Introduction One of the major growth areas within accounting in the last five years has been “accounting for the environment”, which has generated interest well beyond the confines of accounting academics and professional accountants. Managers, the media, politicians and the public have noted environmental and, therefore,social problems which may be addressed, in part at least, by identif…
Purpose – This study aims to bridge the research gap on the perception of accountants, intention to pursue an accounting career and the role of accountants in driving organizational change among undergraduates in Malaysia. Design/methodology/approach – The study sample comprises 279 undergraduate students from a business school in Malaysia. The constructs of the study are leadership, et…
Purpose – This study utilises an internship framework to justify the need for feedback from all three groups of internship stakeholders. The purpose of this paper is to determine the benefits, skills, and outcomes students gained through internships from the perspective of students, university and employers. Design/methodology/approach – A set of structured questionnaires was used to sur…
This is an unsettling paper. Its main theme is to recount a tale of “failure”; the failure of accounting academics to respond adequately to calls for more case study-based research of accounting in action and in its organizational context and, as a consequence, the failure of accounting academics to develop accounting theories. The authors assert that these failures have arisen as a result …
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the views of academics, senior university managers and employer representatives on the design and implementation of an innovative work-based learning (WBL) programme in UK higher education. Design/methodology/approach – The research project draws upon case study research and utilizes data from semi-structured interviews and documentary a…
Purpose – The paper aims to examine the influence of financial disclosure (FD) level and time on the value relevance of earnings, book value, and cash flows relative to three share price proxies, namely average annual share price, annual closing share price, and share price after a three-month period following the financial year-end for Jordanian companies. Design/methodology/approach –…
Purpose – Classically the magnetic material models are considered with a deterministic approach. Nevertheless, when submitted to the fabrication process, the magnetic core properties are negatively impacted and may be subject to variability during the process. This variability can be of such importance that the performances of the final device (electrical machine) will also present a notic…
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of accounting discretion in a principal-agent setting, wherein accounting information is used in performance evaluation. The agent may choose one from among several allowable accounting methods. However, limited audit resources allow only for verification of only the method the agent chooses, and this is the only one used to deter…
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to consider the impact of social accounting at the micro level and examines the use of social reporting for constructive purposes through internal communication devices. It explores the discourse adopted by a large organisation in social accounting and reporting (workplace flexibility) through employee newsletters. In doing so the paper seeks to answe…
Purpose – This paper explores the role of accountants as part of the necessary infrastructure in rural community development providing specialised knowledge and skills to business owners who may lack the expertise required to ensure successful business operations. Design/methodology/approach – Perceptions of seven rural development officers from separate Rural Development Boards and two…
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a succinct overview of academic research that has examined audit firm rotation both in the USA and in other countries. Design/methodology/approach – The authors outline the unresolved nature of academic research on audit firm rotation, review recent literature, discuss why academics have been unable to resolve this issue and offer sugges…
Purpose – Value relevance studies, in particular international comparative studies, use market values sampled at different dates relative to the fiscal year-end. This paper aims to contribute a theoretical and empirical analysis of the relationship between value relevance and the month of market value sampling. Design/methodology/approach – The paper examines two components of value rel…
Purpose – The purpose of this study is to describe and evaluate the implementation of an online self and peer assessment model (SPARKPLUS) to assess team work skills of accounting students. Design/methodology/approach – This study describes the background and implementation of SPARKPLUS and employs a survey questionnaire administered to students enrolled in an undergraduate company acco…
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the generic skills that are important for the career success of accounting graduates in Sri Lanka from the perspectives of university educators and employers. Design/methodology/approach – Bui and Porter’s (2010) expectation-performance gap framework was modified to match with the context of the current study. Data collected via qu…
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report the findings of a survey on the perception of the globalisation of accounting education among academics teaching at tertiary schools in Japan.With the acceleration of globalism in accounting education, the aim of this exploratory research is to investigate the perceptions of Japanese academics toward this global convergence. Design/methodol…
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of ethical ideologies on ethical judgments of future Malaysian accountants in general situations and based on the legality of the situations. The examination covers the relationships of both the specific ethical dimension (i.e. idealism and relativism) and the specific categories of ideology (i.e. absolutist and subjectivist)…
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to further extend research (Fan et al., 2012a) examining the attitudes of Chinese certified public accountants with respect to independence aspects of their professional codes of conduct and their influence on ethical judgement. These attitudes are compared with those of Australian public accountants Particular attention is given to refining a pre-existi…
