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Purpose: This paper aims to investigate materiality judgement providing insights, critiques and future research paths in light of the open debate on the role of materiality in corporate financial disclosure, highlighting potential connections and implications with sustainability and intellectual capital (IC) reporting. Design/methodology/approach: The research presents an overview of the analysis of financial materiality, including new stimuli from recent studies and regulatory requirements for financial and non-financial reporting. Accordingly, this study used a systematic literature review (SLR) based on a combination of content, text and bibliometric analysis of materiality in accounting research studies, collecting data from the Scopus database as one of the most relevant repositories. Findings: The SLR identified four relevant research trends, concerning: (1) the relevance of materiality principles in corporate disclosure; (2) financial reporting practices and materiality; (3) theories and approaches in defining financial materiality and (4) the existence of quantitative and qualitative thresholds in the materiality judgement. Research limitations/implications: The results provide theoretical and practical implications when comprehending the development of the concept of financial materiality in financial statements and whether they can be appropriate in reporting IC as well. We identified future research paths. Practical implications: From a practical perspective, this study is useful for companies implementing financial materiality based on stakeholder engagement and improving their transparency in financial and non-financial reporting practices. Social implications: The research investigates if the process for assessing materiality is in line with the expectations of all stakeholders involved in financial and non-financial reporting. Originality/value: This research is the first to investigate the scientific basis and applicability of the concept of financial materiality to sustainability and IC reporting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I follow the mystery of millions of tons of materials washed out to sea by the March 2011 Japan tsunami: a massive wave of lost materials expected to reach North American shores that never seems to officially arrive. I bring Gordon's conceptualization of haunting together with STS conversations about absence and invisibility to build on feminist approaches that do not take as given what is missing or what should be done. I begin by situating efforts to respectfully distinguish materials survivors call 'floating things' amidst a sea of concern for ocean plastic pollution. These efforts are then contrasted with what I initially perceived as the institutional erasure of floating things at sea, re-counting how some practices work to ensure materials can be ignored, cleaned-up, or used for other kinds of ocean science research. Yet, floating things refuse to disappear completely, as potential traces wash up on beaches, trajectories are modeled back into existence, and individual practices exceed institutional obligations. I argue that attending to hauntings by listening to ghosts and drifting with them is necessary for justice-oriented forms of care for absences. In the case of floating things, this means honoring survivor relations while resisting the perpetuation of Pacific narratives of danger from the outside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many of the debates among theorists of the body in feminist and gender studies center on the gendered body and its relation to the sexed body, with the validity of the sex/gender distinction itself a topic of contention. On the one hand, feminist advocates of social constructionism tend to distinguish between sex and gender, in which sex (male or female) is identified with the biological body as a "natural" datum and gender (masculine or feminine) is a second-order sociocultural construction that is superimposed as an ideological superstructure on this "natural" base. On the other hand, feminist advocates of sexual difference such as Judith Butler call into question the sex/gender distinction and insist that the sexed body, like gender, is socially constructed. This article brings these contemporary feminist interlocutors into conversation with sixteenth-century Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava authorities who developed a distinctive discourse of embodiment in which they frame the categories of sex and gender in relation to devotional desire in their ontological theories of bodily identities. The Gauḍīya discourse of embodiment explodes notions of the relationship between embodiment, personhood, materiality, and gender on both the human and divine planes and challenges prevailing body theories by positing bodies beyond matter, personhood beyond matter, and gender beyond sex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early childhood schoolbooks designed to teach children to read, have been shown not only to shape gendered identities in a limiting, binary format, but to lend the written word the appearance of unquestionable, and restrictive truth about the way the world is. Texts written for adults, too, may similarly limit what can be known, reining in the world's emergent efflorescence. Extending the concept of emergent listening, this paper develops the concept of emergent reading, a form of reading that is intimately and diffractively related to emergent listening and emergent writing. Emergent reading is relational, intra-acting with the emergent efflorescence of written words and with the materiality of the human and more-than-human world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the U.S. federal securities regulation and materiality determinations involving environmental, social, and governance (ESG) information.

