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Currently, many studies have shown an increasing interest in owner-dynamic capabilities (ODCs). Existing studies mainly focus on the dynamic capability basis and capability development within the owner organization, whereas they rarely analyze the capability mobilization within the network of participants in megaprojects. Therefore, this study aims to explain the interaction and evolution of the mobilization strategies of ODCs and the cooperative strategies of other participants.

This study develops a tripartite evolutionary game model to analyze the evolutionarily stable strategy of the owner, the reciprocal participants and the general participants. Results are numerically simulated with a validation case. The asymptotic stability of multiple group strategies is discussed under the replicator dynamic system.

This study suggests that resource complementarity significantly reduces the difficulty of mobilization. Moreover, these strategies are only effective with sufficient ODCs. The results indicate that reciprocal participants are more sensitive to the change in resource complementarity.

This study provides strategic guidance for mobilizing ODCs in megaprojects to better embrace uncertainty and stress, contributing to the dynamic capability literature with an evolutionary game approach. And new insight for the study of reciprocity preference in megaprojects is also provided.

This study aims to explore how firm-level and country-level sustainability governance can shape corporate sustainability performance.

This study uses an international sample of 2,460 observations from 2010 to 2019 for firms in environmentally-sensitive industries (i.e. energy). Various measures have been used to measure corporate sustainability performance, firm-level and country-level sustainability governance. This study uses a range of statistical models, including fixed effects, random effects, a two-step generalized method of moments, along multiple sensitivity checks to provide accurate empirical evidence.

A specialized sustainability committee and environmental management team enhance corporate sustainability performance. Likewise, a country’s regulatory quality and its environmental performance positively affect the sustainability performance of firms operating in this country. Besides, companies operating in a country with a higher gender gap have a lower corporate sustainability performance.

Energy firms should prioritize establishing sustainability committees or environmental management teams to enhance sustainability practices. Likewise, policymakers should develop robust regulatory frameworks that promote sustainability. Besides, countries should enforce policies promoting gender equality to enhance corporate sustainability.

This study contributes to the literature on environmentally-sensitive industries by examining both firm-level and country-level sustainability governance attributes using three proxies (environmental, social and governance, sustainability strategy and environmental performance) to measure sustainability performance, providing a holistic perspective of how governance attributes influence sustainability outcomes in energy industries.

Drawing on signalling and impression management theories, this study aims to examine a bidirectional association between managerial tone in earnings conference calls and financial performance.

The sample includes non-financial firms listed in the FTSE 350 index during the period 2010–2015. Managerial tone was measured using positive and negative keywords based on the Loughran-McDonald Sentiment Word Lists, while return on assets was used as a proxy for firms’ financial performance.

The findings indicate that current financial performance positively affects the managerial tone in earnings conference calls. Likewise, the results also show that there is a positive relationship between managerial tone in earnings conference calls and firms’ future financial performance.

The results have important implications for top management to use more virtual communication media (i.e. earnings conference calls) to continue managing their relationships with financial stakeholders and helping them better understand financial performance, especially in countries where holding such calls is not yet part of firms’ policy.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies that explore the relationship between managerial tone in earnings conference calls and financial performance. Overall, this study contributes to managerial tone literature and holds significant theoretical and practical implications.

This study aims to conduct an exploratory analysis to investigate whether changes occurred in the readability of sustainability reporting narratives following a reputational crisis.

Drawing from crisis communication and impression management studies, the authors explore whether a reputational crisis may influence management to adapt the readability of narratives. Using the reputational crisis following the Costa Crociere incident in 2012 as a case study, the authors analyse the readability of sustainability reports before and after the crisis through the multidimensional linguistic software Coh-Metrix.

Comparisons across the three main sections of sustainability reporting narratives (letter to stakeholders, environmental performance and social performance) reveal substantial changes in linguistic characteristics after the crisis, especially concerning the sections devoted to environmental performance. However, the different trends of changes among sections do not allow for a clear interpretation of manipulative intent.

