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We present a critical literature review debating Brazilian research on social and environmental accounting (SEA). The aim of this study is to understand the role of politics in the construction of hegemonies in SEA research in Brazil. In particular, we examine the role of hegemony in relation to the co-option of SEA literature and sustainability in the Brazilian context by the logic of development for economic growth in emerging economies. The methodological approach adopts a post-structural perspective that reflects Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory. The study employs a hermeneutical, rhetorical approach to understand and classify 352 Brazilian research articles on SEA. We employ Brown and Fraser’s (2006) categorizations of SEA literature to help in our analysis: the business case, the stakeholder–accountability approach, and the critical case. We argue that the business case is prominent in Brazilian studies. Second-stage analysis suggests that the major themes under discussion include measurement, consulting, and descriptive approach. We argue that these themes illustrate the degree of influence of the hegemonic politics relevant to emerging economics, as these themes predominantly concern economic growth and a capitalist context. This paper discusses trends and practices in the Brazilian literature on SEA and argues that the focus means that SEA avoids critical debates of the role of capitalist logics in an emerging economy concerning sustainability. We urge the Brazilian academy to understand the implications of its reifying agenda and engage, counter-hegemonically, in a social and political agenda beyond the hegemonic support of a particular set of capitalist interests.

Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine has inflicted catastrophic consequences, profoundly impacting Ukrainian sustainability across the environment, society and economic dimensions. Despite these challenges, Ukraine’s civilian population has displayed remarkable resilience, emerging as a persistent stronghold amid the turbulence of conflict. In this study, the author has explored the key role of civil society in strengthening resilience and social justice during wartime.

This study uses a qualitative multi-method research design, combining a systematic literature review (SLR) and a single case study to understand and describe the phenomenon. The SLR provided a replicable, scientific and transparent conceptual framework, which the case study empirically validated and enriched. Additionally, the Delphi method gathered relevant insights from academic experts and Ukrainian nationals residing in the EU, enhancing this research.

This research revealed complex social dynamics and community resilience, highlighting various resilience-building efforts undertaken by voluntary organizations and emerging Ukrainian movements. The findings highlight civil society’s pivotal role in promoting resilience and addressing adversity to enhance social justice and unity in Ukraine. Specific contributions include countering disinformation, providing psychosocial support and mobilizing community efforts. Furthermore, the paper identified six key steps that epitomize societal resilience and formulated a conceptual model based on these steps.

This research offers a comprehensive and practical analysis of grassroots organizations’ efforts to sustain social resilience and unity amid war. It builds upon previous studies, extending their scope by providing empirical validation and offering new insights into civil society’s contributions to Ukraine’s defense and social cohesion. The study also explores the obstacles faced by civil society and the implications for Ukraine’s future sustainability and social cohesion.

This study examines the dynamics of innovative auditing practices in the digital age, with a specific focus on auditor competencies. Within this scope, we highlight the necessity of redefining auditing practices and the essential adaptation required from auditors. The primary objective is to understand comprehensively how auditor competencies can be strengthened to meet the challenges posed by innovative audit practices.

A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was conducted to explore this theme, ensuring rigor and credibility in the outcomes. The results emphasize the importance of auditors strengthening professional competencies, embracing technological agility, and promoting ongoing professional development initiatives.

The triadic framework comprising—Auditor, Auditing Practices, and Digital Audits— forms the basis for innovative audit practices. This manuscript further discusses the transition of advanced technologies, laying the groundwork for the evolution of auditing practices. Through a systematic assessment of the literature, this study develops a framework for innovative, ethically driven, and effective auditing practices, ensuring the occupation's relevance and value. Future investigations should focus on the ethical implications of automation in auditing practices and develop innovative frameworks tailored to diverse organizational contexts.

The study addresses a contemporary issue by examining the evolving nature of auditing practices considering digital transformation. Practical implications highlight the enhancement of auditor roles in digital transformation, covering ethics, technological adaptation, and continuous development to uphold the profession's integrity. This focus acknowledges the changing dynamics of business and the growing role of technology in auditing processes.

