Accounting Organizations and Society最新文献

Accounting and the accountancy profession sit at a consequential crossroads as the realities of planetary boundaries manifest through climate change, biodiversity loss and soil depletion, forcing societies and economic systems to transform. Alongside the effects sustainability has on corporations’ financial performance, future outlook and risk profile, accounting and reporting need to focus on externalities, with the aim of shedding light on the impacts firm activities have on society and the natural environment. Drawing on Adams et al. (2023), this essay continues the discussion on sustainability, impact and verification, calling for attention to the styles of verification prioritized by current accounting infrastructures. With the interlinkages between verification, reporting and accounting, the elements and types of information we emphasize in verification have implications for corporate activities and priorities and, therefore, for their negative social and environmental impacts, which we as societies ought to reduce urgently. While challenging, the terrain of accounting, reporting and verifying of impact offers opportunities for the accounting profession and for institutions to serve the public interest by helping societies transform. This may, however, require them to transform themselves.

In examining whether firms align their sociopolitical claims with their corporate political activities (CPA), Preuss and Max (2023) tackle a topic of keen interest to the Accounting, Organizations and Society (AOS), corporate social responsibility (CSR), and broader interdisciplinary accounting research communities. They document partial alignment between firms' diversity and environmental claims and the voting records of U.S. Congress members they financially support through political action committee (PAC) contributions, but also report several important caveats. Given that firm strategies on CSR and CPA often are played on ‘two (different) chessboards’ (Den Hond, Rehbein, de Bakker, & Lankveld, 2014), a study such as theirs is difficult to accomplish successfully. I applaud their efforts and believe the objective of their study was met. In my commentary, I use their study as a springboard to discuss key considerations regarding theory, data, and the interpretation of results when performing political CSR research in accounting.

Using a laboratory market experiment, De Meyst, Cardinaels, and Van den Abbeele (current issue) show that assurance of sustainability disclosures acts as a deterrent for “cheap talk” for report preparers who are incentivized to invest in sustainability initiatives. The study also shows that report users value sustainability investments more when reports about sustainability initiatives are assured and when the report preparers are incentivized to invest in sustainability initiatives. The study is both timely and relevant in light of the recent introduction of U.S. and international rules that mandate corporate sustainability disclosures in regulatory filings and independent assurance on these disclosures. My commentary discusses some research design issues regarding boundary conditions and the assurance manipulation, the implications of the fast-evolving regulatory landscape, and concludes with some directions for future research.

Drawing on literature in auditing and workplace learning, this paper develops the Auditor Learning Framework. The Auditor Learning Framework distinguishes auditor learning processes along two dimensions: the location of learning (on-the-engagement or off-the-engagement) and the role of others in the learning process (active or passive). We review the auditing literature and classify papers that directly or indirectly enhance our knowledge of auditor workplace learning into our framework to identify gaps in our understanding of the auditor learning processes. Our study provides a comprehensive view of auditor learning processes and provides suggestions for future research.

Many organizations have professional employees on fixed-term and ongoing employment contracts. While hiring employees on fixed-term contracts offers organizations operational flexibility and other benefits, it also brings about challenges in the form of relatively lower goal alignment and ability of these employees, thus creating the need for management controls. At the same time, given the costs and constraints of designing and implementing a control system, we expect that the planned use of fixed-term workers would be affected by the type of control environment that organizations are willing or able to create. Hence, this study investigates whether an organization's choice of its control environment and its use of fixed-term professional employees are interdependent (i.e., made jointly). Using surveys from different sources and archival data from the education sector, we find that some types of controls (i.e., action controls and organizational culture) and the organization's choice of using fixed-term employees are interdependent, while other controls (i.e., employee selection practices and results control) are independent of this choice. We also find that the interdependence between the choice of using fixed-term employees and the control environment is generally weaker when organizations use fixed-term contracts as an implicit screening mechanism for ongoing employment. Finally, in additional analysis, we find evidence that the interdependence between controls and the use of fixed-term employees is primarily due to concerns related to goal alignment rather than ability.