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This study explores factors that influence the initiation of leadership coaching relationships that include externally employed coaches and school administrators.

This qualitative research study includes semi-structured interviews, observations and documents collected across three academic years within the context of a university-based leadership coaching program. Participants included six leadership coaches and six school administrators who participated in the program.

Qualitative analysis indicates that gender and race, prior professional experience, pre-existing professional relationships and the complexity of the district’s organizational structure influence the initiation of the coaching relationship.

Confidentiality restrictions imposed by the program limit opportunities for member checking and other forms of triangulation. Additional data collection using more expansive research methods would help address this limitation.

This study contributes to the sparse literature about leadership coaching with school administrators by describing how different factors influence initiation coaching relationships.

The field of international business (IB) formally welcomes and frequently calls for case study research, but the proportion of case study papers appearing in IB journals remains very small. This paper aims to support efforts to redress this imbalance by addressing an overlooked yet critical issue: the (mis)use of tenses when theorizing from case study findings. The authors reveal a pervasive use of the present tense and argue that this leads to decontextualization and, in turn, over-generalization. The paper also suggests ways in which this problem may be avoided in the future, thereby improving the credibility and status of case-based research and helping to de-marginalise it within IB.

A qualitative content analysis was applied to all (2,627) papers published between 2011 and 2021 in four leading IB journals. In total, 171 case study papers were identified over these 11 years, and a deeper content analysis was then performed to measure the extent of decontextualization/over-generalization implied by the inappropriate use of the present tense in the discussion and theorisation of research findings.

This study found that, out of 171 case study papers identified, 141 (82.5%) provided at least two instances of over-generalization as implied by the misuse of the present tense. However, some of these papers were found to feature statements that could be claimed to mitigate such inappropriate generalization. These mitigating factors included the repeated use of adverbial phrases denoting context and the use of a “propositional style” that clearly distinguished contextual findings from speculative, decontextualized generalizations. Nevertheless, 71 of the 171 (41.5%) papers still demonstrated inappropriate generalization, even after allowing for mitigating factors.

This study reveals a problematic writing practice and one which has arguably significantly contributed to the “decontextualization” problem critiqued in IB and management studies more broadly. The study also offers further insights into how decontextualization might be avoided, arguing that this problem would be significantly reduced if tenses were used appropriately in discussing and theorizing case study findings. Additionally, the study highlights the continued marginalization of qualitative research methods in IB and reinforces calls to address it.

Environmental philosophies have guided cultures throughout history and continue to do so. This paper uses a framework of environmental philosophies drawn from history and the present, to analyse contemporary corporate environmental reporting. The purpose of this paper is to interrogate the philosophical underpinnings of corporate reporting allows for a nuanced understanding of the relationship between corporate activities and nature, and in so doing demonstrates the moral practices of accounting for nature.

Three themes are extracted from a historical review of western environmental philosophy: dualism, transcendence and interconnectivity. These themes are applied to a sample of corporate environmental reports through discourse analysis, enabling the illustration of otherwise obscured moral characteristics of the corporate relationship with the natural environment.

This paper uses environmental philosophies to better understand some of the implicit messaging of corporate environmental reporting. Evidence of each of the three themes is found in a sample of environmental reports, predominantly dualism and interconnectivity.

Understanding that accounting is not just a technical, but also a social and moral practice expands the way the authors can interpret the outcomes of accounting. By presenting an exemplar of how accounting practice such as the corporate sustainability report can be analysed through a moral lens, this paper offers new insights intentioned to inform a more meaningful approach to environmental reporting.

A novel framework to explore the corporate sector’s relationship with the natural environment is presented. In light of current and predicted environmental changes, much of which has been attributed to the impact of corporate activities, the importance of a detailed explication of this relationship – such as the one proposed here – becomes imperative.

Organizational scholars studying compensation often place an emphasis on certain employee groups (e.g., executives). Missing from this discussion is research on the compensation systems for low-wage jobs. In this review, the authors argue that workers in low-wage jobs represent a unique employment group in their understanding of rent allocation in organizations. The authors address the design of compensation strategies in organizations that lead to different outcomes for workers in low-wage jobs versus other workers. Drawing on and integrating human resource management (HRM), inequality, and worker literatures with compensation literature, the authors describe and explain compensation systems for low-wage work. The authors start by examining workers in low-wage work to identify aspects of these workers’ jobs and lives that can influence their health, performance, and other organizationally relevant outcomes. Next, the authors explore the compensation systems common for this type of work, building on the compensation literature, by identifying the low-wage work compensation designs, proposing the likely explanations for why organizations craft these designs, and describing the worker and organizational outcomes of these designs. The authors conclude with suggestions for future research in this growing field and explore how organizations may benefit by rethinking their approach to compensation for low-wage work. In sum, the authors hope that this review will be a foundational work for those interested in investigating organizational compensation issues at the intersection of inequality and worker and organizational outcomes.

