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This study investigates the impact of organizational culture on the governance transparency of audit firms operating in the emerging market of the United Arab Emirates. The study unpacks how organizational culture influences audit firms' perceptions and practices regarding transparency in leadership, operations and reporting.

The primary data for this study is collected through an online survey distributed to auditing firms in the UAE, with statistical analysis conducted using multiple regression models and robustness checks. The survey is designed to assess transparency practices in leadership, operations and reporting based on the Financial Reporting Council’s (UK) audit firm governance code. Then, the data is analyzed using SPSS software, representing a diverse sample of auditors from different firm types, ownership structures and sizes.

The study reveals that organizational culture significantly influences audit firms' perceptions of governance transparency practices. Specifically, cultural aspects such as public interest, improvements and consultation positively and significantly impact voluntary transparency in leadership, operations and reporting. Notably, reporting practices are particularly affected by organizational cultural norms and values. Furthermore, transparency practices vary based on audit firms' size, type and industry. These findings offer valuable guidance for audit firms, regulators and accounting standards setters in developing suitable governance mechanisms for global audit firms, including developed and developing countries.

Future studies may extend the scope by including additional transparency issues such as independent non-executives and dialogue practices. Further, it would be valuable to investigate the influence of organizational culture components, such as symbols and assumptions shared by employees, on governance transparency and to include an additional set of control variables, such as corporate governance. By incorporating these aspects into research, a more comprehensive understanding of transparency practices within organizations can be achieved.

This study offers directions for stakeholders in the audit industry, aiding them in developing effective governance strategies both locally and internationally. The study further highlights ways audit firms can foster a culture of transparency, regulators can establish relevant frameworks, and accounting standards setters can contribute to developing consistent and appropriate governance mechanisms across different countries.

This study explores the influence of organizational culture on governance transparency in UAE audit firms, emphasizing the role of cultural elements in shaping transparency practices. It provides insights for enhancing governance mechanisms in global audit firms. Previous studies dealt with different determinants of audit behavior and performance. This study extends this prior literature by focusing on organizational culture as a vital underlying informal mechanism for controlling agency relationships.

This study examines the impact of workplace bullying on workers’ innovative behavior, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and affective commitment while taking burnout into account as a potential mediator.

We hypothesize that workplace bullying will have a detrimental effect on employees’ capacity for innovative behavior and OCB, as well as impair their affective commitment to the company, based on the Conservation of Resource theory. We used cluster sampling to gather data from 249 bank employees, using structural equation modeling to evaluate our assumptions.

According to our research, there is a strong negative correlation between workplace bullying and innovative behavior, OCB and a reduction in affective commitment. Additionally, burnout was found to be a key mediator between these outcomes and workplace bullying, indicating a critical role for burnout in spreading the negative impacts of bullying on employees’ attitudes and behaviors.

The results of this study show how bullying at work harms employees’ innovative behavior, OCB and affective commitment, which might eventually lower organizational productivity and performance. It is important to develop a culture of creativity, increase employee engagement and strengthen organizational commitment by building a friendly and courteous work environment. Collectively addressing burnout and workplace bullying will increase employee well-being, job happiness and overall organizational success.

The study aims to identify the practical borders of AI legal personality and accountability in human-centric services.

Using a framework tailored for AI studies, this research analyses structured interview data collected from auditors based in Poland.

The study identified new constructs to complement the taxonomy of arguments for AI legal personality: cognitive strain, consciousness, cyborg paradox, reasoning replicability, relativism, AI misuse, excessive human effort and substitution.

The insights presented herein are primarily derived from the perspectives of Polish auditors. There is a need for further exploration into the viewpoints of other key stakeholders, such as lawyers, judges and policymakers, across various global contexts.

The findings of this study hold significant potential to guide the formulation of regulatory frameworks tailored to AI applications in human-centric services. The proposed sui generis AI personality institution offers a dynamic and adaptable alternative to conventional legal personality models.

