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Diversity in boards has gained attention as a reflection of societal imbalances. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of diversity in terms of both gender and nationality in management boards of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) on firm performance from an upper echelons perspective. The authors also examine how board-specific characteristics influence the structural makeup of boards in gender and nationality diversity terms.

The authors focus on the UK because of its individualistic society and flexible labour market and assess 309 SMEs in the manufacturing industry over 2009–2019. A 3-stage least squares (3SLS) estimator is used to analyse the data, the Shannon index to measure board diversity, return on assets as proxy for firm performance, and owner-manager presence, board member age and tenure are the board-specific characteristics of primary interest.

Both gender and nationality diversity contribute to firm performance and represent distinct upper echelon characteristics that change the cognitive and psychological dynamics of boards. Firms with larger boards do not perform better, but diverse boards reduce the narrowing view of CEOs. Yet the presence of owner-managers, despite their performance-enhancing contribution, holds firms back from benefitting from diversity as a strategic choice.

This study extends the upper echelons theory to include board diversity as an important aspect that should become more central in upper echelon thinking when understanding firm performance. The authors’ findings suggest that theoretical developments in search of understanding firm behaviour must proceed by accounting for diversity and not simply focusing on decision-making styles.

This study aims to investigate the impact of earnings predictability and truthfulness on nonprofessional investors’ investment willingness.

Earnings predictability is captured by quarterly earnings autocorrelation, and earnings truthfulness is indicated by real earnings management (REM). The average of investment attractiveness and willingness measures investment willingness. The authors use experiments to isolate the impact of quarterly earnings autocorrelation and REM on investors’ investment behaviors.

From the 2 × 2 design, the authors observe that investors weight more on earnings predictability than earnings truthfulness.

The generalization of the findings may be constrained for the following reasons. First, the authors use only one proxy, REM, to measure earnings truthfulness. In addition, the authors provide the participants, Amazon Mechanical Turk, with earnings predictability. Results may no longer hold if each participant has different understanding and analysis of earnings predictability.

In periods of unprecedented and severe financial uncertainty (i.e. the COVID-19 pandemic), investors rely more on earnings predictability than on earnings truthfulness. The study assists managers to strategically emphasize the predictability of earnings to attract investors, especially when firms face financial challenges or uncertainty.

This study contributes to understanding investor behavior and the critical role of earnings predictability and truthfulness in shaping investment decisions.

This paper contributes to the literature of earnings properties in financial reporting, particularly by shedding light on the nuanced interplay between earnings predictability and earnings truthfulness. The research also demonstrates that elevated earnings autocorrelation indirectly stimulates investment willingness by enhancing the investors’ perception of earnings persistence of targeted firms.

This study aims to examine the under-researched relationship between audit committee independence and earnings management in a number of emerging Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries.

Ordinary least squares regression was used to study the association between audit committee independence and earnings management in a sample of 3,206 firm-year observations during the years 2007–2017. Data were obtained from the Thomson Reuters Compustat database.

The main results show that audit committee independence has a negative association with accrual-based earnings management. The results also document no evidence to suggest that audit committee independence has any significant relationship with real earnings management.

This study provides new evidence of the impact of the independence of the audit committee in decreasing earnings management in MENA region, which was not addressed in previous studies.

This study has a significant practical implication for regulators and corporate governance policymakers in MENA countries and other countries with a similar institutional setting, whose responsibility is to prescribe proper corporate governance structures to guarantee that shareholders are protected.

The author contributes to the still limited research on the impact of audit committee independence on earnings management since the extant literature focuses on the Anglo-Saxon countries. The author tries to provide new insights into this relationship within the developing context, the case of MENA countries that have a different environment compared to advanced markets. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study is among the pioneering efforts to investigate the influence of audit committee independence on earnings management in MENA countries.

In this study, we attempt to investigate and examine the correlations among enterprise culture (EC), business ethic rules (BERs) and talented human resource supply chain management (THRSCM) in service SMEs in the Middle East region.

