to reduce labour costs in three public hospitals in South Africa, which were effective and why. In the democratic era, after the revelations of large-scale corruption, the authors ask whether their case studies provide lessons for how public service institutions might re-make themselves, under circumstances of austerity.

A comparative qualitative case study approach, collecting data using a combination of interviews with managers, focus group discussions and interviews with shop stewards and staff was used.

Management in two hospitals relied on their financial power, divisions between unions and employees' loyalty. They lacked the insight to manage different actors, and their efforts to outsource services and draw on the Extended Public Works Program failed. They failed to support staff when working beyond their scope of practice, reducing employees' willingness to take on extra responsibilities. In the remaining hospital, while previous management had been removed due to protests by the unions, the new CEO provided stability and union–management relations were collaborative. Her legitimate power enabled unions and management to agree on appropriate cost cutting strategies.

Finding an appropriate balance between the new reality of reduced financial resources and the needs of staff and patients, requires competent unions and management, transparency and trust to develop legitimate power; managing in an authoritarian manner, without legitimate power, reduces organisational capacity. Ensuring a fair and orderly process to replace ineffective management is key, while South Africa grows cohorts of competent managers and builds managerial experience.

Sustainability is viewed as an encompassing perspective, as endorsed by the international policy context, driven by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We aim to examine how women entrepreneurs transform capitals to pursue sustainability, and to generate policy insights for sustainability actions through tourism entrepreneurship.

Applying qualitative approach, we have generated empirical evidence drawing on 37 qualitative interviews carried out in Turkey, whereby boundaries between traditional patriarchal forces and progressive movements in gender relations are blurred.

We have generated insights into how women entrepreneurs develop their sustainability practice by transforming their available economic, cultural, social and symbolic capitals in interpreting the macro-field and by developing navigation strategies to pursue sustainability. This transformative process demonstrates how gender roles were performed and negotiated in serving for sustainability pillars.

In this paper, we demonstrate the nature and instrumentality of sustainable tourism entrepreneurship through a gender lens in addressing some of these SDG-driven challenges.

We advance the scholarly and policy debates by bringing gender issues to the forefront, discussing sustainable tourism initiatives from the viewpoint of entrepreneurs and various members of local community and stakeholder in a developing country context where women’s solidarity becomes crucial.

In this article, the authors analyse the impact of the 2020 lockdown and the subsequent measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 in Italy in the hospitality industry by looking at the social demands brought forward by the restaurant sector.

To analyse social demands, the authors choose Twitter as an observation point using two hashtags as keywords to scratch the data: #iononriapro and #ioapro, which correspond to two different instances conveyed by the same subject: the restaurant sector. The instances linked to the hashtags produced different levels of engagement and penetration within the social structure and digital platform. To analyse the first block of data linked to the first hashtag-flag #iononriapro, the authors used content analysis. To analyse the second and third block of data linked to the hashtag-flag #ioapro, the authors used an automatic procedure, emotional text mining.

The analysis procedures allow us to reconstruct the positioning of the topics of closures and reopenings due to lockdown in this sector and to identify two explanatory dimensions: structural and affective, which explain the tension that has emerged between the State and the restaurant sector around COVID-related closures.

The study's findings not only contribute to the current understandings of the birth, transformation and penetration of social issues by the restaurant sector over the specific period linked to the COVID-19 pandemic and the measures imposed for its containment but are also valuable to analyse the dynamics through which Twitter hashtags and the social issues they represent find strength or lose interest in the public.

This paper aims to examine the nature of corporate governance systems in Ghanaian Family-owned Businesses (FOBs). Specifically, the study investigates the nature of boardroom decisions structures, sources of governance regulations and family roles in corporate governance.

Drawing on Bourdieusian perspectives of the field, capital, habitus and doxa, a case study design is used to gather detailed insights about the phenomena. Purposively, the study conducts 20 interviews with participants from 15 FOBs in Ghana. The interview data are complemented with secondary sources, such as FOB handbooks, website information, legal documents and scriptures. Subsequently, data gathered were thematically analysed.

