A transaction cost perspective on blockchain governance in global value chains

This study advances theoretical insights into blockchain adoption in the context of global value chains from a transaction cost theory perspective. The research has adopted an exploratory qualitative approach using the Netnography method to scrutinize the case of TradeLens—a thriving blockchain-enabled ecosystem that Maersk and IBM jointly developed. This study applies textual and audiovisual data from company websites and social media. Our findings indicate blockchain technology's salient and strategic relevance in streamlining business processes, improving efficiency, enhancing visibility, transparency, and traceability for value creation in the global value chains. This investigation supports the notion that blockchain, as a disruptor, will transform global trade with the digital tools to share real-time information and collaborate security to reduce search and information cost, policing and enforcement cost in global economic transactions and administrative friction in trade. In contrast, the bargaining cost will increase if the information for the transaction is hard to verify where human actor intervention will be required, implying relatively higher designing costs in codifying the agreements in smart contracts

Accounting and Auditing with Blockchain Technology and Artificial Intelligence: A Literature Review

This paper surveys the published work on how blockchain technology will impact accounting in general, but AI-enabled auditing specifically. The purpose is to investigate how blockchain technology can improve transparency and trust in accounting practice and how professionals can use blockchain data to improve decision-making, based on the qualities of immutability, append-only, shared, verified, and agreed-upon (i.e., consensus-driven) blockchain data. The multi-party validation of blockchain protocols adds real-time trusted data for the AI systems used by auditors to improve assurance and efficiency. This review summarizes four themes emerging from the literature focusing on how blockchain technology has changed record-keeping in accounting: event approach to accounting; real-time accounting; triple entry-accounting and continuous auditing. The research interprets the findings using agency theory and stakeholder theory to advance how using blockchain to mitigate information asymmetry and improve stakeholder collaborations is understood. The investigation also summarizes the challenges and clarifies organizations’ reasons to be cautious about adopting blockchain. Lastly, the study suggests that future researchers use this study in two ways that enrich blockchain literature: first, to apply the themes and answer the questions identified within this review to improve the business methods of practitioners and policymakers; and second, to encourage stakeholders such as practitioners, system designers/developers, and policymakers to collaborate in designing blockchain ecosystems that suit accounting and auditing as they transform digitally

Assessing the Sustainability of Climate Change Response Measures to Farming Practices in an agricultural enclave in the Eastern Region of Ghana

Given the fundamental role of agriculture in human welfare, concern has been expressed regarding the potential net effects of climate change on agricultural productivity. Response strategies to climate change impact in the Agricultural sector is therefore an imperative. However, not all response activities to climate change impact can be considered good enough to be sustainable. Thus the study investigated the response strategies of farmers in Oboadaka, a farming community in eastern region of Ghana as to whether they qualified as sustainable impact response measures or otherwise. The framework for classifying the impact response measures was summarized as follows: reacting to experienced and/ or current impacts alone qualified as coping whereas such measures that in addition to reacting to current impacts anticipated future impacts and allowed a plan to adaptively manage the response measures qualified as sustainable adaptation. The method employed to achieve the results was largely qualitative case study method. The findings established the fact that farmers perceived the climate to have changed; farmers viewed climate variability and climate change to mean the same thing- a change in weather patterns whether long or shortterm. It emerged that the responses to the impact of climate change were part of reactionary responses or strategies which were short term. Analyzing the strategies, it was concluded that, the climate change impact response practices of farmers in the study area qualified as coping and not sustainable adaptationmeasures needed to build resilience to future climate change.&nbsp

Learning From Afar Gatekeepers Of Innovation In Ghanas Food Processing Clusters

Development, prosperity and sustainable livelihoods in Africa requires knowledge generation, adaptation and transmission. This paper argues that technology entrepreneur gatekeepers can become potent conduits for the transmission of new knowledge and technology within clusters, particularly in developing economies. Yet, most research in the context of the Sub-Saharan African region overlook the role of entrepreneur gatekeepers working with the small formal and informal sector enterprises. This study therefore addresses this knowledge gap through a qualitative empirical study of two food processing clusters in Ghana. Gatekeepers are identified as those entrepreneurs who decodify the codified knowledge while also bringing in tacit knowledge that can be shared throughout a cluster. The informal nature of the African economy shapes these processes with key relationships being based on personal trust rather than written agreements, and institutional weaknesses limiting the rigorous implementation of intellectual property right law allowing micro enterprise artisan engineers to freely adapt technology