This study is quantitative in nature and adopts the quantitative-deductive hypothesis testing approach. To do this, a self-administrated survey was used and carried out to reach managers, human resource (HR) staff and workers from various small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the service sector that are listed in the Chambers of the Industries of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan in the Middle Eastern countries.

The empirical findings show that THRSCM and the BERs have a strong, positive correlation. Further, it found that there is also a strong and positive correlation between the EC and the BERs. As a result, THRSCM and EC can be extremely important in advancing and implementing BERs in SME service businesses. HR staff members should receive greater attention when implementing the BERs to accomplish the company’s goals and give customers a positive image of their enterprises. The HRM division and the company must be deeply aware of the significance of the BERs in their enterprises.

These findings can give managers, executives and HR staff helpful information to support the creation and upkeep of efficient business ethics rules inside their service SMEs.

Because there is not much study on the relationships between THRSCM, EC and BERs in the Middle East, this article attempts to investigate these relationships and consider them a benchmark for other future studies in ethics. Furthermore, it significantly influences service SMEs in the Middle East region.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-10-2023-0763.

The Metaverse is rapidly reshaping the understanding of tourism, yet the public perception of this new domain remains largely uncharted empirically. This paper aims to build on the technology acceptance model (TAM) and diffusion of innovations theory (DIT) to fill this gap, offering crucial insights that could inform scholars and practitioners in both the tourism and technology sectors.

Using a big-data approach, the authors applied machine learning to scrape comments made by social media users on recent popular posts or videos related to tourism in the Metaverse from three prominent social media platforms. The cleaning process narrowed down 15,461 comments to 2,650, which were then analysed using thematic, emotion and sentiment analysis techniques.

The thematic analysis revealed that virtual tourism evokes a complex range of public beliefs. While many express awe and excitement toward its immersive capabilities, others remain sceptical about authenticity compared to physical travel. Additional themes show people draw comparisons to real-world tourism, discuss technology’s role and note educational value and novelty. However, some comments raise concerns about potential societal harms, exploitation and mental health impacts. Sentiment analysis found over half of the comments positive, though some were negative. Emotion analysis showed contentment, happiness and excitement as most frequent, though sadness, worry and loneliness also featured. Overall, perceptions of Metaverse tourism encompass enthusiasm yet substantial ambivalence.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to comprehensively analyse public discussions on Metaverse tourism. It takes TAM and Rogers’s DIT a step further and provides fresh insights into how these theories can be employed in the emerging field of Metaverse tourism. The themes revealed new conceptual insights into multidimensional factors shaping public beliefs about Metaverse tourism and thus informing scholarly research on virtual interaction and technology acceptance regarding Metaverse tourism. In addition, the results can help tourism providers, platforms and marketers address salient public beliefs and sentiments/attitudes in developing marketing offerings, experiences and communications. Over time, this analysis methodology can be used to track the evolving public perceptions of Metaverse tourism.

This study examines how the strong emphasis placed on the purposes of budgeting, referring to a comprehensive focus on budgeting, is related to top managers' education and tenure while controlling for their functional positions in their respective firms and ages, as well as several company-specific predictors (information quality, firm size, information technology, importance of profit and strategy).

Survey data were collected from senior managers of large manufacturing firms in Finland and Sweden.

The results suggest that academic business education is positively associated with a comprehensive focus on budgeting, but tenure as well as functional position in the company (Chief Financial Officer (CFO) or not) and age are not. Overall, the company-specific control variables in general and information quality in particular are shown to have greater explanatory power than the top management characteristics analyzed.

This study identifies several empirically supported factors that seem to contribute to a comprehensive focus on budgeting. The effects of information quality, business education, the importance of profit and firm size could be considered in future research.

Academic business education matters more than the other top management characteristics analyzed. If organizations want to make comprehensive use of budgets, they should employ business graduates and be mindful of company-specific variables.

This study is the first to address a comprehensive focus on budgeting and some of its determinants. Future research could investigate a broader set of such determinants in different contexts.