Using a Supreme Court ruling that rejected the use of "bright-line" rules previously relied upon in evaluating materiality claims, this study examines how heightened materiality uncertainty impacts audit pricing. We expect the heightened uncertainty to make it more difficult for auditors and clients to assess materiality and to reach a consensus on materiality assessment, which increases audit effort and engagement risk, leading to higher audit fees. Consistent with this prediction, we find that after the ruling, audit fees increase significantly for treatment firms in the circuits using bright-line rules in the pre-ruling period, relative to control firms not affected by the ruling. This effect is stronger when auditors have lower quality or lower industry expertise, and when investors have more diverse opinions. We also find that for firms audited by low-expertise auditors, auditor turnover due to auditor-client disagreement on materiality-related issues increases significantly for treatment firms relative to control firms. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text. JEL Classifications: K2; M41; M42. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using SASB's materiality framework, prior research finds alpha for the portfolio of firms with improving ratings on material ESG issues. We replicate this finding and provide a fundamentals-based perspective on why the materiality portfolio outperforms. Our basic premise is that changes in material ESG issues reflect fundamental firm characteristics. More financially established firms—firms with larger size, lower growth, and higher profitability relative to their sector—are more likely to not only create material strengths but also resolve material weaknesses in their ESG scoring. This fundamental link dictates that one should comprehensively control for fundamental determinants of stock returns before attributing portfolio outperformance to improving material ESG scores. Indeed, we find that the materiality portfolio does not generate alpha after we account for its exposure to profitability and growth factors. Our evidence underscores the issue of correlated omitted fundamental factors in the debate of ESG alpha. Data Availability: Data are available from the sources cited in the text. JEL Classifications: G11; G12; G14; M14; M41; Q51. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Materiality assessments play an important role in helping firms to select the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) topics to include in their sustainability report. This article presents the six main steps of materiality assessments, the methods used, and how the complexity, uncertainty, and evaluative nature of sustainability issues complicate them. This article draws two conclusions: the selected materiality perspective influences how the other steps are conducted, and assessment results should not only focus on selecting win-win scenarios, but also on "tensioned topics," which indicate material societal impact but lack a business case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide evidence on effort coordination and information sharing between audit committees and external auditors. We use four effort measures: the risk areas reported by both the auditor and committee, auditor-reported materiality, and committee meetings. We find that the number of risks reported by the auditor (committee) is positively related to the number of risks reported by the committee (auditor) and that lower materiality is associated with more risks that the committee discloses. The evidence also suggests that although risk areas are "sticky," the committee identifies new risks faster, whereas the auditor focuses on shared risks. Next, our analysis indicates that audit process standardization influences reporting quality in a nonlinear manner. Finally, although audit fees tend to rise with auditor effort, they are unrelated to the committee's effort. Our findings endorse the service perspective on auditing by emphasizing the collaborative nature of the audit process over individual actors' self-interests. Data Availability: Data are available from public sources cited in the text. JEL Classifications: M41; M42; G38. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a critique of Vargo and Lusch's service-dominant logic (SD Logic) and proposes an alternative basis for service design. The proposed approach builds upon the formgiving tradition outlined in Maldonado's definition of industrial design. More specifically, the article questions SD Logic's neglect of service materiality and emphasizes the need for a deliberate reevaluation of formgiving, taking into account the unique materiality of services exchanged in face-to-face interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of ESG ratings and scores has become ubiquitous in asset management, with 9 in 10 European fund managers in a recent survey using them to support their investment process. Meanwhile, these tools have come under sustained criticism, with detractors highlighting methodological divergences, inconsistent predictive power, and inherent biases. By contrast, less attention has been paid to understanding their design, for which there is little academic research. Building on a framework from Berg, Kölbel, and Rigobon (2022), this article focuses on the first step in constructing an ESG score and a key source of divergence among available solutions: scope, in which ESG topics are defined and selected as material for integration into company assessments. The authors first identify two key stages--topic selection and materiality matrix--in the process of defining scope for an ESG scoring model. Next, they survey approaches to these stages as outlined by regulators and standard setters and developed by ESG score providers. Lastly, they propose