The effect of the 150-hour requirement on new accountants’ professional commitment,Ethical orientation,and Professionalism

This study examines the professional commitment, ethical orientation, and professionalism of 414 accountants beginning their careers at two Big 5 public accounting firms. After comparing the accountants possessing 5-year degrees with those possessing four-year degrees, we find insufficient evidence to conclude that the 150-hour requirement affects new accountants’ professional commitment, ethical orientation, or professionalism.     

Organisational Factors and Dimensions of Satisfaction:A Comparative Study of Accountants in Australia and the US

This paper compares perceptions of organisational characteristics and their relationship to job satisfaction dimensions of US and Australian accountants. Data were collected from accountants in an international accounting firm on perceptions of job satisfaction dimensions, autonomy, feedback on performance and access to job-related information. Given the cultural similarities of the two countries and the use of a single firm, differences were not expected. Results indicated that accountants in the two countries had similar perceptions of the organisational variables and similar levels of satisfaction. However, there were extensive differences in how the organisational variables related to the satisfaction dimensions.     

An institutional perspective on the changes in management accountants’ professional role

The paper theorises how a new actor of a firm can drive the institutionalisation of a new role for management accountants. Drawing on institutional theory and using insights from a single case study in a German manufacturing firm, the paper analyses the institutionalisation of the so-called “business partner” role for management accountants, which was promoted and driven by the case firm's newcomer CFO. The paper focuses on the micro-processes and especially the institutional work carried out by the new CFO that supported the entrenchment of the “business partner’ role within the case firm. In this light, we illustrate that especially three interrelated kinds of institutional work were carried out within the case firm to support the institutionalisation of the management accountants’ new role: (1) legitimising the new “business partner” role, (2) (re-)constructing the management accountants’ role identities and (3) linking the intra-organisational level with an institutional environment in which external actors aim to achieve changes in the management accountants’ role on a broader societal level. In this context, the paper also provides insights into the specific German management accounting context. Overall, the findings suggest that the institutionalisation of a new role for management accountants can be understood as the product of purposive actions carried out by actors to support a specific institutional arrangement within the firm.     

Strategy,accountants’ activities and new product development performance

Prior literature indicates that activities carried out by accountants in new product development (NPD) are important. We explore the relationship between accountants’ activities and NPD performance. We extend prior studies to identify the possible activities carried out by accountants within the NPD process to include five types of activities: basic, cost planning, cost control, profit management, and risk management. We argue that the relationship between accountants’ activities and NPD performance is contingent on firm strategy. We mainly use sales from new products over total sales to measure NPD performance. Based on a large-scale survey, the findings confirm our conjecture that the effects of the five types of activities on NPD performance generally vary as a function of the strategy adopted by the firm. The implication of these findings is that in combination with the chosen strategy, firms should concentrate on the specific activities of accountants that can improve NPD performance.     

‘Passionate and professional’: reconciling logics in public service accounting

In order to deliver public value, the UK government sought to build relationships and connect ‘the public’ with public servants (including back-office workers), but with what effect? Drawing on interviews with public service accountants, the authors found that how these accountants conceptualized ‘the public’—as society or people—shaped whether public value was considered as a monetary or moral concept. Accountants who regarded the public as people spoke of an improper level of involvement and struggled to maintain their professionalism.     

Client Focus,Cooperation, and Coherence: (Re)professionalising Processes for Elderly Care

This paper suggests the study of professionalism and the professionalising processes within public sector organisations. Sociologists propose that professionalism is changing into a new variant developing under the premise of organisational management and control. This paper disputes the perspective that the use of management control leads to deprofessionalisation in terms of the routinisation of reflective professional tasks or weakened professional values. This paper proposes that, with client focus, professionals and accountants can cooperate and create coherence between management control system elements and professional values. This dynamic contributes to the retention of professional values and more reflective work procedures.     

Informal mentoring relationships and the career processes of public accountants

Research has shown that informal mentoring relationships benefit the protégé, mentor and employing organisation. As such they have been of interest to public accounting firms. The functioning of these relationships in Big Eight/Big Five accounting firms has been investigated in the USA and more recently in Ireland. The career outcome of most interest has been turnover intentions. This paper reports the results of a questionnaire study of mentoring relationships in the Australian state of Queensland. The receipt of mentoring support by accountants is found to be associated with not only lower turnover intentions, but also higher job satisfaction, and lower intentions of female accountants to seek part-time employment. The impact of the organisational context in which these relationships are initiated and cultivated is also investigated. The size of the accounting firm and the national culture of the country in which the firm operates, appear to have some bearing on mentoring experiences.     

