No abstract

Originated from financial reporting context, the concept of materiality has been applied in and contributed to sustainability reporting, by identifying, selecting, and prioritizing sustainability issues with significant impacts. This paper identifies two dilemmas that traditional stakeholder-approach confronts, and then analyzes how materiality-approach delivers advantage by addressing the dilemmas. This paper further observes two challenges for materiality-approach reporting: complexity interrelationship of sustainability issues; and subjectivity in materiality assessment. It argues that the two challenges are inherent and basic concerns for current sustainability accounting. This paper concludes that the road of materiality to sustainability reporting would be advanced with the progress of coping with the challenges. That is, extending our insight on the complex interrelationships of sustainability issues, and on subjectivity in materiality assessment, we would not only embrace a better materiality model to future effective sustainability reporting, but also open a door to view the fundamental theoretical concerns in contemporary sustainability accounting.

This study contributes to both accounting and concept mapping literature through the depiction of a concept tree based on the Accounting Theory curriculum, which has undergone recent and rapid expansion of its knowledge and has hence outgrown the previous limited mapping work. This tree-shaped concept map not only accounts for a particular mapping approach little studied and scarcely exemplified in literature, but also signifies a creative model that graphically interprets the sophisticated system of accounting theories and concepts as well as their complex interrelationships. In teaching practices, this concept tree has attested a potential to promote curriculum development, as evidenced in sequence and cohesion of topics and by being linked meaningfully to exam design.

Communicative exchanges consist of a certain degree of both static and dynamic structure that can be used for prediction. Temporal dynamics are often neglected in communication studies. We use Shannon's mathematical theory of communication to examine 1,594,690 contributions from 206,184 contributors to 38 open online collaborations. We find that about three fourths of the total predictability of turn taking stem from participation frequencies ('static variance'), while one fourth originates from the temporal sequence ('dynamic process'). Most dynamic structure is contained within consecutive dyads. We find a trade-off in the importance of static and dynamic structure, which we explain with a combination of both theoretical and empirical factors. We also show that the stationarity of the communication process plays a significant role in this trade-off. These findings have implications both for theorizing and methodologically measuring communication as a dynamic process, as well as for the practical design of online collaboration systems.