three avenues to reduce scope divergence across ESG models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Brazilian Business Law Journal / Administração de Empresas em Revista is the property of Administracao de Empresas em Revista and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Idea generation in interactive learning environments requires the consideration of the interactivity and materiality aspects of creativity. In educational robotics, idea generation is mediated through a technological object in a process allowing us to observe the three main components of divergent thinking: fluency, flexibility, and originality. Nevertheless, divergent thinking assessment has been mainly evaluated in the last decades through semantic idea generation tasks such the Alternative Uses Test (AUT), asking participants to write different uses for familiar objects. In our study, we aimed to analyze differences in the three divergent thinking components (fluency, flexibility, and originality) through the AUT as a semantic task and through an educational robotic task that engaged the participants in building their ideas interactively. Results show that the creative components are strongly correlated within but not between the two tasks, leading us to consider the differences in the creative processes engaged when generating ideas through building with robotic objects. The role of affordances in idea generation through educational robotics is discussed as an important difference to consider in the evaluation of creativity in interactive learning environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of a hundred and one handwritten essays by master students in Informatics. The students reflected on their experiences of working with pen and paper for reading and writing as a mandatory assignment for the duration of a five-week intensive course. Taking an inductive approach, reflexive thematic analysis was used to identify patterns of meaning across the full dataset. The essays elicited insightful student reflections on learning, knowing, and being. One overarching theme, New connections, and four sub-theses were identified: Handwriting as note making, Being present for learning, Freedom to think, and Materiality of reading and writing. This study contributes to an improved understanding of the affordances of paper and laptops in the lecture room, based on a student-centred approach, and reflects on how student perspectives can be implemented during lectures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Contemporary Accounting Research is the property of Canadian Academic Accounting Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper develops a materialist and performative conception of power, proposing a theoretical framework that bridges Barad's intra-active agential ontology and Foucault's microphysics of power. The article uses empirical data collected from a social clinic in Greece where the traditional apparatus of the clinic is contested and experimentally reconfigured. We focus on three overlapping themes and reflect on how power relations materialize themselves through everyday practices and multiple entanglements between human and non-human agents. We argue that these entanglements constitute the dynamic matter of power: their performative reiteration determines how power matters. By showing how power materially exceeds the manifest intentions of human agents, our case study aims to contribute to an idea of alternative organising that accounts for the materiality of mundane posthuman entanglements within an antagonistic understanding of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Norba: Revista de Arte is the property of Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Extremadura and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This qualitative article with a biographical-narrative design aimed to understand how violence exercises against homosexual men with disabilities operate. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven Mexican homosexual men with different disabilities --motor, visual and hearing-- ranging in age from 19 to 57 years. Through a content analysis and from an intersectional perspective, in the shared narratives the violence that the participants faced was analyzed. This violence ranged from the institutional to the relational. We also observed how violence shapes particular ways of thinking, feeling, and relating to others that give way to specifc forms of bodily and subjective materiality used to account for these experiences. We concluded it is necessary to approach violence from intersectionality in order to recover emotional production and its imprint in the individual's agency in a way that, instead of crystallizing identities, comprises them in a framework of complexity in constant tension and dynamism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses indulgences as an instrument that provided the spiritual treasury of the Church with a material manife-station. We propose that indulgences reflected the Divine within the material world in four different ways: 1) by promoting particular locations as sources of divine grace; 2) by promoting the cult of saints and their relics; 3) by generating donations for the construction and renovation of churches, and 4) by being in themselves – as indulgence letters and their copies preserved in chartularies – material evidence of the Church's spiritual treasury. Therefore, indulgences must be taken into account in scholarly discussion of Christian materiality. We explore the four material aspects of indulgences through the evidence from Turku Cathedral from the mid-thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research purpose. The ESG literature supports a positive correlation between a firm's ESG performance and its financial performance; however, the