This study contributes to crisis communication research by focusing on readability, an under-explored yet crucial aspect of crisis communication strategies. It also enhances impression management literature by investigating readability manipulation in post-crisis sustainability reporting narratives. Furthermore, the study offers a methodological contribution by proposing the use of multidimensional linguistic software like Coh-Metrix to explore deep language structure levels not easily detectable with commonly used readability measures.

Heterogeneous risk disclosure has been proven to improve the efficiency of new stock issuance, but excessive risk disclosure during the IPO may lead to irrational underestimation of the company, which is different from the original intention of management's detailed disclosure. Therefore, this study aims to examine the impact of IPO heterogeneous risk disclosure on earnings management motivations from the information transfer perspective of earnings management.

The sample includes 2,000 listed companies listed firms on Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 2007 to 2022. This study uses the pretrained ERNIE model to measure text similarity in the prospectus to measure the heterogeneity of IPO risk disclosure.

This study empirically finds that heterogeneous IPO risk disclosure suppresses the opportunistic motivation of earnings management because managers tend to use earnings management to leverage information transmission functions. Such an effect is more pronounced in firms with higher analyst attention, lower marketization levels and non-state-owned. And heterogeneous risk disclosure may inhibit management’s over-investment behavior, thereby reducing the possibility of management engaging in opportunistic earnings management. Besides, price discounts are used to distinguish opportunistic and non-opportunistic earnings management and carry out a quasi-natural experimental design to demonstrate that marketization can enhance the relationship between heterogeneous risk disclosure and earnings management.

This study contributes evidence regarding the economic consequences of managerial earnings management behavior related to heterogeneous IPO risk disclosure. It supports highlighted firms in the IPO risk information disclosure to mitigate potential adverse outcomes through earnings management. This contributes to the literature and enhances information transparency in the capital market, fostering the healthy development of China’s capital market.

The purposes of this paper are to explore accounting talk events and to contribute to the literature by presenting a model of accounting talk genres.

In the qualitative tradition, interviews were conducted with accountants in both private and public sector. The pandemic provided a natural experiment, as the implemented restrictions gave rise to a situation in which accountants had to prepare and communicate numbers while working remotely. Using sociolinguistics, the paper analyzes the interactions between accountants and other organizational members when remotely preparing and communicating reports.

This study develops a conceptual model that illustrates the significant influence of accounting small talk on the production and presentation of financial information. The analysis reveals various genres of accounting talk in the everyday practice of management accountants. In so doing, the study makes three contributions. First, it provides a conceptual model of accounting talk. Second, it highlights the role of accounting small talk in creating a less risky environment for reflection, which facilitates the exchange of thoughts and ideas. Third, it offers an explanation of why even so-called bean counters can benefit from accounting small talk. It suggests that such informal communication can not only enhance efficiency by helping to ensure accurate accounts but also improve quality by aligning the numbers with more realistic forecasts.

We encourage future studies of accounting discourse in settings that are more similar to everyday work environments. Additional insights could also be gained by drawing upon other methods, such as conversation analysis and ethnographic studies. This paper may help controllers to be more aware of how they use talk in addition to numbers. The knowledge provided here is also important for the education of future controllers.

The paper provides a conceptual model of how organizational members talk about accounting, which may enable a more detailed analysis of accounting talk. The study also highlights the importance of accounting small talk, which has been largely overlooked in accounting literature.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between political connections and the narrative disclosure tone of management discussion and analysis (MD&A) reports in Indonesia during the normal economic (2018 to 2019) and the COVID-19 pandemic (2020 to 2021) periods.

Data on political connections were collected manually from annual reports, government websites and online search engines. Meanwhile, the narrative disclosure tone was measured from the MD&A reports according to the wordlist by Loughran and McDonalds (2011) processed with Diction 7 software. Multiple linear regression was used to test 414 nonfinancial corporations listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange for the 2018–2021 period.