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the linkages between management accounting systems (MAS), enterprise risk management (ERM) and organizational performance by examining MAS information characteristics that match ERM implementation and joint effects of MAS and ERM on organizational performance. Design/methodology/approach – The research method involved administering a que…
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to establish a link between communication apprehension and communication self-efficacy in accounting students. Design/methodology/approach – This is achieved by the use of two questionnaires jointly distributed to the students involved. The Personal Report of Communication Apprehension (PRCA-24) developed by McCroskey to measure oral communication …
Purpose – The authors aim to critically review the co-operative education program conducted between 20 Chinese universities and the Certified General Accountants’ Association of Canada. Design/methodology/approach – The assessments made are influenced by the results of a questionnaire survey of the opinions of students in the co-operative education program; and by the experiences of t…
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an extensive and critical overview of the theoretical perspectives used in the accounting disclosure literature including economic theories, political and social theories. Design/methodology/approach – The paper reviews and discusses in details the positive accounting theory (PAT), agency theory, signalling theory, political economy theo…
Purpose – The paper aims to provide a longitudinal view of successful turnaround phases and of how management accounting practices played a significant role in improving performance in one company. Design/methodology/approach – The company provided internal documents to cover the period of the study and permitted access to key individuals who were able to elaborate and clarify the motiv…
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a critical review of the contributions of multiple theories to accounting and organizational research, which is often referred to as “theoretical triangulation” or “theoretical pluralism”, with a particular focus on the manner in which chosen research methods have informed these efforts at theoretical triangulation. Design/methodol…
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the construction of articles published in three highly ranked interdisciplinary accounting journals. Design/methodology/approach – The analysis is based on articles published during 2010 in Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal (AAAJ), Accounting, Organizations and Society (AOS) and Critical Perspectives on Accounting (CPA). The …
Purpose – This editorial aims to consider the global accounting academic and the environment in which we research and teach, including consideration of the challenges that confront us now and into the future. Design/methodology/approach – Document review, personal reflections and argument. Findings – The paper acknowledges that the accounting academic has an important role to play in …
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an understanding of the “Kyocera approach” to business, i.e. the relationship between the Kyocera philosophy, the amoeba management system (AMS) and the associated management accounting system. Design/methodology/approach – Utilising a variety of secondary sources, including semi-autobiographical works written by Inamori, the archite…
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the historiographic writings for accounting concerned with the craft of researching and writing history, published in the English-language, across a period of 30 years from 1983 to 2012. The study’s aim is three-fold: first, to review the literature pertaining to the writing of accounting history and to identify key developments and trend…
Purpose – The authors expect major shifts in thinking about the transnational regulation of accounting and how it will develop. This is a time for ideas as well as action. The global accounting profession must take a leading role in developing and presenting the case for the transnational regulation of accounting, in identifying new regulations, new ways of regulating, and new compacts bet…
Purpose – Opposition to transnational calls for the adoption of accrual-based accounting in the public sector may stem from arguments that it is associated with poor earnings quality. The purpose of this paper is to determine whether state owned enterprises (SOEs) operating under accrual-based accounting manage their earnings, whether it is more prevalent vis-a`-vis privately owned enterprise…
Purpose – This paper aims to examine the influence of academics who are members of the profession on academic institutions. Design/methodology/approach – An analytic autoethnography of the influence of accounting academics who are members of the profession on South African universities, supported by publicly available information, such as policy and other documents, web sites, and publi…
Purpose – Concomitant with the trend towards specialisation in UK accountancy and the rise of relatively separate formal spheres of professional work along formal specialisms such as tax, audit and management consultancy, women entered the profession in unprecedented numbers, but not evenly distributed across those specialisms. This paper aims to draw on the sociology of accountancy and f…
Purpose – The accounting regulation literature has recently devoted a significant degree of attention to delineating the roles of accounting firms as key professional actors in the transnational policy arena. Such a heightened level of scholarly engagement with firms seems to have shifted the focus away from the roles of the national professional institutes. The purpose of this paper is to…
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the life of Tony Lowe, Emeritus Professor of Accounting and Financial Management at the University of Sheffield, who died on 5 March 2014. It celebrates Tony Lowe’s considerable direct contributions to accounting knowledge and, possibly more significantly, his indirect contribution through his enabling of a range of those associated wi…