details of this relationship are ambiguous, which has led to conflicting results in the literature. This article asserts that this ambiguity is largely related to the fact that ESG studies rarely consider the important issue of materiality. This article is an expanded replication of analysis by Williams ---amp--- Apollonio (2022), a study that called for deeper analysis of both materiality and the causal link between ESG ratings and financial performance. Design / Methodology / Approach. This methodology calculates Pearson Correlation coefficients between Bloomberg ESG scores and abnormal returns for S---amp---P 500 firms from 2020 to 2022 after controlling for the material issue of GICS sectors. Findings. The results show no relationship between ESG scores and abnormal returns, and the conclusion is that controlling for GICS sectors is not the methodology that will clarify the presumed positive correlation between ESG performance and financial performance. Originality / Value / Practical implications. This study is one of the few that addresses materiality in ESG ratings. The finding that controlling for GICS sectors does not sufficiently control for materiality is a significant building block for future researchers. This article suggests that more granular categorization of sub-industries using a larger sample than the S---amp---P 500 is likely to be useful future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate whether non‐GAAP reporting affects the audit process and thereby the quality of the related financial statements. First, we provide evidence that auditors in numerous countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, rely to varying degrees on non‐GAAP profit before tax as a benchmark for determining quantitative materiality. Then, using Premium Listed companies on the London Stock Exchange, we document that U.K. auditor reliance on non‐GAAP materiality benchmarks often results in a higher quantitative materiality amount and can lower audit quality. Although U.K. auditors appear skeptical of managers' more aggressive non‐GAAP adjustments, auditors adopt more of management's low‐quality adjustments when auditor independence is weaker. In sum, our results suggest that non‐GAAP reporting can indirectly affect investors by reducing the rigor of the financial statement audit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advent of Transformer architectures for neural nets and the high language proficiency of programs like GPT-3 confront us with a fundamental question. How can, or should, literary criticism proceed when the text's creator is not a human but a machine? The query shakes to its core literary criticism, and indeed the entire enterprise of critical inquiry. This essay confronts the issue head-on, arguing that it does matter whether language is produced by humans or AIs. It provides context for the development of neural nets that process natural language, looking at competitors to GPT-3 and similar Transformer novels. It then goes into depth on GPT-3's Transformer architecture and how it processes word sequences. It compares how the AI learns language with how human children learn it, arguing that the differences result in a systemic fragility of reference for AI's language understanding. It interrogates the null strategy of assuming there is no difference between human- and machine-generated text and explores its implications, arguing for a middle position between the program understanding nothing about meaning or everything. Finally, it offers four strategies for how literary criticism can engage with machine-generated language, arguing that machine narratives can be of significant interest in themselves. The point is not to ignore the powerful capabilities of GPT-3 to generate compelling narratives and texts, but rather to devise and deploy a new kind of literary criticism that can adequately interpret its complexities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biodiversity loss, climate change and natural resource depletion are major concerns at local, state-wide and global scales. In the European context, addressing these challenges depends largely on the implementation of European Union (EU) environmental policy. This Special Issue sheds light on the making of environmental Europe in localized action and practice, from the perspective of non-linearity of policy implementation processes and trajectories. The different articles address three analytical challenges examining policy implementation of (i) highlighting the ties between the macro and the micro scales of implementation; (ii) taking into account the materiality of ecosystems as well as the diversity of forms of knowledge, representations and values associated with nature; (iii) characterizing the new relational configurations emerging between public and private actors involved in hybrid forms of governance. Through examination of the implementation of EU environmental and sustainable development policies primarily in the French context, the Special Issue contributes to a renewed understanding of policy implementation as institutional change. Further, the articles highlight the values underlying the implementation of environmental Europe and the specific role of science in shaping the representations, instruments and strategies at stake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the disability studies scholars, Jan Grue and David T. Mitchell who examine to perform some of the most innovative readings disability studies that has made possible in the literary field. Topics include considered as Grue and Mitchell suggest, recent work in disability studies has taught us how to locate representations of disability not on the margins of human existence but at center informing diverse relationships among embodiment, materiality and the social world.

