Manzurul Alam

Purpose
This study aims to explore how reimbursement negotiation of health-care services influences management accounting and control systems in a nonprofit private hospital. Attempts have been made to obtain an in-depth understanding that explains the choice of the cost management systems and strategies used by a hospital operating within its institutional funding environment.

Design/methodology/approach
This paper uses a qualitative case study approach, which comprises semi-structured interviews with key informants to understand how different bases of reimbursement impact management accounting systems in a nonprofit private hospital.

Findings
This study highlights that, unlike publicly funded hospitals, nonprofit hospitals face multiple bases in the reimbursement process of health-care services in their institutional environment, which impact their internal processes, including management accounting systems. It also reports the organizational processes to negotiate with external funding bodies, where different funding logics were accommodated.

Research limitations/implications
This research focuses on a single case study, and its findings need to be interpreted carefully. Repayment systems can be different and subject to changes over time, which can influence various nonprofit hospitals to adopt different Organizational strategies that require contextual understanding.

Originality/value
This paper contributes to extant knowledge on how reimbursement of health-care costs affects internal organizational processes, including management accounting.

This study explores how strategic approaches to sustainability issues would determine the integration between Management Controls Systems (MCS) and Sustainability Control Systems (SCS). Although existing literature has focused on developing SCSs, these systems remain decoupled from MCSs used for strategic management purposes. More specifically, this study seeks to respond to the call by Gond (Management Accounting Research 23(3):205–223, 2012) by exploring the missing link to integrating regular MCS with SCS. This engagement-based study has used multiple case analyses of manufacturing companies in Sri Lanka. Data were collected through semi-structured, in-depth interviews with the senior managers and a document analysis of publicly available information. The study identifies four types of control configurations: (i) Symbolic Compliance, (ii) Lean Accommodative, (iii) Dynamic Adaptive, and (iv) Sustainability-driven Comprehensive, depending upon the company’s strategic approach to sustainability in the spectrum of proactive and reactive. A company characterised by a proactive strategic approach has strongly integrated control systems while having complex attributes. In contrast, reactive companies’ SCSs remain decoupled from MCSs with simple control attributes. When companies fall in the middle (accommodative), they may either have a combination of strong integration with simple attributes or weak integration with complex attributes. This paper provides new scientific insights based on empirical evidence from a developing country on how the strategic approach of the organisation is associated with the extent of sustainability integration. The typologies suggested in the paper would allow managers and practitioners to identify boundary conditions for integrating sustainability into the strategy. This paper contributes to the growing literature on the complexity of control systems and their association with strategic sustainability approaches and control integration under a single framework. The originality of this study also lies in its attempt to examine the sustainability integration of control systems in a developing country context.

Purpose
This study aims to investigate how corporate governance (CG) attributes and the the chief executive officer’s (CEO’s) political connections impacts on the corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure in the Chinese power and chemical industry.

Design/methodology/approach
The study uses data from 265 Chinese power and chemical companies listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges between 2013 and 2016 (for a total of 892 firm-year observations). The data were analysed using multiple regression techniques. The authors addressed the endogeneity issues between CG attributes and CSR disclosures and checked the robustness of our results in several ways, such as a fixed effect regression.

Findings
This study finds a significant positive relationship between internal control and CSR disclosures. In addition, the results indicate that CG attributes such as ownership, board independence and Audit committee have a significant positive impact on CSR disclosures. However, contradicting the literature, no significant relationship was found between the CEO’s political connections and CSR disclosures in the Chinese power and chemical industry context.

Research limitations/implications
The findings of the study provide valuable insights for practitioners, regulators and policymakers on encouraging companies to enhance CSR disclosure by improving the quality of internal control and CG attributes in China’s heavily polluting industries. The findings may be useful for the users, regulators from the countries that share similar contextual and cultural values.

Originality/value
This study is among the few that examine CSR disclosure using a large sample within China’s power and chemical industries–sectors widely recognised as major environmental polluters and of growing concern to both the Chinese government and the international community.

Purpose

This study aims to explore the managerial conception of the determinants and barriers of sustainability integration into management control systems (MCS) of manufacturing companies in Sri Lanka. Although existing literature has explored the factors that influence the adoption of specific management controls to handle environmental and social issues, the role of management conception has been underrepresented. Specifically, literature is scarce in identifying contextual and organisational factors that influence corporates beyond mere adoption of controls but to integrate with regular controls, especially in developing countries such as Sri Lanka.

Design/methodology/approach

A multiple case study approach has been used to identify the management conception of barriers and enablers for sustainability control integration. The analysis is conducted based on a theoretical framework extending the work of Gond et al. (2012) and George et al. (2016). To obtain an in-depth and multifaceted view, semi-structured interviews were conducted with managers in charge of different functional departments of five manufacturing companies.

Findings

The findings identified managers’ perceived factors, such as environmental impact, stakeholder pressure (customer, competitor and regulatory authorities) and top management commitment, showing a clear difference between strongly and weakly integrated companies. Contrary to the literature, domestic regulatory pressure and multinational ownership do not sufficiently drive MCS sustainability integration.

Practical implications

The findings have implications for managers and practitioners to anticipate the potential barriers and determinants of sustainability integration and provide guidance to take proper measures to deal with them when designing and implementing their MCS.

Originality/value

The study adds value to the literature by presenting a theoretical framework based on the triangulation of different theories to recognise the significance of management idea in sustainable integration. Furthermore, because sustainable integration of MCS is a novel idea, this research is one of the earlier attempts to highlight problems from the perspective of developing countries.