Purpose – The study aims to explore the use of alternative measures of “understandability” on accounting texts. This includes the meaning identification test (MIT) and the sentence verification technique (SVT), which have not previously been used by accounting researchers, as well as variants on the traditional Cloze tests such as the C-Test. Design/methodology/approach – This study…
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to critically assess integrated reporting so as to “broaden out” and “open up” dialogue and debate about how accounting and reporting standards might assist or obstruct efforts to foster sustainable business practices. Design/methodology/approach – The authors link current debates about integrated reporting to prior research on the conteste…
Purpose – The last four decades have seen the rise of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) as the core locus of transnational accounting regulation. Initial steps of associational cooperation were superseded by establishing a standard setting organization that heavily draws on consultation procedures. The purpose of this paper is to focus on recent changes in governance and …
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which sustainability reporting can be viewed as a simulacrum used to camouflage real sustainable-development problems and project an idealized view of the firms’ situations. Design/methodology/approach – The method was based on the content analysis and counter accounting of 23 sustainability reports from firms in the ener…
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to add to the literature on accounting change in explaining a decade-long effort by the FASB and IASB to develop a set of global accounting standards accepted by markets worldwide. This research studies the effort as one of “convergence” in accounting standards and aims to bring theoretical and empirical clarity as to how we can conceptualize the …
Purpose – The paper aims to extend research which has sought to explain Britain’s early success as an industrial power by identifying the influence of religious doctrine of the Dissenting Protestant churches on the development of accounting practices in the factory. The concern is not with specific accounting practices but with the social and moral environment which provided the incentiv…
Purpose – This study examines social reporting by Islamic banks with special emphasis on themes related to social justice. By using critical theory and “immanent critique”, the study attempts to explain and delineate reasons for disclosures and silences in Islamic banks’ annual reports and web sites vis-a` -vis social justice. Design/methodology/approach – The approach taken was a…
Purpose – This paper seeks to problematise “accounting for biodiversity” and to provide a framework for analysing and understanding the role of accounting in preserving and enhancing biodiversity on Planet Earth. The paper aims to raise awareness of the urgent need to address biodiversity loss and extinction and the need for corporations to discharge accountability for their part in th…
Purpose – The paper seeks to respond to calls by Jones for more studies exploring the possibility of operationalising accounting for biodiversity. Design/methodology/approach – Archival data are used to produce a natural inventory report for the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest declared as a World Heritage site by UNESCO in 2007. Findings – The study extends prior re…
Purpose – The paper aims to analyse accounting rationalities and practices which lie behind biodiversity offsetting. The way in which accounting functions as a technology of government through the practice of biodiversity offsetting is to be considered and its effects examined. Design/methodology/approach – Governmentality is drawn upon to examine ways in which power and authority are e…
Purpose – This paper seeks to examine how the biodiversity comprising a tropical forest ecosystem is being protected as a result of having its conservation brought into financial accounting calculations by constructing a greenhouse gas emissions offset product to sell on the voluntary over-the-counter carbon markets. Design/methodology/approach – The research examines a single embedded …
Purpose – The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the application of standard environmental accounting practices for estimating long-term discount rates is likely to lead to the rejection of biodiversity-sensitive projects that are in the greater societal good. Design/methodology/approach – The authors combine estimates of marginal ecosystem damages from two forestry case studies, …
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between management controls and the work-life balance (WLB) of junior accountants working in four multinational accounting firms using semi-structured interviews. Design/methodology/approach – The authors interviewed junior accountants, asking them about their firms’ time budgeting process, their views on organisationa…
Purpose – Arguing that the print media act as a claims-making forum for the social construction and contestation of crises, the aim of this paper is to explore how the print media mediated two audits commissioned following a high-profile salary cap breach in the National Rugby League (NRL) in Australia. Design/methodology/approach – This paper draws upon critical discourse analysis to e…
Purpose – The aim of this paper is to identify and gain insights into the significance of barriers contributing to the purported “gap” between academic management accounting research and practice. Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on diffusion of innovations theory, this study collects and analyses data from a questionnaire survey and follow-up interviews with 19 representatives …
Purpose – An effective management accounting information system (MAIS), as well as the accounting discourse related to it, can support, facilitate, enable, and constrain diverse business discourses. This paper aims to examine the discursive and organisational effects of an organisation accounting upon absent accounting artefacts, i.e. accounting without accounting. Situated within the dis…
Purpose – This paper aims to suggest that companies have ethical reasons to report about biodiversity issues and to investigate whether companies act on these reasons by examining the extent of biodiversity reporting in Denmark. Design/methodology/approach – For the first purpose, desk research was conducted using consequentialist ethics, while for the second purpose, data were gathered…