This article weaves together futurist electropop, the neorationalist memescape, neoliberal urban planning, and digital finance to illustrate some of the new epistemological and political challenges facing the growing musicological subfield of critical organology. Drawing upon recent studies of financial technology, it argues that calls to erase theoretical abstraction and return to a “common-sense” concern for “tangible things” come dangerously close to endorsing the neoliberal drive to replace public institutions with entrepreneurial competition. The aims are to show that the “affordances” of music technology today are not necessarily discernible when organologists limit their attention to musical instruments’ ontologies alone, and to propose an alternative focused on “repairing” music technology’s capacity for democratization. The first section presents a reading of the Grimes single “We Appreciate Power,” situating the music in relation to an ethnographic account of the scene where Grimes first emerged. The second section seeks a definition of affordance that makes sense of the technological politics at work in things like rationalist meme economies and neoliberal innovation hubs. The concluding section outlines the case for a reparative organology that would both account better for materiality and resolve anxieties around theoretical abstraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the widespread planning-and-control paradigm, organizations schedule their budgeting early in the period (planning) when the organization has more time to carefully reflect on the processes to be later controlled. I refer to a budgeting process that conveys thresholds to managers as management by exception (MBE), and model MBE as a limited communication device, which alleviates the manager's burden of retrieving the details from the planning phase while preserving enough information to maintain effective control. Accordingly, I identify a threshold-based MBE algorithm, which is shown to approximate the performance of a full-communication policy, suggesting that simple static threshold-based communication can be effective. The equivalence between a full-disclosure policy and perfectly flexible budgets helps to explain the popularity of static budgets in light of these findings. The results also challenge the accounting concept of materiality by suggesting that less important activities may actually have tighter thresholds. JEL Classifications: D21; M41. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digital circulation and forms of digital artworks appear to be immaterial. However, our analysis of their materiality discloses new dimensions of affinities between the art market and the financial market. These relations have been recognized in the social sciences in order to understand the transformation of standardized mass markets into markets in which the highest value is attached to the singularity and authenticity of a commodity. Financial markets are undergoing such a transformation. The art market is essentially associated with singularity and authenticity. New digital technologies transform the art market's working. Despite the hopes and visions of art being liberated from the present curatorship of gallery and museum representatives, curators, critics, collectors, and gallery owners, art's valuation perpetuated in blockchain infrastructure comes closer to the valuation and appreciation stemming from financial markets. We study three auctions of artworks that took place in Poland and were hailed as the first auctions of NFT tokens associated with art. Thus, we delve into the most common and propagating forms of digitalization based on blockchains that have been associated with art. The focus on materiality enables us to identify new dimensions of this process. We present two understandings of art's materiality. The first assumes that materiality is a transmitter of meaning. In the second, materiality refers to the interaction with - and usage of - not only physical, but also digital objects. From the first perspective, artworks' manifestations are anchored in physical objects or singularized data files whose value is assessed by current decision-makers, such as gallery and museum representatives, collectors, curators, art critics, and gallery owners. Physical objects are kept in galleries, museums, and among collectors. Such a vantage point hampers how digital circulation co-creates the valuation of artworks, their originality, and the logics of circulation. From the second perspective, the standards of smart contracts, the means of token collecting, and their pricing are used not only by humans, but are also submitted to data processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the structure and lexicon of the Book of the Duchess illustrate our inability to comprehend death and the inevitable absence it entails. In its meditation on this absence, its focus on materiality, and its formal recursivity, the Book of the Duchess explores the gap between the apprehension of death (we know, in a sense, that it has happened) and the comprehension of it (it feels surreal; where has the beloved gone?). This article builds on what many scholars have noted in passing—that death is incomprehensible and that language cannot recuperate the Man in Black's loss. And yet, very often, scholars return to the idea that in some way the poem does console, or does recreate Blanche, however poetically or even conventionally. But as this article demonstrates, the poem reminds us that nothing can restore Blanche; death is the thing we cannot recover from. