The antecedents of brand image are defined as the differential effect of brand knowledge on consumer response to the marketing of the brand. It is now widely acknowledged by organizations that strong brand image will create a competitive advantage in the marketplace that will enhance their overall reputation and credibility. Indeed, recent trends in modern marketing have changed enormously, and study of antecedents of brand image is increasingly becoming significant to keep pace with this change. A brand is said to have positive (negative) brand image when consumers react more (less) favorably to the antecedents of brand image for the brand. In this conceptual paper, we have summarized the literatures on currently prevailing concepts and approaches on brands that will allow us to identify the antecedents of brand image, and therefore will help organizations to enhance their marketing efficiency. Based on a comprehensive review of several earlier works, here we propose a plausible framework for the antecedents of brand image in sequential order, namely, awareness of the brand, association of the brand, superiority of the brand, affection of the brand, resonance of the brand and corporate social responsibility. In this review, we put forward the notion that the antecedents of brand image attempt need to be associated with organizational processes which will conceptualize according to an associative network of memory model through organizational activities. We suggest that these activities could play a significant role in creating brand image among consumers.Keywords: brand image, awareness of the brand, association of the brand, superiority of the brand, affection of the brand, resonance of the brand, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

The monitoring role of the board of directors has been extensively slammed as being ineffective since it depends on several factors. This study sheds light on some of the directors’ attributes and the impact on mitigating the opportunistic behaviour. By adopting different perspectives, we argued whether the directors with more expertise, tenure, outside directorships become more effective in mitigating the opportunistic behaviour. These attributes could have a curvilinear effect since such optimal attributes could improve the competency level of the directors. Hence, the board becomes more effective. Meanwhile, its effect could turn inversely to make the directors ineffective. This study adopted discretionary accruals as an indicator for earnings management. A sample of 114 service and industrial firms listed in Amman Stock Exchange (ASE) from 2009-2015 were chosen for this study. Pooled OLS regression model is enlisted to avoid the inconsistently of the slope across individual units and time period. Results show that the directors with financial expertise are more effective to minimise the level of earnings management practices. Conversely, the independent directors with high tenure besides the higher directors with outside directorships are engaged with a high level of earnings management practices. This implies the existence of each of the friendliness hypothesis and the busyness hypothesis in the Jordanian market. Similarly, this also explains the weakness of the board of directors in complying to their monitoring role in the emerging markets in general.

Prior studies have focused on the role that the institutional investors play to control managerial behaviours as one of the factors of the external ownership in the developed countries specifically. Nevertheless, scant attention has given to the external ownership role whether the institutional or the foreign investors to maintain the minority shareholder interest especially with the presence of the central agency problem in the emerging markets such as Jordan. Thus, this study argued the monitoring role of the external ownership factors can minimize the managerial opportunistic behaviours through examining the relationship between external ownership factors and earnings management. Earnings management proxies using the performance-adjusted discretionary accruals model (Kothari et al. 2005 model) by applying the cross-sectional method to determine model parameters for each industry in each year. In order to achieve objectives of this research a sample of 798 firm-observation of the Jordanian non-financial firms listed in ASE during the period 2009-2015 were collected. The random-effect GLS regression model is used after following the correct procedures of the panel data analysis to determine the appropriate model as stated by the results of Hausman and LM tests. Hence, the correcting robust standard errors estimates method was used since the data was suffered from the heteroscedasticity problem. The results show that the institutional ownership in Jordan plays a vital role in mitigating the opportunistic behaviours of managers. Likewise, the existence of foreign ownership in firms minimizes the level of earnings management practices. These support the hypotheses that the institutional and foreign investors are able to control the managers of the firm. Also, provide evidence about the similarities between the role of the foreign investors and the role of institutional investors since there is a shortage of the evidence about foreign investors role especially with earnings management.

This paper attempts to review on how the effectiveness of board of directors and the executive compensations are moderated by internal ownership such as managerial and family ownership to mitigate earnings management. Most of prior studies focused on the traditional interaction among corporate governance mechanisms and earnings management, thus neglected that the variance of these practices that can be attributed to the business environment and the nature of ownership structure. This paper revisits the literature on the relationship between the factors of effectiveness of the board of directors in the individual level such as board independence, size, meeting frequency, CEO duality, audit and nominations-compensations committees, directors financial expertise, tenures and multiple directorship etc. and as a bundle through creating a score of effectiveness on the earnings management practices. It also reviews on whether the managerial and family ownership can moderate the relationship between the factors of effectiveness of the board of directors (as a score) and the total executive compensation with the earnings management practices. Panel data analysis method will applied over the data collected for ASE for the Jordanian listed firms for the period after the issuing of the Jordanian corporate codes in 2009. This paper’s contributes to the existing literature by providing an in-depth review of corporate governance mechanisms and earning management.

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