The outcomes of this research contribute to the ongoing public discourse on AI’s societal impact. It encourages a balanced assessment of the potential advantages and challenges associated with granting legal personality to AI systems.

This paper advocates for establishing a sui generis AI personality institution alongside a joint accountability model. This dual framework addresses the current uncertainties surrounding human, general AI and super AI characteristics and facilitates the joint accountability of responsible AI entities and their ultimate beneficiaries.

The study aims to determine whether a relationship exists between the potential significance of corporate controversies for stakeholders and how organisations respond to them in their annual and sustainability reports.

This paper employs content analysis on annual and sustainability reports of 48 listed companies from the Refinitiv database. The logit regression was used to estimate the model.

The study revealed that the main factors increasing the probability of a controversial issue being addressed in a corporate report are the controversy’s potential significance, companies’ financial performance and lawsuits.

Our study has three major limitations. These are a relatively small sample of companies and reports, focusing on disclosures made in corporate reports and omitting other channels of communication, for example, social media, and a certain amount of subjectivity in the process of coding information.

Former studies show that corporations face a serious risk of their hypocritical strategies becoming too evident for stakeholder groups. Our findings suggest that the risk is already materialising and may undermine the idea of CSR and sustainability reporting.

Our research focuses on high-profile adverse incidents widely reported in the media, the omission of which from corporate reports seems to constitute a particular case of organised hypocrite. It also demonstrates that companies use an impression management strategy to defuse adverse publicity and that major controversies cause minor ones to be omitted from their reports.

India’s efforts to achieve large-scale financial inclusion are challenged by growing concerns related to the stability and profitability of the overall banking system. Although a rising dependence on digital finance and the acceptability of wallet-based payments was also visible during the post-demonetisation era and the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic, issues related to bank stability and profitability could be addressed through the extension of digital financial services (DFS), making the system more transparent and resilient to internal as well as external perturbations.

The study provides empirical evidence to support the bank digitalisation and extension of DFS to achieve financial inclusion. The impact of digital finance, macroeconomic aspects and microprudential factors (bank specific) on stability is examined for selected Indian banks using quarterly observations spanning 2011Q1–2020Q4. The relationship between banking stability (measured through z-score and Sharpe ratio) is established with digitalisation factors using the instrumental variable regression two-stage least square -based panel regression. Robustness is tested using panel vector autoregression models.

Digital transactions including mobile banking, National Electronic Fund Transfer (NEFT) and Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) prove vital and significant in establishing stable banking activity in the Indian context across both public and private banking institutions. Access to broadband services provides a positive impetus in this direction. These issues could be addressed through the extension of DFS making the system more transparent and resilient to internal as well as external perturbations. As an implication, the adoption of innovative means of transaction could empower the financially excluded sections of society.

The novelty of this study is to bring the discussion of digitalisation and bank stability (riskiness) in the Indian context to light. As the first of its kind, this study paves the way for providing an empirical justification for promoting and achieving bank stability through digitalisation in the era of post-demonetisation and Covid-19.

Purpose: This chapter aims to identify and evaluate the various components of business model disclosures in an Integrated Report and ascertain how the notion of business model is perceived among practitioners.

Need for the Study: According to previous research, the International Integrated Reporting Council’s (IIRC) objective of improving corporate reporting by encouraging organisations to disclose their business model has not found the desired recognition. Therefore, the study elaborates on the various components of business model reporting and their implications on corporate reporting in general.

Methodology: A review of literature was conducted to identify and analyse research based on business models and their disclosures in integrated reporting. A narrative review was undertaken for selected literature.

Findings: The findings suggest that most large-sized organisations use integrated reporting for impression management and are not inclined to disclose too much about their business models for fear of competition. There is still a lack of clear understanding of what a business model should entail.

Practical Implication: This study adds to the research on business model disclosures in integrated reporting. Voluntary disclosure and a better understanding of such disclosures will prepare organisations of all sizes and industries for an event when Integrated Reporting becomes statutory.

