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The purpose of this paper is to propose improvement of the generation capability of a claw pole alternator with DC excitation in the stator (CPAES) using analytical investigation based on a dedicated reluctant model.

The paper analyzes the effects of geometry and material transformations of the magnetic circuit on the generation capability of the CPAES as well as the reduction of claw‐claw leakage flux by inserting permanent magnets in between adjacent claws.

The generation capability could be improved considering the proposed geometry and material changes of the magnetic circuit of the CPAES. The inclusion of permanent magnets in between adjacent claws offers an increase of the alternator generation due to the reduction of the claw‐claw leakage flux.

The research should be extended by building a new prototype of the CPAES in order to compare analytical results and experimental ones.

A new concept with no brush‐ring for excitation and an improvement of the generation capability of the alternator make the CPAES an interesting candidate especially in large‐scale production applications such as the automotive industry.

The paper proposes a new alternator topology called claw pole alternator with DC excitation in the stator (CPAES) and an analytical approach to improve the generation capability of such a concept, which represents a crucial challenge in electric generation systems especially in automotive applications.

This paper seeks to study the feasibility of a stator vibration damping using piezoelectric (PZT) actuators applied to switched reluctance motors (SRM).

A single‐phase structure without moving rotor, but with the same shape as an SRM stator, is introduced to simplify the study and the experimental measurements. Both analytical and finite element methods are used to detail the chosen location and design of the PZT actuators for this structure.

Experimental results show that PZT actuators with a low voltage allow the decrease of the vibration level due to the electromagnetic forces.

To decrease the vibration level of the SRM stator in the real use of the machine, a closed loop system is necessary. Future works consist of the design of a closed loop numerical controller using an acceleration sensor as strain information.

The proposed damping method gives a new solution for the SRM noise problem that can be useful for people working on noise reduction on this machine.

So far vibration damping of SRM stator was obtained using a command or a geometry “acoustically” optimised, or active vibration with an auxiliary coil. The solution presented here applies PZT vibration damping to the stator with a thickness more important than the one of classical plates used for PZT damping applications.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss accounting development in Tunisia, which is a developing North African country little known in the international accounting literature.

Methodologically, this paper is based on an exploratory approach. It uses the descriptive tradition of research by collecting and analyzing numerical and narrative data to identify and describe environmental factors that favor or hamper accounting development in Tunisia.

This paper indicates that Tunisian companies have been applying the Enterprise Accounting System (EAS) since 1996. This system, while keeping with the logic of a chart of accounts, represents a first attempt to harmonize with international accounting standards. Accounting harmonization in Tunisia is meant to support the strategy, launched in the early 1990s, to integrate the country into the globalization process. Accordingly, the EAS has helped to achieve macroeconomic benefits (public interests). However, it does not lead to the desired level of financial transparency (private interests), especially that of large companies. Currently, Tunisian Accounting Standards neither reflect the rapid evolution of business activity nor changes in international accounting standards. This unachieved harmonization has led some listed companies to comply with some International Financial Reporting Standards which are not included in the EAS.

The unachieved harmonization in Tunisia is mainly related to the political system, taxation factors, the legal system, the weak state of corporate governance and governmental control over standardization.

This paper provides insights into the problems of developing countries that harmonize with international standards to achieve public interests. These countries may encounter many difficulties in bringing their accounting standards up to date. These difficulties seem to be associated with environmental specificities. Accordingly, international standardization bodies and developing country regulators should take into account environmental factors which are determinant for the harmonization decision to succeed.

This paper contributes to the existing literature on accounting development in developing countries. It implies that recent accounting development, as it is designed in Tunisia, is better suited to the needs of small businesses. Large companies would be compelled to complement local generally accepted accounting principles by standards they choose, voluntarily, among international standards.

De facto use of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) is a particular form of voluntary compliance with International Accounting Standards (IAS). It is practiced when an enterprise uses a number (and not all) of international standards as a complement to overcome the unachieved nature of local generally accepted accounting principles. The purpose of this paper is to analyze, at first, whether the financial expertise of Tunisian audit committee’s members is associated with de facto use of IFRS. Second, it explores to what extent and in what direction this association evolves when the factor auditor’s size is introduced as a moderator variable.

Data spanning a seven-year period (2012–2018) was hand-collected for a sample of 497 firm-year observations. Further, regression analysis was used to test the study’s hypothesis.

Findings show that the proportion of financial experts who sit on the audit committee is positively associated with the de facto use of IFRS. Besides, the association between audit committee members’ financial expertise and the voluntary use of IFRS is more pronounced when the company is audited by at least one BIG 4 audit firm.