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article defines “.compostmodernism” as a successor to postmodernism by explicating of Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar as an example of .compostmodern textual machinery—a system of two interconnected “machines” (one abstract, the other physical) that are co-dependent and mobilized by the novel’s typography and materiality. Beginning by illustrating how The Familiar exemplifies .compostmodern textual machinery through its experimental typography which becomes the visual manifestation of literary cyber-consciousness, this article indicates how, in visually manifesting character cyber-consciousness, the novel’s typography actualizes the digitality of character interiority, ultimately drawing attention to the work’s status not only as literary artifice, but also as textual machinery. The demands of such experimental typography instantiate a physical relationship between reader and codex that emphasizes the novel’s materiality and requires the reader to engage with the text both physically and digitally. Ultimately, this digital engagement incorporates the internet not only as a crucial supplement for the reader to seek reference, translation apps, and supplementary (albeit obscure) Danielewski publications, but also as a medium for the reader to supplement the novel via social media output and online reading communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, and based on the theme of economies of writing, I explore writing as a more-than-human or posthuman practice. In particular, I consider the way in which academics curate writing places and spaces and the role of matter (things, natures and technologies) in these assemblages of writing by drawing on a Baradian take on posthumanism. The article utilises empirical data from a qualitative, photovoice study with doctoral students. The aim of the article is to encourage reflection on the way we, as academics, experience and teach writing practice in a more-than-human world, and how these experiences relate to productivity and wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conflicts have legacies beyond peace treaties and armistices. This article focuses on one example of such an enduring heritage, namely barbed wire left after the Nazi occupation of Norway during World War II. This barbed wire has persisted up to the present day and thus presents a case that can illuminate nuances of a material legacy that is harmful but also an important source of insight and experience of heritage. This involves the incomplete clean up in the postwar years and how the barbed wire continues to pose challenges for present-day and future cultural and natural heritage management. Contemporary archaeology offers insights into the afterlife of war and works as a counterweight to grand historical narratives that mainly focus on the height of armed conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This paper outlines the development of the principle of materiality in the European accounting framework, from the Modernization Directive (2003/51/EC) to the NFI Directive (2014/95/EU) and on to the proposals for a Corporate Sustainability Reporting (CSR) Directive (2021/0104 (COD)). The authors highlight how the requirements for corporate reporting in terms of sustainability matters have changed, underlining the main issues that require further attention by practitioners, researchers and legislators. Design/methodology/approach: This paper is based upon a historic analysis of European Union (EU) regulations in the field of non-financial and sustainability reporting and how these have changed over time. A conceptual comparison of different reporting concepts is presented, and changes in their relevance to the EU accounting framework are discussed as part of the historic analysis. Implications from corporate practice are derived from previous empirical findings from the EU Commission's consultations. Findings: The proposed change from non-financial to sustainability reporting within the EU affects more than simply the terminology used. It implies that a different understanding is needed of both the purposes of company reporting on sustainability matters and the aims of carrying out such reporting. This change was driven by the need and desire to appropriately interpret the principle of materiality set forth in the NFI Directive. However, the recent redefinition in the shift within the EU Commission's proposals presents considerable challenges–and costs–in practice. Research limitations/implications: Future research on the conceptualization and operationalization of ecological and social materiality, as well as on the use of this information by different stakeholder groups, is necessary in order to (a) help companies that are applying the reporting requirements in practice, (b) support the increased harmonization of the reports published by these companies and (c) fully assess the costs and benefits associated with the increase in reporting requirements for these companies. Practical implications: Companies have to establish relevant reporting processes, systems and formats to fulfil the increasing number of reporting requirements. Originality/value: This paper outlines the historic development of the principle of materiality regarding mandatory non-financial or sustainability reporting within the EU. It outlines a shift in rationales and political priorities as well as in implications for European companies that need to fulfil the reporting requirements. In consequence, it describes appropriate interpretations of this principle of materiality under current and upcoming legislation, enabling users to apply this principle more effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a matched sample of European firms exceeding the relevant size thresholds for the Directive 2014/95/EU, the results show that the Directive has improved both quantitative and qualitative characteristics of sustainability reporting by European PIEs. Directive 2014/95/EU represents the main initiative developed in Europe to contribute to the 2030 Agenda actively. The main criticisms the [7], [8] reports in the Directive 2014/95/EU impact assessment are as follows: There is inadequate publicly available information about how non-financial issues, and sustainability issues in particular, impact companies, and about how companies themselves impact society and the environment. [Extracted from the article]

