Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the emotional or affective mechanisms that underlie the relationship between employees’ perceptions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and employee attitudes and behaviors. Drawing on affective events theory (AET), this study examines a sequential mediation model in which CSR perceptions influence positive affect (PA) at work which leads to employee engagement in the creative process that, in turn, affects employee creative behaviors. Design/methodology/approach Two-wave data were collected from a sample of employees working in the telecommunication sector in Egypt (N=208). The collected data were analyzed using structural equation modeling. Findings The study found a positive association between CSR perceptions and employee creative behaviors. The results also showed that CSR perceptions have induced PA, which, in turn, led to greater level of engagement in the creative process and eventually led employees to exhibit creative behaviors. Originality/value This is one of the first studies to use AET as a conceptual framework to explain the positive association between CSR and employee positive work outcomes (i.e. creativity). By integrating AET with CSR and employee outcomes literatures, this study contributes to the available knowledge regarding the affective or emotional mechanisms through which CSR perceptions could affect employee work behaviors.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of competing logics on the implementation of risk-based management controls (RBMC) by providing evidence of resistance due to competing logics. Moreover, the study proposes solutions to logic contestation. These solutions may help the company override logic complexity. Design/methodology/approach This study draws upon the theory of institutional logics. It adopts an interpretative qualitative research approach and uses the case study method. Data were collected from one of the biggest private sector insurance companies in Egypt through a triangulation of interviews, observations and documents. Findings We found that internalised and institutionalised roles and structures – represented by the incumbent corporate and community-related sets of logics – compete and disrupt the emerging enterprise risk management and RBMCs. The newly imposed RBMCs produced heterogenic practices that changed the means of controls at the case company. However, this change was faced by resistance from local employees, as it represented a challenge to the prevailing cultural symbols and norms in their traditional work environment. Originality/value This study contributes to the literature by offering new evidence on resistance to Western risk-based management control projects applied in emerging markets. Moreover, it extends the cultural political economy of management accounting and control by illustrating that management accounting in emerging markets is also an operational manifestation of culture, community and location.

PurposeThe study aims to investigate the appearance of corporate social and environmental responsibility (CSER) practices in a context where economic, communal and political institutions are highly central and competing with each other.Design/methodology/approachTheoretically, the study draws upon the institutional logics perspective and the theoretical concepts of logics centrality and compatibility to understand how higher-order institutions interact with mundane CSER practices observed at the case company's micro level. Empirical data were solicited in an Egyptian village community, where fishing, agriculture and especially salt production constitute the main economic activities underlying its livelihood. A combination of interviews, informal conversations, observations and documents solicits the required data.FindingsThereby, this study presents an inclusive view of CSER as practiced in developing countries, which is based not only on rational economic perspectives – as is the case in developed and stabilised contexts – but also on social, familial and political aspects that are central to the present complex institutional environment.Originality/valueThe reported findings in this study highlight the role of non-economic (societal) logics in understating CSER in African developing nations.

Purpose This study aims to examine the impact of Covid-19 on transforming accountability, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and office operation and control. This paper explains how unleashing the rationality of health and safety along with internal CSR made the transformation to telework successfully operable in a periphery of a western multinational corporation. Design/methodology/approach The study draws upon the theories of governmentality and social accountability. It adopts an interpretative qualitative research approach and uses the case study method. Data were collected from one of the biggest private sector telecommunication companies in Egypt. Findings This study finds that Covid-19 and its related health and safety discourse represented a good rationale for the western home office to accelerate the initiation of its office transformation plan to reach full working from home policy in a less developed country peripheral subsidiary. Under the guise of CSR, the company spent a large budget to make this transformation quickly operable, while its Egyptian subsidiary is financially distressed. Moreover, the company achieved its objectives from this new rationality as employees currently prefer the telework mode which reduces the company costs in the long run. Practical implications The study provides practitioners with evidence and practicable knowledge regarding the impact of Covid-19 on office reconfiguration and the ways used to achieve this in the Egyptian telecommunication sector. Originality/value The current study extends the governmentality literature by illustrating that transformation to telework in emerging markets is an operational manifestation of cost reduction and efficiency rationality under the guise of CSR. Moreover, it extends the office transformation literature by bringing early evidence regarding office transition plans during COVID-19 in an emerging market.

The concern of this paper is methodological. It reports on how methodology and methods are coupled with the theory used in a case study. This is illustrated from my study on transformation of management control from a monologic form to a heterogenic one through the implementation of Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) in an Egyptian firm. Having stimulated by the critiques developed against positivistic research in management, this paper explains what philosophical rationales justified this methodological choice and how a particular theoretical framework advanced an argument about how the above transformation occurs. The paper concludes that case study research can only be acceptable if the story is suitably theorised to make contribution to knowledge.