A comparative study of appropriateness and mechanisms of hard and soft technologies transfer

© 2017 Elsevier Inc. Technology transfer continues to play a significant role in fostering economic growth, enterprise and human capability development in many emerging and developing economies. In this paper, we examine the appropriateness and mechanism of hard and soft technology transfer in the African cotton industry. Focusing on Uganda, a land-locked African country, we comparatively examined the appropriateness and pro-poor nature of Indian and US made hard and soft ginning technologies transferred into Uganda. Data for our inquiry come from two cotton ginneries in the eastern region of Uganda. We found that a technology transferred into a developing economy can only be appropriate if both the hard and soft component of the technology is transferred into the economy. Our study also reveals that while ginning technologies from India appear to be much more appropriate relative to those from USA, they are not environmentally friendly and affordable for those at the bottom of the pyramid. In addition, the long staple cotton lint the Indian made technologies churn out tends to attract higher prices on the international market. Nevertheless, ginning technologies from the United States tend to have very high rates of production. Implication for theory and policy are presented

In Direct Breach of Managerial Edicts: A Practice Approach to Creative Deviance in Professional Service Firms

Drawing on practice as a meta-theoretical lens, we explore creative deviance: wilful violation of managerial orders by employee(s) to pursue creative ideas. Data for our inquiry comes from in-depth interviews with middle managers and employees in two professional service firms (PSFs). We argue that two distinct organising processes are necessary for the emergence of creative deviance in practice: organising configuration and formalisation of R&D processes. We develop these dimensions to produce a typology of interrelated ideal types of outcomes when employees are explicitly instructed to stop pursuing an idea. We found three salient organising practices (technical concerns for efficiency and metrics, suppression of metistic knowledge, and disjointed managerial responses to violations of sanctioned organising procedures), which may operate in combination or serially, to foster creative deviance in practice. We conclude with some key implications for the theory and practice of creativity in professional service firms

Corruption as a Source of Government Project Failure in Developing Countries: Evidence from Ghana

This study explores how corruption impacts the failure of government projects in developing countries with evidence from the Ghanaian context. This study solicits the perceptions of project management practitioners (14), contractors (6), government officials (clients; 5), and the general public (5) on the subject. The findings indicate that corruption influences government project failure on all the failure criteria that were used for the evaluation. However, corruption influences failure at two different levels: project management and product phase. At the project management level, corruption has direct influence, while at the product phase level, the influence is indirect

The three pointers of research and development (R&D) for growth-boosting sustainable innovation system

Copyright © 2022 The Authors. Research and development (R&D) is frequently touted and labelled as the fundamental engine for creating sustainable innovations and achieving climate transitions. Yet, recent R&D efforts have struggled to live up to the widespread life-altering results they delivered in the 1960s when the term R&D was coined. In our attempt to address this concern, we propose a sustainability pathway model to achieving an economically viable innovation system that is anchored in three important pointers of R&D which have long been viewed as mutually distinct components in R&D budgets—investment, talent, and learning institutions. Directing attention to the pervasive need to align R&D investments with talents and learning institutions, we delineate how these pointers of R&D coming together to constitute a trivalent force may drive a growth-boosting sustainable innovation system. While there is no simple recipe which suggests an optimal combination of new scientific understanding, technologies, and process that could help produce the much-needed innovations and technological change, we present a set of propositions that highlights opportunities for reflection on existing R&D investment strategies and serves as a bridge to connect the emergent scholarship on sustainability with the intellectual traditions of R&D in innovation management

A phoenix rising? The regeneration of the Ghana garment and textile industry

Some African countries’ premier industries, such as textiles, garments and agro-processing, which floundered in the face of market liberalization and stiff competition from cheap imports, are now going through regenerative changes, with some beginning to tell a cautionary tale of a leap upwards. Focusing on the Ghana garment and textile industry, we draw on a framework that integrates social practices and everyday general-purpose technologies to explore the rise, decline and regeneration of the industry. Explicating a fine analysis of how the performative reconfiguration of social practices and functional sources of innovation and technologies may combine to support innovation-driven growth, our study sheds light on how loosely connected actors within a hitherto floundering industry can learn to transform their situated practices to drive their ‘industrial regeneration’. Implications for the theory and practice of industrial regeneration are outlined.Basic Research Program of the HSE Universit