Accounting Organizations and Society最新文献

Broker-dealers traditionally charge their clients for the provision of investment research with a composite fee that bundles payments for research with other variable fees, such as those for trade executions. Due to regulatory changes in Europe, US broker-dealers temporarily allowed some of their clients to pay an explicit fee for the provision of investment research. Drawing on the sunk cost literature, I examine how transaction cost unbundling influences investors’ reliance on investment research. Results from 16 experimental markets indicate that investors place greater weight on costly forecasts under a system of unbundled payments compared to bundled payments, but only if transaction costs are sufficiently high, which is consistent with the dynamics of a sunk cost fallacy. I find marginal evidence that the enhanced focus on the forecast further inhibits investors' learning, as reflected in a slower reduction of price errors over time. These results are important since investors worldwide are increasingly paying explicit charges for investment research, a trend reinforced by a recent SEC policy change.

Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing (TDABC) systems use time inputs and distinguish between the cost of resource usage and the cost of unused capacity to provide accurate cost information. Importantly, TDABC produces aggregate signals of unused capacity at the department level, which offers the potential for superiors to assess misreporting or slack creation during budgeting without knowing which subordinates contributed to the slack. In a multi-agent participative budgeting experiment, we examine the impact of two capacity reporting conditions against a condition where capacity reporting is absent. When superiors receive an aggregate signal of unused capacity and subordinates have no discretion over cost allocation input parameters, misreporting of cost budgets decreases compared to when capacity reporting is absent. However, the benefits of capacity reporting on misreporting largely vanish when subordinates have discretion over the inputs allowing them to hide their unused capacity. When discretion is absent, subordinates anticipate peers to reduce misreporting to avoid the superior's rejection of their aggregate proposal. Yet, discretion over the inputs changes subordinates' anticipation in that they expect others to misreport and hide unused capacity to appear honest. Costing system designers should thus be aware that giving employees discretion over time inputs can offset the decision-making benefits of TDABC.

The development of quantitative technologies is increasingly challenging professional practices and raises questions about whether and how organizations may foster plural and reflexive practices. In this paper, we outline the role played by tools and their layouts in this process. Tools can sustain the enactment of plural views, logics and evaluative principles. However, it is not clear why, in some cases, designing or using these tools triggers intractable conflicts instead of helping to sustain reflexivity in a “productive” way. To address this issue, we explore the case of a French bank that introduced in its credit management processes a new statistical approach of risk management, which conflicted with the professional approach that prevailed at the time. Relying on Boltanski’s (2011) work on critique, we highlight how “productive” reflexivity emerges, not only from critique, but from a dynamic relationship between critique, confirmation and practical action. This framework allows us to bring a fresh look at the layouts identified in the literature as able to sustain pluralism by exposing their differences regarding whether and how they may contribute to trigger reflexivity. We especially show that, when quantitative technologies are involved, the creation of compromising accounts may prompt dynamics of escalating conflict, while combinations may help organising a pluralism of modes of evaluation that nurtures reflexivity without inhibiting action. Moreover, our study shows how, in credit risk management, quantitative technologies can be implemented, even in the most operational processes, without bringing about an unreflexive “illusion” of control.

In this paper, we seek to understand the ethics of accounting technology design. We commence by working with the concept of technological mediation, which is theorizing how technologies steer actions by evoking given behaviours and by contributing to perceptions and interpretations of reality that form the basis for choices and decisions to act. As such, this relation between people and technologies has important ethical consequences since it implies that technologies contribute actively to how humans do ethics. In this paper, we draw upon a postphenomenological approach (Ihde; Verbeek) to study and to theorise the moral mediations brought about by accounting technology, by examining how, in its design, technology can actively mediate the moral choices and guide the moral actions human beings make. Our central research question is ‘how is morality mediated in the design of accounting technologies?‘. This question is explored through an ethnographic study of the design of a new Performance Measurement and Compensation System in the Italian division of a multi-national pharmaceutical company. We offer two main contributions towards answering this question. First, by working within the theory of technological mediation, we develop the concept of a ‘moral imaginary’ as an approach to understanding designing the morality of things. Second, we elaborate a process model to theorise how moral mediations unfold in the design of accounting technology. From our conceptual motivation and the theoretical elaboration it inspired, we illuminate how the design of accounting technologies, in this case a PMS system, is a form of ‘engineering ethics’ through techno-moral mediation.