The research identifies literature on Home-Based Businesses (HBBs) from 2000 to August 2023, focuses on their economic roles, challenges for entrepreneurs and success strategies, reflecting societal and technological changes. This guides future studies and highlights knowledge gaps.

A systematic literature review of published, peer-reviewed research between the years 2000 and 2023 is performed to examine how research on HBBs has changed over time, areas needing more study and how research has been done.

A total of 58 articles were analyzed and categorized into five distinct themes. Key insights into the evolution, significance and multifaceted aspects of HBBs are presented, revealing the impact and role of these businesses in a modern economic context.

The synthesis of existing literature enhances our understanding of recent studies on HBBs, focusing on challenges, and identifies promising directions for future research.

This paper aims to investigate fit problems with some ready-to-wear garments, analyse the body measurements of Ethiopian young female consumers and draw implications for the improvement of ready-to-wear garment fit.

A random sample of 970 university students aged 18–35 years were interviewed, and their 35 body dimensions were measured manually according to the procedures in ISO 8559: 2017. The fit problems and body measurements were examined with the body mass index (BMI) and ethnicity of the subjects. Moreover, 15 body dimensions were compared with that of Chinese and US females of similar age.

The results showed that fit problems are frequent in lower garments for underweight consumers. Nearly consistent and smaller differences in body measurements were observed with BMIs and ethnicity of the subjects, while inconsistent and larger differences were found among the subjects from the three countries. The Ethiopian subjects were smaller than the Chinese in height and weight, between the Chinese and US females in most body measurements, and larger than the US subjects in across shoulder and arm and shoulder lengths. The results alarm the need for the development of Ethiopian national garment size standards.

The paper relates ready-to-wear garment fit issues to demographic factors and demographic factors to body measurements. Moreover, it considers young female consumers in Ethiopia, an African country with less explored consumer needs for clothing.

In this paper we propose to study the differences among family and non-family-firms in relation to its financial strength, and therefore its potential position to resist in front of financial crisis and receive financial support or conditions by public or private institutions.

We used multiple hierarchical regressions on a sample of 137 Spanish medium-sized firms (SMEs).

We observe that the perspectives and idiosyncratic characteristics of family-firms (strongly influenced by their socioemotional wealth) will affect the way these companies invest and operate in the market, which would be more related to efficiency because of their higher willingness to continue the legacy of the business and their weak risk-bearing attributes.

Our study adopts a measure of familiness with a dummy variable, and not as a continuous variable as proposed by recent research. Therefore, our results although relevant and significant for the family firm literature, must be viewed carefully. Additional research could also retest some prior studies to depict differences caused by “real” family firm involvement.

Under a non-munificent environment, the financial strength maintained by firms will be highly relevant since this context could likely stress and influence their immediate future and viability, overcoming and blurring any other characteristic present in the firm or its managers.

This paper contributes to the family firm literature by offering insights into the nuanced dynamics between family and non-family firms during economic downturns, specifically examining their financial strength when different strategic options are pursued and when firms are managed by different type of managers.

Inspired by the internationalisation paths to prosperity of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), where narcissistic leaders are diligent about organisations but also pursue their dark goals, this study aims to concurrently examine two avenues for the internationalisation of narcissistic leaders in SMEs concerning the function of team organisational citizenship behaviours (OCB): corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) and digital business model innovation (BMI).

This study utilised a quantitative design emphasising mature theory research, and data was analysed using multiple regression analysis and Hayes' process model. The data for this study was collected via surveys from 270 SMEs in Vietnam.

The study showed that narcissistic Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) can penetrate the global market profoundly by utilising both the righteous path, which is based on the power of the times via BMI, and the unethical path, CSI. However, team devotion via OCB can mitigate the unethical conduct of narcissistic CEOs.

The study endeavoured to find a path to internationalisation for SMEs in emerging markets with high economic openness and increasingly close connections with international markets, via two strategies for SMEs to conquer the international market more successfully, and with utilising the foundations of CEO narcissism and team citizenship behaviour.

This study contributed to the theory of SME internationalisation by employing the resource-based view and upper-echelon theory, with the updated Uppsala model as its foundation.