In this article, we discuss the issue of the right to education of young children, focusing on the Institution of Early Childhood Education (EIC in Portuguese), of views with legal markers and educational indicators of a Brazilian State. From a research that approached Early Childhood Education (EI in Portuguese) in settlements of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST in Portuguese) and making use of the Bakhtinian framework we highlight the processes of inequality that devastate childhood in the rural settings. The data reiterate the need to not only combat the logics of precariousness that affect the service given but also to guide the specificity of Children’s education field, within a framework of the effectiveness of primary school attendance. Hence, we call one’s attention to the debate of the ways of setting up institutions, with a view to serving children, urging the regulations related to the right to education, particularly, the right to Early Childhood Education in the peasant’s context, particularly in settlements.

From the perspective of housing affordability, Portugal is an interesting case study, considering that Portugal ranks 5th in terms of price-to-income ratio and has experienced, since 2015, a significant increase in real estate prices.

The provision of housing is a critical social development factor. With the growing worldwide urbanization and the demand pressure over real estate in many cities, the problem of affordability has gained increase attention by policy makers. Housing affordability is hardly a new topic from a literature perspective, but the recent post-pandemic worldwide inflation growth has re-centered affordability as key topic in the housing agenda. This paper provides a comprehensive overview on past literature and a detailed analysis on the Portuguese market at the municipal level, by analyzing the changes in housing affordability in recent years.

Despite this growth, overall, affordability has improved. The study also shows the importance of municipal-level analysis, given the significant geographical differences. The authors' study confirms that many municipalities, outside metropolitan areas, exhibit low levels of affordability. Nevertheless, markets with higher average real estate values tend to exhibit even lower affordability, outpacing the higher levels of income.

Previous studies have focused on affordability issues on a national or highly aggregated level or focusing only on the two largest metropolitan areas in the country. This paper provides a deeper understanding on the inequalities of housing affordability between Portuguese municipalities.

Diversified trading networks have recently drawn a great deal of attention. In the process, the importance of diversity has perhaps been overemphasized. Using the trade in port wine from Portugal to Britain as an example, this essay attempts to show how a market once dominated by general, diversified traders was taken over by dedicated specialists whose success might almost be measured by the degree to which they rejected diversification to form a dedicated “commodity chain.” The essay suggests that this strategy was better able to handle matters of quality and the specialized knowledge that port wine required. The essay also highlights the question of power in such a chain. Endemic commodity-chain struggles are clearest in the vertical brand war that broke out in the nineteenth century, which, by concentrating power, marked the final stage in the transformation of the trade from network to vertical integration.

Managerial discourses tend to portray work-related mobility practices in a positive light, presenting mobility assignments as a place of stimulus and differentiation. A conception of mobility as an opportunity, may contrast, in specific economies and business settings, with lived personal experiences. This article reports the results of a three-year study, aimed to question how multinational companies (MNCs) located in a small and developing European economy (Portugal) are building talent pools for expatriate assignments. Interaction effects, as proposed by the job demands-resources (JD-R) theory, are considered as lens to understand the interplay of company expatriate policies, willingness profiles and psychological contracts of expatriates. By using a Portuguese sample, the study examines whether prior findings in mature economies and consolidated MNCs can be generalized to less developed international business settings.

A three-year study, encompassing 24 expatriate cases observed in five multinational firms born or located in Portugal. Two techniques of empirical data collection were used: statistical sources and documental analysis and in-depth interviews. A total of 37 interviews were conducted, both in-person and remotely, of which 13 were with company managers and representatives, and 24 with expatriates (as defined and referred like this by the companies under study).

Heterogeneous company policies, ranging from juvenile, functionalist to more dynamic and flow-based approaches, are presented as qualifying resources of willingness levels and psychological contracts of expatriates. Observed interaction effects between policies, willingness and psychological contracts, empirically mirrored in three profiles (conformist, protean and disrupted expatriates) suggest that incentive effects (emanating from company policies) and job demand-resource balance, factored as terms of social and economic trade, are non-linear and asymmetric, influencing firm propensity to succeed while using international work to support company expansion goals. As job resources, expatriate policies are presented as operating as pull or push factors: functionalist HR approaches seem to act as push factors generating more conformist or compelled willingness profiles.

Generalization of study's outcomes has limitations. Future studies are encouraged to use comparative and longitudinal research designs. Furthermore, future research should include business expatriates with entry-level positions, and increase the number of interviewees, as results can also be considered as limited by sample size.

It is suggested that further strategic work is needed to present expatriation development value, formally screen and consider willingness level as selection criteria, and enlarge the pool (from internal to external) of candidates, in peripheral economic settings such as Portugal. A shift to more dynamic and job resource-dense policies are suggested as beneficial, as pathway to optimize social and economic value from expatriation assignments and work experiences.