The paper’s findings have implications for regulatory bodies and standards setters who are concerned with the functioning of the audit committee, especially when it comes to enhancing the quality of the financial statements. The results also shed light on the role of financial experts on the audit committee and Big 4 auditors to enforce the de facto use of IFRS.

The findings of this study contain an important message for the drift toward national de jure convergence with IAS.

In recent years, Tunisian listed companies have been preparing their financial statements under a hybrid set of accounting standards; a mixture of national and international standards. The purpose of this paper is to empirically verify to what extent this particular form of de facto compliance with IAS/IFRS (which are not authorized in Tunisia) is used among listed companies. The paper further analyzes accounting professionals’ perception of the current state of Tunisian standards and their attitudes in the absence of relevant national Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAPs).

Two methodological approaches were used to answer the paper’s research questions: a document analysis approach and a survey questionnaire.

The document analysis revealed that a growing number of listed companies complement local GAAPs by standards they select among IAS/IFRS. The perception study indicated that Tunisian Accounting Standards are, indeed, less suitable for listed companies’ needs. Accordingly, when there is no local standard to measure a specific transaction or event, accounting professionals seem to have no problem in using some IAS/IFRS as a complement to overcome the unachieved nature of local GAAPs. However, the overall findings are likely to suggest that international standards used must not conflict with the Tunisian conceptual framework’s provisions. This means that the use of IAS/IFRS in conjunction with local GAAPs is generally perceived as being beneficial to the quality of financial statements.

This study may be of interest to many developing countries that have not continued the harmonization of their accounting standards with IAS/IFRS. Future research should focus on the reasons which have led to this unachieved harmonization and the consequences of the normative gap which might emerge.

Previous research has often shown how difficult it is to apply international accounting standards in developing countries, especially when they do not correspond to the companies’ needs. Difficulties could occur when local standard-setters do not accurately know which new international standards are suitable to the market needs. The study gives some insights suggesting that corporate accounting practices should be analyzed to understand the real needs for new standards.

The paper highlights the beginning of a de facto convergence with international accounting standards without any support of national de jure convergence. Consideration of this phenomenon may contribute to the understanding of the malaise that characterizes the current accounting standard-setting in developing countries.

Tunisia has been living a decade of democratic transition since 2011. In this new context, the civil society has been fervently expressing claims for democracy and social justice through creating thousands of non-for-profit organisations (NPOs) (23,456 NPOs in 2020 against 9,000 established in 30 years up to 2010). However, this shift seems to be misleading, as only 3,000 NPOs are actually active, indicating that NPOs are struggling to sustain their activities and ensure their survival. The purpose of this study is to uncover the factors hindering NPOs’ activities and survival.

Semi-structured interviews were carried out using a purposive sample of 32 NPOs members in two main economic and touristic cities – Tunis and Sousse – selected using the snowball method. A considerable amount of qualitative data was produced (400 pages of text). This seems representative of Tunisian citizens’ inclination to protest in the new prevailing political and social context. The data collection benefited from the freedom of speech gained after the 2011 civilian uprising as interviewees were enthusiastic in voicing their opinions.

Two main categories of inhibitors were identified. First, endogenous inhibitors including inhibitors under the control of the NPO (i.e. use of illegal and foreign sources of funding, limited financial resources, unavailability of NPOs’ members, short term planning, conflicts between managers, autocratic leadership, organisational support, activities diversification and organisational justice, leadership and communication skills, “NPO culture”, members’ opportunistic behaviour and generation gap), inhibitors related to NPOs inter-relationships: stiff competition, unfair and dishonest competition, lack of collaboration, trust and communication between NPOs. Second, exogenous inhibitors i.e. perceived unethical practices and image transfer, economic crisis, foreign funding sources and the media.

This study has some limitations mainly due to the sample size and characteristics of the selected interviewees. In addition, data was collected in only two regions (Tunis and Sousse). Therefore, the results may lack generalisability.

The findings highlight the critical impact of the inhibitors under the control of NPOs compared to those out of their control. NPOs in a crisis context could overcome these inhibitors by ensuring congruence between the NPOs’ mission, objectives and activities and designing suitable marketing strategies.

This study contributes to elucidating this complex circular system of exchange and its inhibitors in a challenging and understudied context. It offers support to Bagozzi’s (1974, 1975, 1994, 2011) calls for uncovering the factors constraining or facilitating exchanges that have an impact going beyond the relationship between three or more partners and the conditions that govern these exchanges. Moreover, and to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first empirical attempt to support Bagozzi’s (1994) conceptualisation. It also brings an update to NPOs’ data and marketing strategy in a region near the crossroads of Middle Eastern, North African and Western influences.

