Accounting Organizations and Society最新文献

We conduct two experiments to examine how descriptor identicalness influences investors' assessments of managers' opportunistic estimation choices. We manipulate the identicalness of descriptors (identical versus non-identical) and managers' opportunistic estimation choices (more versus less opportunistic). We find that investors are better able to integrate information when managers use identical descriptors in their disclosures than when managers use non-identical descriptors. We also find that investors who observe identical descriptors tend to make less favorable investment judgments when managers' estimation choices are more (versus less) opportunistic, whereas those presented with non-identical descriptors are less likely to discern between more and less opportunistic estimation choices. Lastly, our supplemental analyses indicate that descriptor identicalness facilitates information integration, which in turn moderates the impact of managers' estimation choices on investors’ credibility assessments and subsequent investment judgments. Our findings have important implications for regulators, managers, and investors, shedding light on how investors use and incorporate accounting disclosures into their investment decision-making processes.

The situations in which accounting is practiced raise moral concerns about customer and employee safety, community welfare, environmental sustainability, and human rights. Traditional accounting practices, such as budgets and performance measurement systems, have been widely regarded as ‘crowding out morality’ by objectifying the people affected by a firm's actions. In two North American utilities, we observed a stepwise structured process of moral reflection (which we identify as an instance of Rawls's reflective equilibrium approach), in which accounting, in the form of the risk appetite radar, helped guide executive decision making informed by moral principles. We develop two dimensions of accounting's role as ‘moral interlocutor’: enabling organizational value consensus and organizational value coherence. We identify three features of the observed accounting practice that enable it to act as moral interlocutor: subjectification rather than objectification of potential victims of the firm's actions; de-monetization, that is, considering trade-offs in terms of multiple organizational values, not only in terms of cost; and visualization of the organizations' moral principles on value priorities and how they are shaped by organizational decision making and action. The accounting visualizations did not only enable executives' reflection on rights and wrongs, but also triggered a fuller and richer moral vocabulary that was used for complex decision making involving, for instance, automation and the risk of suicides.

Accounting's sense of place and purpose is informed by social imaginaries. The imaginaries of the sphere of the economic, the public, and the planet help accountants make sense of their surroundings and the world at large, help them coordinate and form alliances with other forms of expertise, and frame their understanding of what matters. Recent disputes over materiality and declarations by the profession to serve the “people and the planet” suggest that accounting's sense of place and position is variable, yet its long-standing imaginaries indicate that it is also regular and steady. By discussing how imaginaries of the economic, the public and the planet prefigure how accounting connects us with the world from our “bubbles” (Sloterdijk), the paper makes a case for paying more attention to how these imaginaries shape our understanding of what accounting is about and can become, how they might lock accounting into position, and us with it.

In the most recent revision of the conceptual framework underlying accounting standards the concept of prudence became the focus of an extraordinary public political dispute. This dispute is explored here by taking an actor-network theory perspective on politics, a ‘dingpolitik’ (Latour, 2005a) or ‘material politics’ (Barry, 2013a), that revolves around things and matters of concern, rather than just interests and ideologies. The analysis unveils how a multiplicity of human actors, including regulators, preparers, auditors, and users of accounts, academics, lawyers, politicians, and journalists, but also material actors such as IASB due process documents and responses, parliamentary debates, official statements, speeches, legal opinions, and financial press articles, come together and raise concerns that are unpredictable and evolving. These concerns ultimately expose the political qualities of prudence that are connected to other controversies relating to other financial reporting issues. At the peak of the political drama that unfolds we see a group of long-term investors commissioning a legal opinion challenging the legality of IFRSs on the grounds that the removal of prudence violates the legal requirement for accounts to show a true and fair view. Both the politics and anti-politics that take place around the concept of prudence lead us to reflect on conceptions of an unrelenting financialisation of accounting standards through fair value accounting and of their (potential) functions in organisations and society.