By putting the interplay between macro and micro-level processes into perspective, the study provides empirical evidence on how company expatriate policies have come to promote unforeseen differentiation of employee willingness and psychological contracts at the heart of MNCs. This is particularly relevant in developing economies such as Portugal, challenging the need to build talent pools for international work assignments. Empirical data illustrating company policies interactive effects with different willingness profiles and psychological contracts of expatriates is provided.

This chapter is born out of concern about the perception of the physical and symbolic place of the live-in housekeeper, both in socioeconomic, and historical terms, as well as the architectural and social dynamics of the home. An intersectional and teleological analysis of the intrinsic devaluation of paid social reproduction work is carried out, based mainly on gender, race, and class inequalities. Ultimately, the chapter tries to locate the position in which the maid finds herself in the domestic environment, both in family relationships and in the symbolism inherent to the concept of the maid’s room. Based on sociological, philosophical, and anthropological analysis, the ambiguous place of domestic workers becomes clearer, promoting a reflection on the very concept of family and household. Thus, the chapter proposes to achieve a hermeneutic dive into the experience of this working class, revealing a hierarchical system beyond the socioeconomic, but above all, of their subjectivities.

This paper aimed to develop a participatory methodology to analyze the disaster risk creation in coastal cities, based on an approach that combines social, urban, environmental and disaster risk elements.

The methodology uses some aspects of three theoretical approaches in a complementary way: i) the Pressure and Release (PAR) framework for the identification of dynamic pressures that contribute to disaster risk creation; ii) the application of Drivers, Pressure, State, Impact, Response (DPSIR) framework to analyze environmental dimensions; and iii) urban analysis, applying the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) tool to classify urban processes. The methodology combined the use of satellite remote sensing data to analyze the urban sprawl and citizen science methods to collect social and environmental data, using the case study of the watershed of the Juqueriquerê River in the coastal city of Caraguatatuba, Brazil. The pilot project was part of a local university extension project of the undergraduate course on Architecture and Urban Planning and also engaged residents and city hall representatives.

The satellite remote sense data analysis indicated a continuous urban sprawl between 1985 and 2020, especially in the south of the Juqueriquerê watershed, reducing urban drainage and increasing the extension and water depth of urban flooding and riverine floods. Using citizen science methods, undergraduates identified settlements with limited economic resources to elevate houses and a lack of infrastructure to promote a resilient coastal city. After identifying the dynamic pressures that contribute to disaster risk creation and the weaknesses and strengths of a resilient city, undergraduate students proposed urban planning interventions and gray and green infrastructure projects to mitigate disaster risks.

The paper identifies urban sprawl in disaster-prone areas as one of the risk factors contributing to disaster. It also comprehensively analyzes differences between different zones in the Juqueriqere River, which will be useful for policy-making.

The method presented an interdisciplinary approach that used satellite remote sensing data and citizen science techniques to analyze disaster risks in coastal cities. The multidimensional approach used to evaluate risks is useful and can be replicated in other similar studies to gain a more comprehensive understanding of disaster risks.

This paper aims to analyze the sustainability approach within higher education institutions. Universities, as institutions of knowledge, play an important and strategic role in maximizing social and economic benefits in a hands-on way. However, some studies on sustainable development and HEIs reveal a distancing between students and the application of sustainable initiatives in universities. This fact differs from the premises of the Talloires Declaration, which points to students as a community and as global leaders and ambassadors for sustainability.

This paper mapped the approaches, present in the literature, used to develop sustainable campuses and in particular the apparent dichotomy between the changes indicated as top-down or bottom-up in HEIs. To that end, scientific articles focused on sustainable actions in HEIs were analyzed to identify implementation approaches for sustainable development and student involvement in the process.

Results have shown that sustainability promotion models in universities generally occur in a top-down manner, where students are receptors and not sources of development for sustainable policies in universities. Thus, the authors highlight the importance of students becoming central players in sustainable initiatives.

The article becomes original when it identifies the dichotomy between top-down and bottom-up approaches. It does so through multidimensional scaling and exploratory factorial analysis in scientific articles on the topic Sustainability Funding in Higher Education. These findings show that, unlike what is discussed in the literature, sustainability promotion in universities generally occurs in a top-down manner, where students are receptors and not active agents in promoting sustainability. In response to this, the authors discussed the importance of the bottom-up approach, where they are key players.