Along the coronavirus pandemic, huge business challenges are facing as a result of collapsing customer demand and organisational significant changes supported by digital development, while the increasing social and environmental needs involve business and individuals. The authors argue that this trend is modifying organisational and market logic, replacing them with values and practices linked to community-based models. The present work aims to study the impact that smart working (SW) has on the worker, seen both as a member of the organisation and the social community.

The study data were collected from a computer-assisted web interview administered in 2020 to public employees working for health agencies across the Campania region, in South Italy. To test the conceptual model, partial least squares-structural equation modelling is used. Considering the abductive soul of the research, the study represents a pilot survey that will deliver stochastic results to be subsequently replicated in all Italian health agencies.

The results of the research highlighted how the evolutionary dynamics of SW employees tend towards a reconceptualisation of workspaces, a redefinition of time and emotions and a better balance between work and personal life, thus creating a greater space for social and community aspects and determining a greater involvement in their working life.

This research introduces a new win-win logic in the labour market, one capable of generating advantages for people, organisations and the entire social system by allowing workers to better reconcile working times with their personal needs and with flexibility demands coming from companies.

Monitoring corporate credit risk (CCR) has traditionally relied on such indicators as income, debt and inventory at a company level. These data are usually released on a quarterly or annual basis by the target company and include, exclusively, the financial data of the target company. As a result of this exclusiveness, the models for monitoring credit risk usually fail to account for some significant information from different sources or channels, like the data of its supply chain partner companies and other closely relevant data yet available from public networks, and it is these seldom used data that can help unveil the immediate CCR changes and how the risk is being propagated along the supply chain. This study aims to discuss the a forementioned issues.

Going beyond the existing CCR prediction data, this study intends to address the impact of supply chain data and network activity data on CCR prediction, by integrating machine learning technology into the prediction to verify whether adding new data can improve the predictability.

The results show that the predictive errors of the datasets after adding supply chain data and network activity data to them are made the ever least. Moreover, intelligent algorithms like support vector machine (SVM), compared to traditionally used methods, are better at processing nonlinear datasets and mining complex relationships between multi-variable indicators for CCR evaluation.

This study indicates that bringing in more information of multiple data sources combined with intelligent algorithms can help companies prevent risk spillovers in the supply chain from causing harm to the company, and, as well, help customers evaluate the creditworthiness of the entity to lessen the risk of their investment.

This paper aims to explore accountants’ views on mandatory corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting. It focuses on three main factors underpinning their understanding and attitude towards non-financial disclosures: general understanding of the concept, gender and work experience.

The study uses social identity theory as the theoretical framework. The findings are based on a survey conducted among 73 accountants in 2018. The questionnaire consisted of 86 questions divided into 9 main areas. The Mann–Whitney U test was used to determine if there are any significant differences between the accountants’ attitudes towards non-financial disclosures.

Study results suggest that the general knowledge of CSR reporting among accounting specialists is insufficient. The attitude towards mandatory CSR disclosures significantly differs between accountants who participated in training related to non-financial reporting and those who did not. Contrary to expectations, there were no significant differences in responses either between female and male accountants or between accountants at the beginning of their career path (with experience shorter than five years) and the more experienced ones. The paper contributes to social theory studies as it refers to the problem of the influence of professional associations, governments and big accounting firms on the transformation of accountants’ social identity. It also discusses the relations between the characteristics influencing personal identity and social identity of accountants in shaping their attitude towards mandatory non-financial disclosures.

The findings could be of interest to the higher education and professional certification institutions which should consider bringing accounting curricula more closely to the realities of the current business environment.

The study contributes to the body of literature mainly because it investigates a diversified sample of accountants in a relatively unexplored institutional setting. It may also serve as a starting point for research that more broadly explores accountants’ engagement in non-financial disclosures on CSR.