Purpose – Drawing on agency theory and legitimacy theory perspectives, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of board characteristics on sustainability reporting of listed companies in the Colombo Stock Exchange (CSE), Sri Lanka. Design/methodology/approach – A sample of 148 listed companies was drawn from the CSE using stratified random sampling method and data were collected from the 2012 annual reports. The proposed hypotheses were tested using a hierarchical binary logistic regression. Findings – This study documents that board size and dual leadership are positively associated with sustainability reporting and boards with female directors are negatively associated with sustainability reporting. This study also found that sustainability reporting is likely to be influenced by firm size and firm growth. Additionally, the study also reveals that younger firms are likely to adopt sustainability reporting. Originality/value – This is the first study to examine the influence of board characteristics on sustainability reporting in Sri Lanka, considered as a developing economy with an emerging equity market.

Malaysia has evolved from a production-based to knowledge-based economy in order to stay relevant and compete in the global marketplace. Thus, the purpose of this article is to discuss current trends in Malaysian higher education and how these affect education policies and practices. Four main trends are discussed in this study: Globalization, Teaching and Learning, Governance, and the Knowledge-Based Society. These are followed by four elements that affect education policy and practices: Employability, Quality Assurance, Academia, and English Language Competency. The transformation that has taken place will surely contribute to the success of Malaysia's Vision 2020 policy of becoming a fully developed nation in the near future.

The widespread environmental change has forced many organizations to change and rethink their business and competitive strategies, particularly cost management system, in order to achieve the competitive edge in the marketplace. Successful organizations are those that are able to improve quality, lower costs and efficiency of operations and eliminate products and services that incur losses. This explains why some organizations are successful while others fail. An organization costing system is a system that helps the management with the strategy planning while the system plays an important role in providing accurate cost information about the products and customers. In other words, the costing management system is important to provide timely and quality information to help managers in their decision making process. To achieve this, many organizations shift their focus from conventional or traditional costing system to an increasingly popular cost methodology system that is Activity-Based Costing (ABC). This system simply collects cost in functional activity cost pools and then applies costs to products/services using individual cost drivers (Brignall, 1997). Initially when this system was introduced, it was only popular among the manufacturing context; however, now it also pulls attention of the service sectors. Kock (1995) noted that it is now more important than ever to have access good information in decision-making in the management of service firms. A number of research and studies reveal how the ABC system in the service sectors has effectively kept the operational cost at marginal level and still be able to provide better customer service at the same time. Thus, this case study analyses how an ABC costing system that improves operations and to better meet the needs of University customers in a more cost -effective manner.Keywords: Conventional Costing System, Activity -Based Costing, Quality of Information Contemporary Management Research 76INTRODUCTION A country's economy in large depends on industries particularly service sectors such as insurance company, financial institutions, health service, transportation. As more corporate sectors venturing into service industries create competition, they are required to provide a quality customer service at reasonable cost. A number of service firms have gone into bankruptcy as a result of poor control over escalating overhead cost. Thus, the survival of a firm in service industry is largely depending on the availability of timely and quality information for decision-making and the ability to keep the operation cost at marginal level.Consequently, cost and management accounting concepts and techniques are not only used in manufacturing sectors but also in service sectors to provide cost information for decision-making. A study by Horngren (1995) found that the focus of cost management should be on decisions and the various cost management techniques, systems and measurements that spur and help managers to make wiser economic decisions. Of the many availa...

Organizations have to confront with new developments brought about by the shift of industrial age competition to information age competition. As a result of this, certain assumptions with regard to the running and measurement of organizational performance have become obsolete. Information becomes essential to bring about new capabilities for competitive success. In the information age, it is vital for organizations to attempt to create future value through investments in customers, suppliers, employees, processes, technology and innovation (Kaplan, 1998). Therefore, in information age organizations need to formulate and utilise performance measurement tools that can be used to develop strategies, not only to create value for the current and future customers, but also to enhance current and future capabilities necessary to improve future performance. The tools are not only to be used to control behaviour and to evaluate past performances, but also to articulate and communicate future strategies. In brief, the objectives of this research study are: 1.Evaluate Performance Measurement at Institutions of Higher Learning 2.Assess the level of Awareness and knowledge of Balanced Scorecard as a measure

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