Have labour practices and human rights disclosures enhanced corporate accountability? The case of the GRI framework

This paper critically evaluates Transnational Corporations’ (TNCs) claimed adherence to the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)’s ‘labour’ and ‘human rights’ reporting guidelines and examines how successful the GRI has been in enhancing comparability and transparency. We found limited evidence of TNCs discharging their accountability to their workforce and, rather, we found evidence to suggest that disclosure was motivated more by enhancing their legitimacy. TNCs failed to adhere to the guidelines, which meant that material information items were often missing, rendering comparability of information meaningless. Instead, TNCs reported large volumes of generic/anecdotal information without acknowledging the impediments they faced in practice.     

Barriers to the “key supplierization” of the firm

The phenomenon of key supply management (KSM) in business companies is far less investigated than the phenomenon of key account management (KAM) which beneficiates, both in practice and in an academic context, from a growing interest. This article is based on the empirical analysis of a sample of 10 international companies which have recently launched KSM programmes or are currently working on launching such programs. It examines the difficulties these companies come up against when implementing such programmes and proposes to organize these difficulties around three dimensions: 1) the difficulties in implementing real supplier portfolio approaches; 2) the narrow view of value co-creation with suppliers, and 3) the persistent lack of integration of the purchasing function with other internal functions within the company. The conclusion of the article is that KSM is far from being a mere symmetric phenomenon of KAM. Several implications are then discussed in relation to the implementation of KSM programmes within companies.     

Readability of accountants’ communications with small business—Some Australian evidence

This paper explores the readability of a new and non-corporate narrative area, accountants’ communications with small business. The distinctive motivations, agendas and interests of small business managers are considered. The findings are informed by rationales from Shearer's (2002) thesis on the influence of neoclassical economics on accounting discourse. The study finds low readability accentuated by potentially low reader interest with accounting documents composed according to conventional accounting's rules and statutory requirements. Higher readability and document content which informs small business managers’ interests is evident when accountants are not compelled to author documents with reference to these professional rules and legislation.     

A Study on Firms with Negative Book Value of Equity

This paper studies the puzzling negative book equity phenomenon among US public firms. Our evidence suggests that negative book equity firms exhibit heterogeneous characteristics. We show that a great portion of these firms, while operating at excessive capital structure with leverage ratio over 100%, are financially and operationally healthy. These healthy negative book equity firms increase their debt primarily motived by a need for funds to fulfill investment demand. We also find that the off‐balance sheet intangible assets and quality of intangible assets play an important role in determining the true debt capacity of these firms.     

Firm heterogeneity, productivity and spatially bounded knowledge externalities

In this paper, we argue that conceptually disentangling the ‘context versus composition’ aspects of regional growth is a multilevel issue. By applying multilevel models (also called random-effects models), we show (1) the importance of considering firm-specific characteristics simultaneously with region-specific characteristics, as we find that a large part of what is traditionally assigned to the impact of the region should be assigned to firm-specific characteristics and (2) that existing single-level methodologies can be problematic, as they are vulnerable to the charge of estimating significance levels that are too liberally assigned and promote exaggerations. This is illustrated empirically by showing that single-level approaches would lead to the conclusion that innovation spillovers are highly significant in a setting of Dutch urban growth differentials, while multilevel analyses shows less liberally assigned significance levels. We conclude that multilevel-effect models better fit research questions that combine firm and spatial characteristics simultaneously, especially because they allow firm-specific characteristics to be differently linked to their regional contexts.