Towards measuring professionalism in accounting

This paper develops an instrument that measures accounting professionalism. The instrument's development was informed by literature on professionalism, similar to the genesis of instruments developed in other fields (i.e., sociology, medicine and pharmacy), and interviews with practising accountants and accounting academics. An exploratory factor analysis of 516 survey responses received from members of Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand (CAANZ) produced four sub-dimensions of accounting professionalism: ethics and independence, altruism, respect for others, and excellence. This four-factor model and a unidimensional model were tested using confirmatory factor analysis. The four-factor model proved superior to the unidimensional one and produced a final instrument with strong psychometric properties.     

The diversity of expertise on corporate boards in Australia

Expertise diversity is expected to enhance the monitoring and advising functions of boards of directors. Yet, little is known about the expertise that actually exists on corporate boards. In this study, we examine the diversity of professional expertise on corporate boards in Australia and implications for shareholder value. We categorise directors by 11 types of professional expertise and find the most common types of expertise are business executives, accountants, bankers, scientists, lawyers and engineers. We find that expertise diversity is primarily related to board size, industry and location. Our analysis also suggests that shareholders benefit when boards diversify their expertise within a subset of specialist business expertise (lawyers, accountants, consultants, bankers and outside CEOs). Further diversity beyond this subset of expertise is associated with lower firm value and performance.     

The making of the management accountant - Becoming the producer of truthful knowledge

In this paper, we analyse the practices through which the management accountant is constructed as a knowing subject and becomes a producer of truthful knowledge. We draw on a case study of an automobile equipment manufacturer in which management accountants play a central role. The centrality of their role is evidenced, among other aspects, by their participation in online reverse auctions, wherein they commit themselves and their company to long-term projects. This commitment is constitutive of their identity as knowing subjects and organisational truth tellers. However, the “validity” of the truth they produce can only be assessed over time. We argue that, in this firm, monthly performance review meetings constitute “accounting trials of truth” during which peers and senior management cross-examine the accounting truth presented. Preparations for these trials of truth constitute a form of subjectivation whereby management accountants act on their ways of being in the firm and become the producers of truthful knowledge.     

An Empirical Investigation of the Role of Signalling in the Valuation of Unseasoned Equity Issues

This paper investigates the role of signalling in the valuation of unseasoned equity issues on the Unlisted Securities Market (USM) in the UK. It extends the existing US literature by considering a wider range of signals and by taking note of the complexities of the issuing process. From the signals considered, firm value is significantly and positively related to the percentage of equity retained by the pre-offering entrepreneurs, the level of planned capital expenditures, the degree of underpricing, the quality of the reporting accountants and the relative costs of flotation. Additional results indicate that firm size and the motivations behind the seeking of a stock market listing affect firm valuations.     

Professionalism, organizational commitment and job satisfaction in an accounting organization

With growth in the number of professionals employed in organizations, concern has been expressed over potential conflict between the professionalism of these employees and their commitment to the organization. Empirical studies examining the relationships between professionalism, organizational commitment and job satisfaction have reported inconsistent results. This paper examines these variables in an organization setting involving several field offices of a “Big Eight” U.S. accounting firm. Accountants who reported high levels of professionalism also reported high levels of organizational commitment. Additionally, both professionalism and organizational commitment were strongly related to job satisfaction.     

The effects of ethnic culture and organizational culture on judgments of accountants

This study extends prior cross-cultural research by examining the effects of ethnic culture and organizational culture (Big 4 and non-Big 4 accounting firm affiliations) on the judgments of accountants in Fiji. The study also examines how interaction between ethnic culture and organizational culture influences the judgments of accountants. It examines the extent and the cause of differences between the judgments of Ethnic Fijian and Indo-Fijian accountants when interpreting and applying selected International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRSs). Consistent with their ethnic cultural values, the results show that Indo-Fijian accountants are generally more conservative in their judgments than their Ethnic Fijian counterparts. This study provides empirical evidence to support the view that both ethnic culture and organizational culture have a significant effect on the manner in which accountants within a country interpret uncertainty expressions contained in the IFRSs. The results also show that organizational culture has a greater effect on the judgments of accountants than ethnic culture. The results of this study provide important insights into the factors affecting the judgments of accountants within a country and raise interesting theoretical issues.     

Publications: A valid measure of faculty contribution?

Publication productivity of academic accountants has been variously measured and used to rank accounting faculties as well as accounting doctoral programs. Implicit in the results of these studies is the assumption that publications are a surrogate measurement of the contribution of faculty members. This study presents evidence of the declining publication productivity of academic accountants throughout their careers and discusses some implications of this phenomenon for performance evaluation.     