The academic–practitioner gap has been a widely discussed and well-established issue. Despite numerous studies conducted in this area, empirical evidence reveals that the gap is widening and also emphasizes the exigency to bridge this gap. Hence, the purpose of this study is to propose an acceptable solution that will fill this lacuna.

The study adopts the qualitative research methodology and was based on the system theory (ST) and the institutional theory (IT). Interviews, based on a semi-structured questionnaire, were conducted, focusing on three categories, namely individuals with solely academic experience, individuals with both academic and industrial exposure and business leaders. The unit of analysis was the individual.

The study, which unearthed some rich and challenging evidence from the respondents, reveals that gaining industrial exposure and working on continuous professional development are vital for academics to narrow or even close this gap. In addition, serving as apex members at board level or in professional bodies, serving global organizations as lead consultants and working on research collaborations are other important dimensions for academics.

This study introduces an emerging model named the “Pentagon Model” and develops a corporate index (C-index) for academics to earn, similar to the h-index. The study also explains the operationalization of the C-index based on the proposed algorithm. Hence, it is the envisaged that this study will change the landscape of the academic sphere in practical terms.

This study was carried out with the sole intention of bridging the gap between academics and practitioners. The proposed model and the index, which were developed by the author purely based on the outcome of this study, pave the way for many future research studies, not only to further improve the C-index but also to minimize disparities in transdisciplinary work between academics and practitioners.

Studies in corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure were initially focused more on disclosure “Quantity” than “Quality” and while they have started to explore “Disclosure Quality”, their assessment mechanisms are found to be immature. Thus, while a number of papers have sought to assess the quality of CSR disclosure, this paper aims to suggest an approach tied closely to both expectations in assessing “quality” derived from the Conceptual Framework for Financial Reporting (revised 2018) and the global reporting initiative. The outcome is to offer a best practice approach to assessing CSR disclosure quality.

In this paper, prior literature is reviewed, qualitative characteristics from the Conceptual Framework for Financial Reporting (revised 2018) and globally recognised guidelines such as the GRI are reviewed. The framework for a “CSR disclosure quality index” as an assessment tool to assess CSR disclosure quality is developed from qualitative characteristics and criteria identified.

The proposed CSR disclosure quality index is developed in stages from the qualitative characteristics identified in the Conceptual Framework for Financial Reporting (revised 2018) and criteria identified from the guidelines discussed. A table was then developed linking the qualitative characteristics to criteria providing a Likert scale approach to assessing the disclosures made by companies to make an assessment of the quality of the companies’ reports. It is argued this provides a robust assessment, being a direct and comprehensive measure of disclosure quality.

As with most qualitative work, there are alternative approaches to establishing an index, but the authors believe this is an approach offering links (and, therefore, credibility) to globally recognised guidelines in the assessment of CSR disclosure quality. Future work could enhance the alignment of this index with the sustainable development goals (SDGs), building on the preliminary connections established in this study.

At a practical level this index offers an approach to reviewing the quality of CSR disclosures which could prove useful to policymakers and in the future development and expansion of this framework offering greater objectivity to assessments and justification for proposed improvement in reporting practice. Also, this index serves as a benchmarking tool for companies to meet the disclosure expectations of stakeholders.

This approach has the potential to substantially fulfil stakeholder expectations by addressing the growing demand for transparency in this area, while avoiding practices that could be perceived as superficial or misleading (greenwashing). Focusing on social issues enables stronger connections between companies and their stakeholders. Furthermore, the index helps companies link their CSR efforts with SDGs and show their commitment to long-term social value building in discussion of governance factors to show accountability expectations are being met.

This paper contributes to CSR disclosure quality literature and provides a reliable method of assessing the quality of CSR disclosures. Opportunities for further and broader developments can be envisaged while offering a credible and reliable approach.

