British Accounting Review最新文献

Hybridisation of public services has increased under neoliberalism and New Public Management policies, over the past four decades since the 1980s. Hybrid arrangements for service provision blend public, private and nonprofit approaches to organising in ways imbued with a range of institutional logics impinging on their value creation mechanisms. Within this context, the corporatisation of public services represents a striking manifestation of hybridisation. However, comparatively little research has considered how hybrid organising through corporatisation shapes the mechanisms through which value is created in corporatized public services. To address this gap, through a field level study, this paper examines hybridity, institutional logics and value creation mechanisms in the corporatisation of adult social care in English local government. The study found that the use of different hybrid corporate forms – blended, segregated, segmented and blocked - to provide services to elderly and vulnerable citizens had important implications for the mechanisms through which financial and social values were created. Nevertheless, it was also apparent that different forms of hybrid organising could co-exist within the same organization along with multiple value creation mechanisms, underlining the unique dynamics of hybridisation pertaining to the corporatisation of public services.

2020 Distinguished Accounting Academic Keynote Address presented at the Annual British Accounting and Finance in April 2022, University of Nottingham.

This paper examines how Gloria Agyemang, the BAFA Distinguished Accounting Academic award winner of 2020, has studied accountability in her work. It does this by analysing her previous research contributions to public sector accountability, nongovernment organisational accountability, and accountability in other contexts such as social and environmental accounting as well as the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. It argues that in the study of accountability, context and the need for accountability to several stakeholders is extremely important; but accountability contexts and the stakeholders need to include those who are hidden in the recesses of everyday life. The paper draws on a theoretical framework that Rached (2016) refers to as “coordinates of accountability”, which by providing a minimalist definition of accountability facilitates an expanded analysis to broaden and deepen accountability research. It argues for responsible scholars to be engaged with historical, contemporary, and societally critical issues and to employ counter accounting methods to reexamine accountability.

Integrated Thinking, the management approach associated with Integrated Reporting, has been hailed as a way of improving organisational decision-making and internal communication, leading to sustainable value creation. Yet Integrated Thinking remains poorly defined and understood. By analysing and synthesising the findings from an emerging body of case study evidence, this paper brings new theoretical insights into how Integrated Thinking is conceptualised and practised and its unique relationship with Integrated Reporting. We reveal Integrated Thinking to bring considerable tension to organisations as managers attempt to adapt to conflicting stakeholder priorities. Organisations which manage this tension and experience some success with Integrated Thinking typically exhibit four ‘hallmarks’, namely: 1) a deliberate drive by the board and CEO to encourage Integrated Thinking, 2) an Integrated Strategy developed through extensive stakeholder engagement and understanding of value creation, 3) the creation, or enhancement, of an organisational culture of trust and collaboration, and 4) the development of Integrated Intelligence, comprising integrated Performance Management Systems (PMS) and the use of multi-functional teams for decision-making. We present a new conceptual framework of Integrated Thinking in practice, reflect on its relationship with developments in sustainable management practices more broadly and propose several avenues for future research.

We explore the significance of climate theory concerning managerial decisions in cross-border mergers. We report that temperature offers a good familiarity proxy showing that country pairs that experience little (large) distance in temperature experience relatively more (less) acquisitions. A one-unit decrease in the difference of the temperature in a country pair is linked with an increase in the number of cross-border mergers by 1.09%. We then highlight the significance of relatively warm temperatures on managerial decisions: We find that (i) the relationship is driven by the Summer months; during June–August for country pairs in the Northern hemisphere and December–February for pairs in the Southern hemisphere, (ii) relatively more cross-border mergers occur towards countries with modestly warmer temperatures showing evidence of managerial affinity towards warmer places, and (iii) country pairs with relatively high temperatures exhibit more acquisitions. Overall, this study highlights a new perspective in the field of climate finance.

Regulators are increasingly seeking ways to incentivize firms to improve corporate social responsibility (CSR) while minimizing criticism of direct interventions in firm behavior. This study takes advantage of two exogenous regulatory shocks initiated by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in the US. In 2011, the CFPB enabled the private filing of consumer complaints against financial firms, and in 2013, these complaints were publicly disclosed. Our findings reveal a positive association between consumer complaints and subsequent CSR performance of the targeted financial firms (referred to as focal firms). Notably, this association becomes significant only after the public disclosure of complaints. Furthermore, we observe a spillover effect on the CSR performance of non-focal firms operating in the same area as the focal firms. Collectively, these findings suggest that mandatory disclosure of consumer complaints is one effective regulatory strategy to motivate both focal and non-focal firms to enhance their CSR performance.

Research considers that the increase in corporate environmental reporting over the past decades has been a response to stakeholder demand and pressure within and beyond the boundaries of business operations. Recent empirical studies have begun to extrapolate the stakeholder concept and rationale into developing countries when explaining their growing reporting practices. However, how this global trend is played out in the particular institutional developing country context remains unanswered. This research addresses the issue by employing a case study of a leading mining company in China. The study finds that corporate managers do understand the importance of stakeholder communication and engagement. Such importance has been framed into national social obligations within the socialist ideology long embedded and more recently reinforced in the minds of managers. It reveals an imprinting process of ideological prioritisation through which imprinted socialist philosophies and values are entrenched in perceived stakeholder salience and responsibility for environmental reporting. This process is decoupled from delivering procedural compliance via accountability reporting because of the dominance of State power and national collective interests over individual rights. This study suggests that socially and politically embedded philosophies and ideology ingrained in a country can create another layer of criteria when managers interpret and determine the salience of individual stakeholders and make reporting decisions. It highlights that the extent to which the salience of stakeholders is understood and responded to in the environmental reporting process is conditioned by the structure and operation of a country's political and social system.

This study examines a disability services funding reform which produced calculative (accounting) practices to frame non-governmental organizations' (NGOs') performance and accountability, and the role of digitalization, as a form of marketization, in reframing that performance and accountability. Drawing on insights from Callon's (1998) concepts of framing and overflowing, this study analyses one NGO's pursuit of performance and accountability via calculative and digitalized forms. Through a qualitative interpretive case study approach, the study traces how new calculative practices inspired by a disability services funding reform and an online service platform act to (re)frame the NGO's accounts of performance. Analysis of this (re)framing work finds that NGO accountability is reduced by a performance object – cost management – which is supported by digitalization. Further, we find that the performativity of calculative practices constructed new forms of marketization for NGO realities, thoughts and actions, reducing the NGO services for disabled persons to economic exchanges. Our study offers insights into the counter-productive dangers of calculative practices when they generate digitalization for cost management performance objectives. In addition to marketization reframing NGO performance and accountability, concepts of framing and overflowing enable us to better understand the impact of calculations and digitalization on NGOs' service performance.