The study finds that human actors blended traditionally tacit and legally expressed boardroom decisions structures in FOBs governance. Again, traditional values, social acceptance of religious sociology and regulatory frameworks of the field dictate corporate governance practices in FOBs. In multiple family ownerships, orthodoxy of doxa is challenged; hence, power struggles and family roles in governance depend on capital possessed by social actors.

To continue as a going concern, FOBs must be mindful of traditional, religious sociology of family and regulatory frameworks within the field in which they operate. This is because, without this, the going concern of FOBs becomes suspicious and highly unlikely, especially where there are multiple family ownership and generations.

The previous literature predominantly focussed on formal boardroom structures in addressing FOBs' corporate governance issues. Notwithstanding, family governance risk of domineering and distrust associated with traditional and relational governance mechanisms remain under-represented and inconclusive, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa.

This case study presents a critical analysis of why and how corporate managers in China are reluctant to adopt sustainability reporting assurance (SRA) provided by externally independent third-party assurers, despite the fact that it is acknowledged as a value-adding activity globally.

A longitudinal fieldwork case study was conducted from 2014 to 2019 in a Chinese central state-owned enterprise (CSOE), a pioneer in sustainability reporting practice since the mid-2000s, to collect first-hand empirical data on managerial perceptions of the adoption of external SRA. Semi-structured interviews with 25 managers involved in sustainability (reporting) practice were conducted. The interview data were triangulated with an analysis of archival documents and board meeting minutes pertaining to the undertakings of sustainability practices in the case study organization.

Our empirical analysis suggests that while managers recognize the benefits of adopting external SRA in enhancing the legitimacy of sustainability accountability, they oppose SRA because of their deep-rooted allegiance to the dominant logic of sociopolitical stability in China. SRA is envisaged to risk the stability of the socialist ideology with which CSOEs are imbued. Therefore, any transformational approach to accepting a novel (foreign) practice must be molded to gain control and autonomy, thereby maintain the hegemony of stability logic. Instead of disregarding external verification, managers of our case SOE appear to harness sustainability reporting as a navigational space to engage in internally crafted alternative manners in order to resist the rationality of SRA.

The empirical analysis presents a nuanced explanation as to why internal managers have hitherto been reluctant to embrace the embedding of independent assurance into the sustainability reporting process. Our prolonged fieldwork provides ample context-specific, intra-organizational evidence regarding the absence of SRA in Chinese CSOEs, which warrants more attention given their considerable presence in the global economy. In addition, the empirical analysis contributes to our understanding of the managerial capture of sustainability issues in a specific context of state capitalism and how organizations and individuals in an authoritarian regime interpret and respond to novel discourses derived from distinct institutional settings.

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.

Through this reflexive, theoretically informed polemical piece, this paper aims to seek to reflect on the role of accounting education in United Kingdom Higher Education (UKHE). The authors reignite an old, but pertinent debate, whether accounting graduates should be educated to be accountants or receive a holistic, critical education.

The authors adopt a theoretical position drawing on the work of Slavoj Žižek and Mark Fisher, and their fusion of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism, in particular Fisher’s (2009) conceptualisation of “capitalist realism” to take a critical standpoint on the effects that UKHE marketisation is having on the teaching of accounting and other business-related disciplines.

The authors outline four key aspects of where accounting education in UKHE is influenced by capitalist realism, as a result of the marketisation of UKHE.

The paper is a reflexive polemic and so is limited by this written style and presentation.

The authors argue that capitalist realism is a dominant theme that influences accounting education. They propose that universities now, more than ever, must focus on their societal duty to foster critical viewpoints in their graduates and dispose of a model that is subject to capitalist realism ontology.

The theoretical stance allows for a potentially deeper consideration of issues surrounding marketisation of higher education, from the micro level of social interaction (that of the accounting academic and their impact/perceptions of the reality).