With increased interest in voluntary sustainability reports from investors and other stakeholders, more companies are having these reports assured. The issue of what is considered material in these assurance engagements is important, and yet research on materiality has focused only on financial statement audits. This article reports the results of an experiment where auditors assess the materiality of audit differences in the same magnitude for both a financial audit and a sustainability (water) assurance engagement. Two factors, the risk of breaching a contract and community impact, are manipulated between-subjects. We find that auditors assess the materiality of an audit difference significantly higher for a financial case than for a water case. This difference is significantly greater when there is no risk of breaching a contract than when there is a risk of breaching a contract. The risk of breaching a contract has a stronger effect on the difference in auditors' materiality assessments when there is no community impact than when there is a community impact. Overall our findings suggest that qualitative factors have a greater impact on sustainability (water) materiality assessments than on financial statement materiality assessments when an audit difference is between 5 percent and 10 percent of a relevant base. Understanding the factors that impact material judgments in sustainability reports is important as these factors affect the reliability of the reported disclosures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 2000s, athleisure (clothing designed for physical activity) has been gaining popularity as both a functional and fashionable clothing trend, particularly among women. Thus far, scholars have explored the gendered nature of athleisure and the neoliberal, postfeminist, and healthism discourses present within this fitness clothing phenomenon. However, the research has yet to account for the materiality of athleisure and its impacts upon women's experiences of fitness and the construction of idealized female bodies. In this article, we use new materialist theory, specifically Karen Barad's agential realism, to explore the material-discursive dimensions of athleisure. Drawing upon a diffractive analysis of interviews conducted with 22 women in Aotearoa New Zealand, in conjunction with social media analyses, we explore two lively intra-actions of women's athleisure-clad moving bodies – the 'muffin top' and the 'big booty' – to reveal what athleisure does to/with women's bodies. We highlight how these athleisure-body intra-actions work to create boundaries around acceptable femininity and give rise to particular constructions and meanings of women's bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Materiality plays an important role in limiting the reach of laws that penalize misrepresentations. Laws that include no materiality element punish any covered misrepresentation regardless of its relevance-like lying about hair color on a loan application. By contrast, laws that include a materiality element withhold punishment for immaterial misrepresentations of that kind-in other words, misrepresentations that have no tendency to affect the ultimate decision. Our immigration laws make it a deportable offense for a noncitizen to 'falsely represent' herself as a U.S. citizen for a purpose or benefit under the law. Although this law has been on the books for decades, a key question about its reach remains open: Does it include a materiality element? The Board of Immigration Appeals and three federal circuit courts have said 'yes,' holding that misrepresentations of U.S. citizenship must be material to trigger deportability. But in a recent panel decision adopted by the en banc court, the Eleventh Circuit said 'no,' holding that the unambiguous statutory text includes no materiality element. This Article examines the history of these immigration statutes and demonstrates why the Eleventh Circuit's holding was wrong, although mainly for a reason no court has yet addressed: the common-law origins of the relevant statutory text. Under well-established principles of statutory construction, Congress is presumed to legislate with the understanding that common-law phrases carry their commonlaw meaning. At common law, the phrase 'false representation' carried with it an implicit materiality element. Therefore, the immigration statutes at issue presumptively incorporate materiality because they penalize 'false representations' of U.S. citizenship. This presumption is confirmed by other contextual clues. And, as this Article explains, ensuring fidelity to the statutes' implicit materiality element is especially important given the statutes' breadth and the draconian consequences that follow from the Eleventh Circuit's contrary holding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of materiality, originating in the accounting domain and applied in the auditing domain, is an essential tool for improving audit quality. A renewed interest in materiality research emerged in Australia after submitting Exposure Draft no. 243 by the Australian Accounting Standards Board (AASB) proposing the withdrawal of AASB 1031 Materiality, which became effective in July 2015. The purpose of this paper is to review the audit literature to examine how the materiality concept is located in the regulatory framework, the