This paper aims to find an answer to the questions: To what extent is the implementation of responsible management education (RME) perceived to be adequate for developing responsible leadership skills among business school students? How should it be used effectively to guarantee such an outcome?

The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with 24 management educators working at three public business schools. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the collected data.

The findings show that the implementation of RME alone is not adequate to ensure the development of responsible leadership skills among students in business schools. However, management educators do perceive it as a considerable step towards that outcome if accompanied with internship and training opportunities to exercise and observe how social roles and activities are practiced in business, not-for-profit and civil society organisations.

This study is a pioneering attempt to address the relationship between RME and developing responsible leadership skills among students in non-Western business schools.

This paper aims to theoretically answer the question: why might business schools in Egypt fail to develop responsible leaders?

The author starts by discussing modernization theory (Lipset, 1959) – which highlights the idea that the more educated people there are in a given society/nation, the more calls for democracy, social citizenship and social justice will be launched – to address the strong association between the quality of business learning and the development of responsible leadership norms. Moving forward by focusing on the theory of education (Dewey, 1916) and institutional theory (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983), the author finds the main conditions needed to develop responsible leadership norms among business school students.

The author identified the following three necessary conditions: implementing responsible management education, sustaining management learning and ensuring that a purposive hidden curriculum is well-planned in business schools. The author sees these as the main priorities for developing responsible leadership skills among business school students in Egypt and similar post revolution countries.

This paper contributes by filling a gap in responsible leadership, public administration and higher education literature, in which conceptual studies on the role of business schools in post-revolution periods and conflict zones has been limited until now.

This paper aims to explore the socio-cultural meanings of functional foods for Tunisian consumers and to understand how these meanings shape their preferences and practices in the particular context of a Middle-East and North African (MENA) region.

A constructivist perspective based on multi-qualitative methods was designed allowing data collection in a natural setting through focus groups interviews, individual in-depth interviews and projective techniques among Tunisian consumers.

Findings show the complexity and importance of conscious and unconscious non-health-related socio-cultural factors in the construction and acceptance of functional foods by the Tunisian consumer. Common sense knowledge, social environment and tradition shape the constructions and practices of functional foods. These factors may act as a shortcut to compensate for unhealthy behaviour and as a social marker to reflect trendiness and identity.

The findings are specific to the Tunisian setting and may be not transferable to other settings.

The role of information is central in functional food acceptance. Communication on health effects should consider not only the formal nutritional health benefit but also lay knowledge.

The findings of this research contribute in the government’s understanding of Tunisian’s constructions of health and well-being by suggesting that besides health motives, non-health-related factors such as lay knowledge, social influences and conspicuous consumption play an important role in functional foods choice.

This paper contributes to extend functional foods literature by exploring the complex interconnected conscious and unconscious socio-cultural constructions behind functional food choice. It contributes also to the understanding of the food consumer behaviour in the specific cultural context of the Arab-Muslim MENA region, an under investigated setting.

Reducing eddy current losses in magnets of electrical machines can be obtained by means of several techniques. The magnet segmentation is the most popular one. It imposes the least restrictions on machine performances. This paper investigates the effectiveness of the magnet circumferential segmentation technique to reduce these undesirable losses. The full and partial magnet segmentation are both studied for a frequency range from few Hz to a dozen of kHz. To increase the efficiency of these techniques to reduce losses for any working frequency, an optimization strategy based on coupling of finite elements analysis and genetic algorithm is applied. The purpose of this paper is to define the parameters of the total and partial segmentation that can ensure the best reduction of eddy current losses.

First, a model to analyze eddy current losses is presented. Second, the effectiveness of full and partial magnet circumferential segmentation to reduce eddy loss is studied for a range of frequencies from few Hz to a dozen of kHz. To achieve these purposes a 2-D finite element model is developed under MATLAB environment. In a third step of the work, an optimization process is applied to adjust the segmentation design parameters for best reduction of eddy current losses in case of surface mounted permanent magnets synchronous machine.

In case of the skin effect operating, both full and partial magnet segmentations can lead to eddy current losses increases. Such deviations of magnet segmentation techniques can be avoided by an appropriate choice of their design parameters.

Few works are dedicated to investigate partial magnet segmentation for eddy current losses reduction. This paper studied the effectiveness and behaviour of partial segmentation for different frequency ranges. To avoid eventual anomalies related to the skin effect an optimization process based on the association of the finite elements analysis to genetic algorithm method is adopted.