Australian Rural Accountants’ Views on How Locally Provided CPD Compares with City-based Provision

Abstract

This paper analyses Australian rural accountants’ attitudes and levels of satisfaction with continuing professional development (CPD), based on whether the CPD was delivered by a professional accounting body in a rural or metropolitan area. The paper responds to prior research that finds rural accountants are dissatisfied with professional accounting bodies [Rural and regional Australian public accounting firm services: Service provision, concerns and tensions. Australian Accounting Review, 23(23), 163–176]. Findings of a survey to which 156 rural accountants responded were that when CPD is delivered into the rural areas, there are greater levels of CPD satisfaction. The study also found that cost was significantly better for rural-delivered CPD and that when more rural-based CPD was attended differences became more significant across a number of satisfaction measures. The findings have important implications for both rural accountants and professional accounting bodies.     

The influence of conservatism and secrecy on the interpretation of verbal probability expressions in the Anglo and Latin cultural areas

We use Gray's [Gray, S.J. (1988). Towards a theory of cultural influence on the development of accounting systems internationally. Abacus, 24 (1), 1-15.] theory of the influence of culture on accounting to develop hypotheses about the effect the interaction of the accounting values of conservatism and secrecy and the context in which probability expressions are used in accounting standards will have on accountants' interpretations of those expressions. Specifically, we expect accountants in a high conservatism country to assign a higher (lower) numerical probability to verbal probability expressions that determine the threshold for the recognition of items that increase (decrease) income than accountants in a low conservatism country. We expect accountants in a high secrecy country to assign higher numerical probabilities to verbal probability expressions that establish the probability threshold for the disclosure of information than accountants in a low secrecy country. We survey professional accountants in Brazil (higher conservatism and higher secrecy) and in the United States (lower conservatism and lower secrecy) to test our hypotheses. We obtain some support for the first conservatism hypothesis related to the recognition of income-increasing items, but no support for the second conservatism hypothesis related to income-decreasing items. We obtain stronger results in support of our hypothesis related to secrecy and disclosure. This study contributes to the literature by investigating the impact of culture on interpretation of verbal probability expressions in the Latin cultural area and by testing Gray's theory, especially the secrecy hypothesis, at the individual-accountant level.     

Cultural relativity of accounting professionalism: Evidence from New Zealand and Samoa

This study investigates the value orientations of two culturally distinct countries in the South Pacific, namely, Samoa and New Zealand, with a view to providing empirical evidence on the relationships between accounting and culture. It uses Rokeach's value survey (1973), Schwartz and Bilsky's motivational domains (1987, 1990), and Hofstede–Gray framework to establish the possible linkages between values and accounting professionalism. The results provide culture-related evidence that suggests the possibility for the existence of major differences in the levels of accounting professionalism in the two countries. This study may have implications for the application of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and the analysis of differences in judgments of professional accountants on measurement, disclosure, and ethical issues. It is the first substantial accounting study on Samoa.     

The rise and fall of normative control

Widely-publicized breaches of professional norms among accountants in the United States have kindled their interest in the problem of norms and normative control. This article discusses the current literature on norms. It suggests that normative control, which is always problematic, is especially so when agents are subject to the control of two or more principals having divergent interests. It is argued that the agent’s compliance will tend to flow to that principal upon whom the agent is most dependent. The analysis is illustrated by the case of the rise and fall of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm.     

Organizational culture in public accounting: Size, technology, rank, and functional area

This study examines the nature of organizational culture in public accounting and demonstrates that different aspects of culture exist across and within public accounting firms. Organizational culture is defined in terms of values shared by members of an organization (or organizational sub-unit) that manifest themselves in the practices of that organization. Practices particularly important to the development and maintenance of culture include selection and socialization. The hypotheses state that different aspects of organizational culture vary across public accounting firms of different size and technology, and public accountants of different rank and functional area. These hypotheses are tested and largely supported with responses to a paper and pencil instrument, the Values Survey Module (Hofstede, Institute for Research on Intercultural Cooperation, 1982), which was completed by 338 public accountants across the United States. Implications for accountants and future research are also discussed.     

Commercialism and Its Impact on the Integrity of Professional Tax Services in the United States

In this paper I rely on prior accounting research on professionalism as a basis from which to analyse recent developments in the commercialization of the United States public accounting profession. Using two examples, one concerning the pricing of tax services and the other concerning the limited use of tax advice, I illustrate how a focus on commercialism deteriorates certified public accountants’ fiduciary relationships with tax clients and calls into question their fundamental functionalist claims of professionalism.