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This paper delves into the enduring influence of Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s groundbreaking work, “Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples,” while examining how the concept of “struggle” has facilitated Māori-centric nursing education.

Utilizing a case study approach, a collaboration between Māori and non-Māori nursing academics describes the development of two Māori-centric postgraduate courses. This approach allows for an exploration of the contextual factors surrounding sites of “struggle” in course development and efforts towards decolonization and indigenization.

The evaluation of a Māori-centric postgraduate course is guided by Smith’s five key conditions for “struggle”. By illustrating the dynamic and intersecting nature of these conditions, the study reveals how various interests, tensions and relationships intersect within academia. We further show how the team actively sought viable solutions to strengthen the Maori nursing workforce and those nurses serving Maori communities through the development of tailored courses.

This case study offers a unique perspective on the tensions inherent in the struggles faced by Māori women and their allies, who utilize cultural frameworks as sites of resistance within Western institutions. We highlight how education can carve out new spaces for Māori within their cultural context and the broader academic sphere. Inspired by Smith’s work, this dialogue transcends academic boundaries, echoing the values, knowledge and experiences of Indigenous peoples marginalized by colonialism.

This paper explores the relationship between gender diversity on corporate boards and the accuracy of analysts’ earnings forecasts. The study focuses on gender-diverse boards as effective monitors, which are expected to influence corporate disclosures, reducing information asymmetry positively and improving forecast accuracy. The unique context of India’s gender quota policy on corporate boards and its relatively weak corporate governance structure offers an ideal setting to investigate this relationship.

The study utilises the generalised method of moments dynamic panel regression to address this research objective, analysing data from 217 Indian firms listed on the National Stock Exchange from 2014 to 2019.

The findings reveal that greater gender diversity on corporate boards positively impacts forecast accuracy. Specifically, having more women directors on the board enhances forecast accuracy, with a critical mass of women directors (more than one woman) further amplifying this effect. The study also shows that independent women directors significantly improve forecast accuracy, whereas grey women directors (those with family connections or non-independent roles) negatively affect it.

This study contributes significantly in two key aspects. Firstly, it sheds light on the value of women directors on boards in a country where women’s representation is mandated. Secondly, the research highlights the crucial role of independent women directors in ensuring robust financial oversight, particularly in an emerging economy.

The purpose of this paper is to shed more light on the motivations for environmental, social and governance (ESG) risk management by agri-food companies and the neutralization techniques used to legitimize the measures taken in this area.

Based on an analysis of the sustainability reporting of 135 companies, this study shows the interdependence between the main motivations for ESG risk management and the neutralization techniques used in disclosing information about their exposure to threats or negative events that could damage their image.

The results of the study allow us to understand the four main complementary neutralization techniques used to obfuscate the negative consequences of risks related to agri-food activities: mitigating ESG threats, addressing global risks through corporate leadership, taking advantage of sustainability trends and turning risks into opportunities.

Managers can use the results of this paper to identify the best management approaches to take ESG risks into account more substantially in their company.

Ultimately, this study is important to improve the practices of agri-food companies and therefore their social legitimacy.

The examination of these neutralization techniques and their underlying motivations makes important contributions to the emerging literature on ESG risk management. The study also contributes to research on the disclosure of negative information that can damage a company’s reputation and on the strategies that companies use to promote the social acceptability of their activities.

The governance of our towns and cities requires an approach that connects people with nature and places. Digital technology can be the glue that does this, if it serves the needs of the various stakeholders, including urban communities. It means identifying the potential connections across people, digital, and place themes, examining successful approaches, and exploring some of the current practice (or lack of it) in spatial planning and smart cities. This can be considered using a range of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies with other methodologies which combine the use of socioeconomic and environmental data about the urban environment. This ambient domain sensing can provide the ecological and other data to show how digital connectivity is addressing the placemaking challenges alongside providing implications for urban governance and communities.

Allocation problems in accounting require joint costs to be allocated among participating agents. In this setting, however, unfair allocations can stifle cooperation and lead to inefficient group outcomes. Then, what qualifies as fair enough for individual agents to agree to cooperate and extract joint benefits? Building on prior analytical literature that has offered perspectives involving joint cost allocations, we experimentally evaluate two common notions of fairness that present competing predictions in the cost allocation context – proportionality and equality. We operationalize two notions of fairness using a behavioral approach and examine which fairness notion prevails in cost allocation problems. More specifically, we examine fairness considerations in the cost allocation context using a modified ultimatum game, where joint cost savings can only be acquired through cooperation between two agents and individual contributions are varied transparently. Our experimental evidence suggests that fairness considerations in cost allocations coincide more with the proportionality notion when individuals make different contributions to create joint benefits. These findings provide important insights on the key rationale underlying the prevalent cost allocation method in accounting practices and the design of fair cost allocations that promote cooperation among agents.

This paper examines the moderating role of firms’ litigation environment on the association between gender diversity and financial reporting quality.

This study draws on a sample of US firms to examine the moderating role of firms’ litigation environment on the association between gender diversity and financial reporting quality. Firm-specific financial data come from Compustat. To measure the firms’ litigation environment, we use state-level datasets from the Lawsuit Climate Survey conducted for the US Chamber Institute for Legal Reform by the Harris Poll.

