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The use of interviews for data collection is prevalent in qualitative accounting research. This paper examines vignettes – sketches of hypothetical scenarios – as a promising complementary way to conduct interviews in qualitative accounting research.

The paper is based on our experiences designing and using vignettes in five separate qualitative accounting studies, which collectively involve over 200 interviews with various participants. It discusses the opportunities the use of vignettes in interviews offers to qualitative accounting research, as well as the challenges associated with designing and using vignettes. The paper also reflects on fellow researchers’ varied reactions during seminars, workshops, and the journal review process.

Vignettes emerge as a productive and engaging complementary way for accounting researchers to obtain additional insights and perspectives not usually accessible in semi-structured interviews. The paper also provides practical insights into developing, using and publishing qualitative accounting studies using vignettes, contributing an additional behind-the-scenes view of using qualitative research methods.

The aim of this paper is to increase awareness of vignettes as a complement to the standard qualitative accounting interview. It provides guidance on how vignettes might be used productively for studying rare, new, emerging, complex, or multi-period real-world accounting phenomena. It also discusses how vignettes can promote transparency, honesty, and a greater level of detail in participants’ responses, as well as facilitate the involvement of lay people in accounting studies.

This study aims to examine whether and how voluntary accounting disclosures can repair individual donors’ trust in a charity after negative events.

The authors adopt a qualitative research approach and conduct 32 semi-structured interviews with active Australian individual donors, with a hypothetical vignette design. Hypothetical negative events and corresponding accounting disclosures are presented to participants during interviews.

Three types of individual donors are identified based on their decision-making patterns after negative events and primary trust relations with a charity-reasoned donor (giving-decision based on their analysis of the situation, competence-based trust), generalist donors (giving-decision based on trust in the charitable sector, institution-based trust) and emotional donors (giving-decision based on feelings and emotions about the charity, integrity-based trust). The research suggests that accounting disclosures can repair trust damage for reasoned donors and support institution-based trust for generalist donors, but do not seem able to repair trust damage for emotional donors and can potentially damage trust further.

Overall, the findings suggest that a one-size-fits-all approach to communicating with individual donors after negative events is not likely to be very effective in repairing trust. Instead, charities may need to adapt disclosures to their different types of individual donors.

While prior accounting studies have largely focussed on how charity managers themselves grapple with accountability or how negative events impact charitable donations, the authors demonstrate how accounting disclosures can play different roles in the trust-repairing process for different types of individual donors.

The purpose of this paper revolves around the informal coming together of various doctoral students in the area of qualitative accounting and management research and the attempt to learn from their respective experiences. Together, the authors share personal reflections and valuable insights in revealing their vulnerabilities, aspirations and how they make sense of the PhD journey and their becoming as academics.

This paper builds on an open discussion and written reflections among the authors, who represent a diverse set of both doctoral students at various levels and recent graduates from different countries, schools and backgrounds.

The discussion highlights the struggles the authors experience as doctoral students, how they learn to cope with them as well as how they are socialized throughout their PhD journey. This allows them to take a critical stance towards increased productivity demands in academia and to embrace doctoral students as a powerful collective, whose aspirations may inspire a change of academic reality for the better.

While guidance on how to succeed as doctoral students is common, we seldom hear about doctoral students as particularly “fragile selves” (Knights and Clarke, 2014) who, as opposed to more established scholars, are more actively experiencing difficulties with finding their ways in academia. The authors are thus motivated to create a rare common voice of a group of doctoral students here by providing a more intimate account of the PhD journey.

The purpose of this study is to provide some references about applying the semi-active particle damper to enhance the stability of the pipe structure.

This paper establishes the dynamical models of semi-active particle damper based on traditional dynamical theory and fractional-order theory, respectively. The semi-active particle damping vibration isolation system applied in a pipe structure is proposed, and its analytical solution compared with G-L numerical solution is solved by the averaging method. The quantitative relationships of fractional-order parameters (a and kp) are confirmed and their influences on the amplitude-frequency response of the vibration isolation system are analyzed. A fixed point can be obtained from the amplitude-frequency response curve, and the optimal parameter used for improving the vibration reduction effect of semi-active particle damper can be calculated based on this point. The nonlinear phenomenon caused by nonlinear oscillators is also investigated.

The results show that the nonlinear stiffness parameter p will cause the jump phenomenon while p is close to 87; with the variation of nonlinear damping parameter μ, the pitchfork bifurcation phenomenon will occur with an unstable branch after the transient response; with the change of fractional-order coefficient k_p, a segmented bifurcation phenomenon will happen, where an interval that k_p between 18.5 and 21.5 has no bifurcation phenomenon.

This study establishes a mathematical model of the typical semi-active particle damping vibration isolation system according to fractional-order theory and researches its nonlinear characteristics.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the Chinese economic reform process has engendered significant changes in the structure and management of work organizations. Central to this process has been the “marketization” of state‐owned enterprises (SOEs). The paper reviews the attempts to reform SOEs as conducted, primarily, under the modern enterprise system (MES) and group company system (GCS) programmes.

The paper analyses institutional issues relating to organizational restructuring, describes the evolution of the SOE “problem” in China, and discusses case evidence of enterprise reform in one of the largest SOE‐dominated industries, iron and steel. Qualitative field data, collected regularly (mostly yearly) since 1995, were derived from in‐depth interviews with executives of ten large SOEs that have restructured as part of MES and GCS programmes.

It is suggested that the historic reluctance of SOEs to embrace reform stems from three main factors – the opaque nature of property rights, the failure of ministries to produce a firm strategy for channelling surplus labour and the inability of government agencies to offer a sense of managerial autonomy to SOE executives. Recent policies designed to overcome these problems together with kindred ones for separating government functions from business operations in the drive to prepare SOEs for global markets are described. It can be argued that China's preference for gradual reform reflects the wider reform context where economic restructuring has not been accompanied by a greater expression of political democracy.

The paper's findings offer insights from a major longitudinal field study of two of the main programmes of China's reform period.