This chapter considers the evolution of diet culture in the digital age, particularly focussing on the proliferation of anti-diet and holistic wellness sentiments, which paradoxically work to conceal the ongoing persistence of diet culture. A discourse analysis approach was conducted on ‘What I Eat In A Day’ (WIEIAD) YouTube videos to examine the ways in which diet choices are narrated and rationalised to achieve the illusion of the ‘disappearance’ of diet culture. The author explores how this has produced the pressure to have (or more accurately perform) a ‘healthy’ relationship with food. This is ambiguously defined and embodied online, but some recurring themes have been observed through my analysis. The author argues that these WIEIAD videos often risk obscuring the persistence of diet culture by positioning it in the past when, as this chapter will attempt to demonstrate, it is very much embedded in the current diet discourse. Weight loss and appearance are downplayed as motivations for engaging in health and wellness. However, they are very much still beneath the surface. While the conversation around dieting might be less overtly problematic than it was in the past, there continues to be a significant amount of vigilance and effort required for women to meet conventional beauty standards. In addition to the material practice of dieting, there is now the pressure to perform the emotional labour of ‘talking away’ accusations of disordered eating, upholding the premature ideal of a post-diet culture era.

Increasing reliance on autonomous systems requires confidence in the accuracies produced from computer vision classification algorithms. Computer vision (CV) for video classification provides phenomenal abilities, but it often suffers from “flickering” of results. Flickering occurs when the CV algorithm switches between declared classes over successive frames. Such behavior causes a loss of trust and confidence in their operations.

This “flickering” behavior often results from CV algorithms treating successive observations as independent, which ignores the dependence inherent in most videos. Bayesian neural networks are a potential remedy to this issue using Bayesian priors. This research compares a traditional video classification neural network to its Bayesian equivalent based on performance and capabilities. Additionally, this work introduces the concept of smoothing to reduce the opportunities for “flickering.”

The augmentation of Bayesian layers to CNNs matched with an exponentially decaying weighted average for classifications demonstrates promising benefits in reducing flickering. In the best case the proposed Bayesian CNN model reduces flickering by 67% while maintaining both overall accuracy and class level accuracy.

The training of the Bayesian CNN is more computationally demanding and the requirement to classify frames multiple times reduces resulting framerate. However, for some high surety mission applications this is a tradeoff the decision analyst may be willing to make.

Our research expands on previous efforts by first using a variable number of frames to produce the moving average as well as by using an exponentially decaying moving average in conjunction with Bayesian augmentation.

To present an analytical framework for conducting critical dialogic accounting and accountability-based participatory action research to further democratisation, social change and empowering marginalised groups, and to reflect on its application in a Bangladeshi nongovernmental organisation's microfinance program.

The framework, synthesising prior CDAA theorising and agonistic-inspired action research, is described, followed by a discussion of the methodological challenges when applying this during a ten-year, ongoing intervention seeking greater voice for poor, female borrowers.

Six methodological issues emerged: investigating contested issues rather than organisation-centric research; identifying and engaging divergent discourses; engaging marginalised groups, activists and/or dominant powerholders; addressing power and power relations; building alliances for change; and evaluating and disseminating results. The authors discuss these issues and how the participatory action research methods and analytical tools used evolved in response to emergent challenges, and key lessons learned in a study of microfinance and women's empowerment.

The paper addresses calls within and beyond accounting to develop critical, engaged and change-oriented scholarship adopting an agonistic research methodology. It uses a novel critical dialogic accounting and accountability-based participatory action research approach. The reflexive examination of its application engaging NGOs, social activists, and poor women to challenge dominant discourses and practices, and build alliances for change, explores issues encountered. The paper concludes with reflective questions to aid researchers interested in undertaking similar studies in other contentious, power-laden areas concerning marginalised groups.

This study aims to examine whether and how the experience of specialized external governance mechanisms mandated by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 – the actuary and auditor – affect pension plan funding.

This study uses data from annual pension plan regulatory reports (Form 5500), Form 10-K filings, Form DEF 14A filings (company proxy statements) and publicly available data sources. The hand-collected data include information related to the pension plan’s actuary and auditor and various pension plan data disclosed in the company’s financial statement footnotes.

The author finds that more experienced actuaries and auditors are associated with better funded pension plans, especially when the company has higher financial risk or lower board independence. Additional analyses indicate that companies with more experienced actuaries and pension plan auditors are more likely to make higher annual pension plan contributions and hold fewer Level 3 fair value assets.

The dearth of pension plan governance research generally focuses on whether and how internal governance mechanisms affect pension plan funding. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first empirical study of the relationship between external pension plan governance mechanisms and pension plan funding.