Under normal economic conditions, the results support impression management theory, where political connections are used to frame information with a more positive tone. Data obtained during the COVID-19 pandemic, on the other hand, confirm the incremental information theory. Furthermore, companies connected to actively serving state leaders consistently present MD&A reports with a more positive tone in both research periods. Proximity to legislative and government institutions allows politically connected companies (with members of the parliament or any political figures/party leaders/officials with strategic functions) to present MD&A reports with a negative tone and more information during the pandemic. The results are robust to alternative measures and endogeneity testing.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore the association between political connections and narrative disclosure tone in Indonesia by considering the moderating role of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The purpose of this study is to examine the audit efficiency and timeliness of Big 4 auditors relative to non-Big 4 auditors, where audit efficiency is defined as the auditor’s ability to conduct an audit more quickly or with fewer resources while still achieving effective outcomes.

The authors use audit report lags (also referred to as audit delay) as a proxy for audit timeliness and efficiency, controlling for audit quality and audit fees (audit input). The authors use a propensity-score matching (PSM) approach to construct a pseudorandom sample in which each non-Big 4 client is matched with a similar Big 4 client based on their characteristics and audit quality, to control for potential endogeneity related to self-selection bias in this setting.

The authors find that non-Big 4 auditors are associated with shorter audit delays than Big 4 auditors. Additional analysis of the matched sample reveals that non-Big 4 auditors charge lower fees than Big 4 auditors do after controlling for the Big 4 premium. These findings do not support the notion that Big 4 auditors conduct audits more efficiently than non-Big 4 auditors do.

These results could be of interest to the management of public firms, audit committees, investors and regulators; provide valuable insights into the performance of audit firms in varying client environments; and contribute to a better understanding of audit timeliness and efficiency.

There is a dearth of knowledge regarding how user dependency offers valuable resources to develop the intellectual capital of social streaming apps (SSAs) companies. This study aims to integrate major conceptual components of the UandD model, identify contextualized goal-oriented SSA dependency and empirically evaluate their interrelated user-dependency relationships in the SSA context.

A mixed-methods approach was utilized in this study. First, user gratifications were elicited through a qualitative approach, considering the exploratory stage of the SSA phenomenon. Second, statistical methods were applied to investigate and extract the sub-dimensions of SSA dependency. At last, a research model was developed grounded on the UandD model and empirically validated using the quantitative approach.

The results validated the gratification-dependency-attitude-behavior relationships hypothesized by the UandD framework in SSA. The role of user-SSA dependency in enhancing intellectual capital in the social media industry has been highlighted in this study.

This research not only provides an opportunity for the UandD model to realize its theoretical potential as envisioned by scholars but also contributes to the scholarship on social streaming apps and media dependency theory by conceptualizing goal-oriented dependency in SSAs.

The research results will guide digital media practitioners to a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between their users and modern digital media apps and thus empower the practitioners to better manage their intellectual capital based on the facilitation of their users’ dependency.

This work is one of the pioneers in contextualizing the UandD model in the SSA field, refining and measuring the SSA dependency and its distinct subdimensions and employing mixed-methods to offer a comprehensive understanding of how user dependency boosts intellectual capital in the SSA industry.

Considering a normative conception of democracy based on the values of autonomy and inclusiveness, there are many reasons to argue that a democratic global financial governance (GFG) is necessary. However, from an empirical approach, the democratization of GFG seems to be very hard to implement. Taking that into consideration, we discuss the challenges and the feasibility of a democratic GFG. We argue that both the skeptics' negative response and the positive one based on abstract premises are unsuited. A democratic GFG will only be feasible if its institutional framework has as reference a concept of democracy which is compatible with the complexity of this field, and a flexible design suitable for facing its multilevel democratic deficit. The BRICS, on the one hand, are key actors for GFG reforms. However, on the other hand, we face a very unfavorable political scenario to the thematization of the GFG democratization by the BRICS. The literature on this topic is vast, but there is a lack of comprehensive studies. We seek to fulfill this gap and, in addition to our own theoretical contribution, provide a framework for future specific empirical-normative research.