standards and guidance that support the application of this concept, and research undertaken using different research methods. As our review reveals significant gaps in recent research on the subject, gaps need to be addressed. The paper concludes by proposing research propositions that fit into the audit triangle for materiality research developed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Practice-based organization scholarship has made significant contributions, but its vision is narrow. It aims to show organizational scholars that what are taken to be entities are better understood as the accomplishments of ongoing practices; in doing so, it seeks to re-imagine the organization studies field. Yet, practice-based organization scholarship suffers from some encumbering blind spots, particularly with respect to its conceptions of agency and its ability to theorize "the" organization. I offer communication as constitutive of organization theorizing—itself a variant of practice thinking—as providing some helpful remedies to those problems. Both approaches, however, have trouble seeing domination in organizing, so a further provocation builds on their shared interest in new materialist theorizing to articulate a novel approach to exposing the conditions and conduct of organizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on comparative ethnographic research on plastic consumption, (re)use, and disposal in households and collective spaces in Cambridge (England) and Montevideo (Uruguay). Focusing on practices of re-use by individuals and collectives, it argues that these constitute forms of 'actually existing circularity' that provide an alternative to circular economy schemes premised on retained corporate ownership. In the context of discussions of the circular economy that are often limited to the macro policy level, this article thus provides a degree of granularity and a focus on everyday practices. Connecting with debates around materiality, it argues both that we must play close attention to the synthetic materials that surround us in everyday life, and that a focus on materials can help demonstrate the way that commodity status can be undone through projects of collective, inventive re-use that spill out beyond the household. Finally, it points to the potentially disenfranchising elements of dominant business-friendly circular economy visions and the way that these might disrupt complex materials pathways and cultures of re-use and repair rather than straight-forward linear economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review of new work in the new materialisms in 2020 picks up a thread of inquiry outlined in the previous year: how to understand how human persons may live, act, and find political efficacy in a relational and intertangled material world. Each of the monographs reviewed offers a different approach to understanding how persons find agency from within the intertanglements of things. Along the way, they address questions of embodiment, of race and of gender, of the materiality of language, of the role of the imagination, of the philosophy of history, and of critical method. Following the introduction, the first three sections are 1. Lo! A Shape!; 2. Militant Vegetables; and 3. Blackness and Plasticity. Each of these offers a distinct account of human ontology, accounting both for the ways the self is moved by its world and the ways it acts within it. The last three sections are: 4. Strange Words, Strange Matter; 5. Disappearing Things; and 6. Four Degrees of History. Each of these considers a monograph which synthesizes new materialist theory with frameworks from related fields in order to offer new perspectives on human action, freedom, or thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents accounting research on the effect of changes in the standard for deferred revenue liabilities on corporation accounting of profits and profit margins. The increased complexity of financial statements due to the changes and the increases use of deferred revenue liabilities by companies are noted. It is found that the changes in deferred revenue liability accounting have a positive impact on forecast profit margins for the next fiscal year and a negative impact on reporting of current profit margins.

We test the asymmetric timeliness hypothesis by using information in extreme events as a measure of good/bad news. Our focus on extreme events is motivated by two arguments. First, the accounting concept of materiality in conjunction with litigation risk influences managers and auditors to make more conservative choices with respect to material events. Second, focusing on extreme shocks minimizes the probability that accounting slack may obscure the effect of asymmetric timeliness (Beaver and Ryan 2005). We identify individual events using short-window extreme returns, since long-window returns would aggregate the effect of multiple events and thus limit our ability to detect the asymmetry. Taken together, these features of our research design provide a more powerful test of asymmetric timeliness. Consistent with prior studies, we document that the correlation between bad news and concurrent earnings is significantly higher than that between good news and concurrent earnings. Our analysis of extreme events also enables us to document higher correlation of good news with earnings two or more quarters ahead. This is in contrast to prior studies that were unable to document asymmetry in the relation between returns and subsequent earnings in the opposite direction to that between returns and concurrent earnings. Our paper contributes to the growing literature on conservatism by modifying the Basu methodology to enhance the power of the test of asymmetric timeliness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]