399 research outputs found

    Management Controls for Sustainable Development: Evidence from a Thai Manufacturing Organisation

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    This thesis aims to empirically investigate the use of management controls in relation to sustainable development within an established manufacturing organisation in Thailand. Situated within the conflicts between formal motivators (e.g., performance measurement and reward systems) which call for economic rationalism and an informally cognitive responsibility for socio-ecological awareness and commitment (Ball and Milne, 2005; Milne, 1996), the existence of formal and informal management controls to support the sustainable development belief and their interplays are examined. An inductive research approach with Laughlin’s (1991) organisational change framework is drawn upon in the analysis of a single case study. The empirical evidence is collected through semi-structured interviews, non-participant observations and document analysis to investigate the organisation's sustainability discourse. This study makes important contributions to the extant social and environmental accounting literature, especially concerning management controls. Little research directs towards how organisations integrate their management controls with the sustainable development concept (Lueg and Radlach, 2016) due to its subjective and disputable nature (Ball and Milne, 2005; Gray, 2010; Milne, 1996). This research goes further to unveil the change journey in quantifiable and religious-based management controls within a Thai manufacturing organisation that encountered complex sustainability challenges. Furthermore, the sustainability concept has been integrated into corporate strategies, organisational culture and key capabilities for value-added activities and innovation. The internal and external disturbances were managed with proper caution and safeguards. The observed formal and informal management controls worked interdependently in line with the organisation’s core values (i.e., interpretive schemes – Laughlin, 1991). These control tools are shown to be built on “measure what can be managed” or achievable-based outcomes with support from multiple specialist work groups

    Business sustainability: understanding the influence of managers and stakeholders on adopting sustainability practices in Nigerian SMEs

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    A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy.The importance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in any economy must be balanced, yet hardly the sector attracts the needed attention for sustainability. This has led to unacceptable high mortality rates for the sector, especially in emerging contexts. Nevertheless, SMEs and sustainability agenda share significant melting pots of disrupting large-scale extreme poverty, among other benefits. Numerous literature supports this and acknowledges SMEs' potential for national employment, investment stimulation and gross domestic growth (GDP). This study aimed to unveil the impacts of managerial characteristics and stakeholders on Nigerian SME sustainability practices to understand SME business sustainability practices in developing countries. To fully investigate these impacts, three research questions enabled the navigation of this project. Firstly, to ascertain the current antecedents influencing SME sustainability practices. Secondly, we quizzed the relationship between the manager's characteristics and Nigerian SME sustainability practices. Furthermore, finally, we sort out how stakeholders influence SMEs' sustainability practices in Nigeria. A qualitative research approach was adopted within an interpretivist philosophical paradigm to construct participants narrated perspectives of sustainability practices. Data were collected from twenty-two (22) Nigerian SME owners/managers and nine (9) stakeholders in semi-structured interviews, virtually. Participants' information was inductively condensed, analysed and thematically framed using the Upper Echelon and Stakeholder concepts. The findings were dimensionally extracted using Gioia's step/order analysis to develop a data structure for each research question. The findings for the current antecedence include the political and governance dimension, the cultural and societal dimension, the economic dimension, and the business orientation dimension. In contrast, the findings for the relationship between managerial characteristics and sustainability practices include observable dimensions and cognitive values. The finding for stakeholder influence on sustainability practices includes the managerial alignment dimension and the dimension of stakeholders’ intervention. Asides from the contribution to knowledge, the result presented national, organisational and managerial practical implications. Diverse organisational and regulatory policy implications were also presented with future research directions

    The Effect of Independent Regulation on Audit Quality: Evidence from UK And Nigeria

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    This study assessed the effect of independent regulation on audit quality. The research data consisted of both primary and secondary. The primary data was obtained from structured interviews conducted with staff members of the Financial Reporting Council, UK, and the staff of the professional accounting bodies (PABs) in Nigeria. The analysis of data entailed the identification of themes and patterns, percentage analysis of the FRC audit inspection grades, and the textual analysis of the audit inspection reports and tribunal judgements using the NVivo 12 (Pro) qualitative data analysis software. The study found that the audit quality outlook in the UK improved during the review period. It was observed that the FRC conceptualised audit quality in terms of adherence of the Big4 audit firms to legislations, auditing and accounting standards, ethical standards, and their own internal operating policies and procedures, with compliance assessed using key audit indicators constituted into an Audit Quality Framework (AQF) in 2008. The study revealed a double-faced audit culture of the Big4 audit firms towards audit quality, wherein they recognise and commit to the pursuit of audit quality but adopted implementation strategies which ensured their interests were served at the expense of the public interest, thereby exhibiting the features of both the normative and abolitionist theoretical perspectives of the public interest theory. The study contributed to theory by providing evidence for the articulation of the public interest behaviour of audit firms in the UK and contributed to debates on the conceptualisation of audit quality. The use of qualitative research approach represented a departure from the common application of quantitative methods to practice based issues. It provided a guide for policy initiatives for the strengthening of audit regulation, especially in developing countries like Nigeria