Purpose

This study aims to investigate the relationship between university rankings and sustainability reporting among Australia and New Zealand universities. Even though sustainability reporting is an established area of investigation, prior research has paid inadequate attention to the nexus of university ranking and sustainability reporting.

Design/methodology/approach

This study covers 46 Australian and New Zealand universities and uses a data set, which includes sustainability reports and disclosures from four reporting channels including university websites, and university archives, between 2005 and 2018. Ordinary least squares regression was used with Pearson and Spearman’s rank correlations to investigate the likelihood of multi-collinearity and the paper also calculated the variance inflation factor values. Finally, this study uses the generalized method of moments approach to test for endogeneity.

Findings

The findings suggest that sustainability reporting is significantly and positively associated with university ranking and confirm that the four reporting channels play a vital role when communicating with university stakeholders. Further, this paper documents that sustainability reporting through websites, in addition to the annual report and a separate environment report have a positive impact on the university ranking systems.

Originality/value

This paper contributes to extant knowledge on the link between university rankings and university sustainability reporting which is considered a vital communication vehicle to meet the expectation of the stakeholder in relevance with the university rankings.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how performance management systems in nonprofit organizations are influenced by their funding sources. It explains how resources motivate organizations to diversify their strategies with attended performance management systems. Design/methodology/approach It adopts a qualitative case study approach involving semi-structured interviews with key informants in a nonprofit organization to understand the evolving nature of performance management systems associated with different funding sources. Findings The findings suggest that the case study organization changed its revenue base along with its performance management systems to satisfy the reporting and accountability requirements of different funding sources. Despite external funding sources detailing different restrictions and requirements, the overall performance management system was able to manage these different expectations. Research limitations/implications This study is based on a single case study, and its findings need to be interpreted with care, as there are differences between nonprofit organizations because they differ in their environments, services and funding. Originality/value This paper contributes to extant knowledge on how organizational performance management is influenced by funding sources, providing insights at the operational and governance levels.

This paper examines how accounting systems are disseminated in different ways as organisations seek to use accounting information to manage social services across organisational boundaries. Drawing upon qualitative field research within a New Zealand community‐care provider and using the literature on bounded management and accounting visibility, our findings reveal that the government's increasing screening and monitoring of social support services create an extra burden on carers and families. We reflect on how internal accounting practices only capture the visible costs endured by government‐funded programmes, ignoring a significant part of disability care costs incurred by family members and other carers.

Purpose This study examines how resource dependency affects municipal budgetary process; specifically, it investigates how politically aligned resource sharing between different levels of government along with clientelism interferes with the budgetary process of municipal organizations in developing countries. Design/methodology/approach The paper adopts a qualitative approach to study two municipal organizations in Bangladesh. The qualitative data are collected from semi-structured interviews with key organizational members. Besides, the study also relies on various publicly available documents and the Local Government Acts to complement the interview data. Findings The findings of the study divulge dependence on partisan aligned nonprogrammable government funds poses significant problems for municipal organizations in carrying out their budgetary process. Clientelism and informal negotiations of incumbent political leaders are found to play a vital role in such resource sharing decisions. The consequent uncertainties in getting funds have the potentials of interrupting the budgetary process at the organizational level. In some cases, budgets do not appear to be useful as a management tool for guiding organizational activities. Research limitations/implications Like other qualitative studies, the results of these case studies are not generalizable because their interpretations are highly dependent on the context of the research sites. Practical implications Despite the limitation of a case study research, the results of this study are useful to deepen our understanding of how uncertainty in resource sharing creates clientele behavior and interferes with the organizational budget. Such an understanding helps practitioners and policymakers devise a sound resource sharing mechanism for effective delivery of municipal services on a sustainable basis. Originality/value This study provides insight into how precarious central government transfers and clientelism interfere with local governments' budgetary process.

Purpose This is a reflective essay on how lockdowns during COVID-19 pandemic have exposed internal organisational processes and work practices. Design/methodology/approach The essay is based on the author's reflections on organisational work practices during the coronavirus mandatory social distancing period. Findings This reflective essay shows how COVID-19 pandemic challenges the existing organisational systems and processes. It produces thoughtful considerations of different options for managing organisational activities in the post-COVID-19 period. Research limitations/implications The reflective essay underscores various issues relating to organisational job design and work practices and the impact on future management accounting research. Originality/value This essay provides personal insight into how the recent pandemic influences organizational work practices.

This paper traces the historical developments of accounting regulations in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia and uses institutional theory to identify factors affecting International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption as the national accounting standards in these countries. We find that the extent of convergence with IFRS in Algeria is higher compared to Morocco and Tunisia. This has been mostly due to greater foreign investor flows from Western countries in Algeria during the last decade, the dominant position of international Big-4 audit firms, and strong trade relationship of Algeria with the European Union (EU) compared with Morocco and Tunisia. We discuss the main challenges faced by these three countries in converging toward IFRS. These are underdeveloped equity markets, switching from French fiscal-oriented accounting systems to Anglo-Saxon accounting systems, and are characterized by lack of knowledge of principles-based IFRS by local professional accountants. Moreover, the convergence with IFRS in these countries is confronted by the prevailing small and medium-sized firms in the economic environment, difficulty in fair-value measurement in these settings, and the cost of convergence for companies. Our study has policy implications for those countries sharing similarities with these settings and have undertaken steps to implement IFRS.