Findings suggest that firm litigation environment moderates gender diversity, as defined by female members on the board to subdue our first proxy for financial reporting quality (accruals-based earnings management), but our second proxy for financial reporting quality (real-activities manipulations) increases in a firm’s litigation environment. To the extent that our results hold after controlling for firms’ reputation indicates that female members on the board are sensitive to reputational loss and protect firms’ reputation in a litigation environment.

The study is based on a specific country, limiting the generalizability of the findings.

The findings provide support for promoters and advocates of gender diversity in corporate boards. Specifically, it shows the importance of gender diversity policies in business and society.

This study is the first to examine the moderating role of firms’ litigation environment on the association between gender diversity and financial reporting quality. The study provides novel evidence and shows that the litigation environment moderates gender diversity to improve financial reporting quality in the short-term (by decreasing accruals manipulation). In firms’ litigation environment, when female members on the board are restrained from engaging in accruals earnings management, they shift to value-destroying and costly real activities to maintain reputation and firm performance. To the extent that we control for the potential effects of firms’ reputation and financial performance, our findings suggest that ethical concerns are likely to drive female members on the board to produce high-quality financial reports.

To argue current calls to address grand challenges like income inequality are unlikely to succeed until the academy acknowledges how accounting is constitutive of these problems. We demonstrate how accounting is part of the problem because of its adherence to a legal model of the corporation erected on false suppositions.

Using multiple disciplines, e.g. history, economics, law and philosophy, pertaining to the nature of the corporate form, we present a logical argument that the official telos of accounting obstructs any fruitful effort to address grand challenges.

The global legal concept governing corporations (an aggregate of members) makes corporations a major cause of the grand challenges humans face. Adherence to a legal theory of the corporation leads accounting policy to rationalize income and wealth inequality by subsuming the legal powers of corporations to expropriate wealth into a singular maximand labeled “earnings.”

Though accounting is essentially “of” law, scholarly efforts to understand accounting’s social role are based on an information metaphor. We provide reasons for skepticism of any efforts addressing grand challenges until accounting acknowledges the legal nature of its social role as a regulator of business conduct. There are no accounting solutions to grand challenges without acknowledging how the accepted legal nature of the corporate form makes the corporation the cause of the grand challenges we face.

This paper aims to examine cases and incidents of workplace sexual harassment and propose policy measures to prevent and handle them in the Nepalese context.

It is based on document analysis and a survey. It raises two research questions and to address them, legal cases were analysed and a field survey was undertaken to collect the responses of female employees.

Sexual harassment is a serious and prevalent issue for female employees in Nepal. Sexual abuse, teasing and touching bodies are common forms of sexual harassment observed in Nepalese workplaces. Male colleagues, managers and clients/customers are accused as the main perpetrators. Some female employees are harassed through the use of social media including the internet, Facebook, Viber messaging, text messages and phone calls. At the organisational level, low employment opportunities, female employees’ involvement in informal sector work and less choice for them to shift jobs in the market are the major reasons for what is happening at workplaces for female employees.

This paper excludes harassment cases of male employees. The nature and gravity of harassment issues and impacts vary across countries; thus, it is difficult to generalise the results of this research across countries.

This research could be an eye-opener for policymakers, managers and researchers to engage proactively and intensively in diagnosing and curing sexual harassment incidents in workplaces.

This paper provides evidence of sexual harassment cases and some policy measures to prevent and handle such problems at work. These measures can raise awareness among organisations and employees about the rights of women and the detrimental effects of sexual harassment.

This paper aims to investigate whether gender-diverse boards and top management teams (TMTs) reduce undesirable environmental social governance (ESG) behavior and whether a critical mass of women in leadership is necessary to influence this outcome. In addition, the authors study whether differences in the levels of national commitment to gender-equality policies affect the effectiveness of gender-diverse boards and management in curbing ESG misconduct.

This study examines the role of women directors and women executives in ESG misconduct using a European sample of analysis of 2,994 firm-year observations from 2015 to 2020.

The authors find that gender diversity effectively prevents ESG misconduct only in countries with strong national policies supporting gender equality. Specifically, women directors and executives significantly reduce ESG misconduct in these countries, demonstrating the complementary role of gender diversity and national equality policies. In addition, female chief executive officers are more likely to curb negative ESG practices in firms operating within gender-equal corporate environments, noting that female chief executive officers are not effective in reducing irresponsible ESG behavior when they are not supported by a critical mass of women directors or executives.

This paper finds novel evidence that the influence of female representation on ESG misconduct is not linear but conditional on the level of female proportion; women in the minority (usually under 3) can scarcely influence group decisions because their specific female attributes are only evident when the visibility and legitimacy of the female group are high enough. Firms led by female chief executive officers seem to reduce ESG misconduct, especially when their chief suites are above a critical threshold. But queen bee female chief executive officers are not effective in reducing adverse ESG activity if their boards and TMTs are not gender diverse; the joint effect of women in different hierarchical positions contributes to decreasing ESG failures.

These findings are useful for policymakers because they show that although there is growing social concern about business gender equality and increasing regulatory efforts through soft/hard gender quotas, stakeholders will not completely benefit from firm gender diversity without national support for gender equality.

This study contributes to the sustainable development literature by examining the direct effects of gender diversity at multiple levels of a firm’s hierarchy (chief suite, board, TMTs), as well as addressing the gap between firm gender diversity and national gender equality policies as mechanisms to reduce ESG misconduct. It also explores the queen bee phenomenon, noting that female leaders in non-diverse organizations often adapt their leadership style to align with masculine corporate cultures.