    Socio-Political Context as a Driver of Corporate Governance Practices in a Society: A Case Study of the Nigerian Banks

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    The global increase in failures and scandals in the financial services sector, especially banking institutions, has renewed the call for a more robust corporate governance in the industry. This has necessitated the need to investigate the impact of corporate governance on bank performance, and this study focuses on the case of Nigeria. Previous research has investigated the impact of corporate governance practices mostly in the developed world, to the neglect of vulnerable and poor economies such as Nigeria. This study therefore investigates the impact of corporate governance on the performance of Nigerian banks in the pre- and post-colonial period, using quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches. While various different theoretical perspectives have been adopted to study the impact of corporate governance in specific social contexts, the appropriateness of these theories to the socio-political context of poor countries has become contested. Considering the integration of the Nigerian economy into the global neoliberal capitalist economic system, this thesis adopts neoliberal global capitalism to understand the activities of the Nigerian banking institutions. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection, adopting qualitative semi-structured interviews and questionnaires, within the framework of neoliberal capitalism, the quantitative results suggest that board size, frequency of board meetings, frequency of audit committee meetings and managerial share ownership have a negative relationship with bank performance. Most of the respondents did not believe that neoliberal corporate governance practices were practical in Nigerian banking institutions. In sum, the study identifies a number of factors leading to failure of banks in Nigeria: the impact of the Nigerian socio-political context of overbearing family domination, ineffective boards, dual and pseudo-dual CEOs, flagrant disobedience and poor application of corporate governance codes. These factors have resulted in poor risk management, excessive risk taking and other unethical behaviours. This study contributes to the body of knowledge by providing an understanding of the connection between corporate governance principles and the performance of banks, looking at the peculiarities of each society in the application of corporate governance principles and introducing a balanced score card to the application of corporate governance. Keywords: Corporate governance, profitability, board size, neoliberalism, Central Bank of Nigeria, political economy, audit committe

    A Tight Coupling Context-Based Framework for Dataset Discovery

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    Discovering datasets of relevance to meet research goals is at the core of different analysis tasks in order to prove proposed hypothesis and theories. In particular, researchers in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) research domains where relevant datasets are essential for precise predictions have identified how the absence of methods to discover quality datasets are leading to delay and in many cases failure, of ML projects. Many research reports have brought out the absence of dataset discovery methods that fills the gap between analysis requirements and available datasets, and have given statistics to show how it hinders the process of analysis, with completion rate less than 2%. To the best of our knowledge, removing the above inadequacies remains “an open problem of great importance”. It is in this context that the thesis is making a contribution on context-based tightly coupled framework that will tightly couple dataset providers and data analytics teams. Through this framework, dataset providers publish the metadata descriptions of their datasets and analysts formulate and submit rich queries with goal specifications and quality requirements. The dataset search engine component tightly couples the query specification with metadata specifications datasets through a formal contextualized semantic matching and quality-based ranking and discover all datasets that are relevant to analyst requirements. The thesis gives a proof of concept prototype implementation and reports on its performance and efficiency through a case study

    Decisioning 2022 : Collaboration in knowledge discovery and decision making: Applications to sustainable agriculture

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    Sustainable agriculture is one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) proposed by UN (United Nations), but little systematic work on Knowledge Discovery and Decision Making has been applied to it. Knowledge discovery and decision making are becoming active research areas in the last years. The era of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data science, in which linked data with a high degree of variety and different degrees of veracity can be easily correlated and put in perspective to have an empirical and scientific perception of best practices in sustainable agricultural domain. This requires combining multiple methods such as elicitation, specification, validation, technologies from semantic web, information retrieval, formal concept analysis, collaborative work, semantic interoperability, ontological matching, specification, smart contracts, and multiple decision making. Decisioning 2022 is the first workshop on Collaboration in knowledge discovery and decision making: Applications to sustainable agriculture. It has been organized by six research teams from France, Argentina, Colombia and Chile, to explore the current frontier of knowledge and applications in different areas related to knowledge discovery and decision making. The format of this workshop aims at the discussion and knowledge exchange between the academy and industry members.Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzad
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