Pitching research: ‘qualitative cousins’ and the ‘extended family’

This study has two related goals – one very specific and one more general. The specific goal is to constructively engage with Lodhia (2017) on the issue of whether and to what extent ‘qualitative cousins’ are well served by Faff's (2015) original pitching research (PR) template. Using this ‘cousins’ focus as a primer, the more general goal is to update the agenda created by Faff (2015) and in so doing, explore the ‘extended family’ of PR work/resources now available.     

Demographic Dividends in the ‘South’, Ageing ‘North’, and ‘South-South’ Trade Diversification

The absence of clear convergence in incomes per capita and welfare between the North and the South, even in the face of spectacular growth rates in GDP in the emerging South, might be due to a terms of trade deterioration resulting from an expansion of production in the South which depresses the product’s price on world markets. This may originate from a “technical catch up” and also from a “demographic dividend” in the South relative to an ageing North. This article illustrates that some South-South trade diversification might mitigate the terms of trade deterioration and increase welfare gains in the South. We use a multicountry overlapping-generation general equilibrium model to simulate the magnitude of the terms of trade effect due to a demographic dividend in Turkey, and show that some trade diversification away from EU toward the South is a welfare improving policy for Turkey.     

‘Above the fray’: Interests,discourse and legitimacy in the audit field

Legitimacy is a crucial concern for the institutional field of auditing, given its reliance on perceived legitimacy for its political mandate and license to practice, in addition to its wider credibility and trust amongst stakeholders such as clients, investors and the public. In this paper, we explore the role of interest-discourse in the discursive strategies of legitimization in the audit field. We develop an Ethnomethodologically informed Discourse Analysis (EDA) perspective that enables us to theorise how institutional actors account for interests as a means for de-legitimization and re-legitimization. We ask: how do institutional actors in the audit field establish who or what is ‘above the fray’ and who or what is ‘interested’? We illustrate our argument by examining how the ‘Big Four’ audit firms handled a ‘crisis of legitimacy’ in the accountancy profession following the recent financial crisis, focussing in particular on a Parliamentary inquiry into market concentration in the audit industry in the UK. First, we show how de-legitimization is achieved through the discursive strategies of stake attribution, stake interrogation and stake mis-alignment. Second, we show how re-legitimization is achieved through the discursive strategies of stake inoculation, stake confession, stake alignment and stake transcendence. We conclude by examining the implications of the discursive processes we have studied for the future of the audit field in the UK.     

Intellectual capital and the ‘capable firm’: narrating,visualising and numbering for managing knowledge

Intellectual capital statements are ‘new’ forms of reporting whose object is knowledge management activities. Based on 17 firms’ work to develop intellectual capital statements, this paper analyses them as managerial technologies making knowledge amenable to intervention. Aspects of actor-network-theory are mobilised to suggest that the intellectual capital statement is a centre of translation, which mobilises knowledge management via three interrelated elements: knowledge narratives, visualisations and numbers. Intellectual capital statements report on the mechanisms put in place to make knowledge manageable. Writing intellectual capital is a local story, which often concerns making knowledge collective and a process of allowing it to be oriented towards organisational ends. In such a story, knowledge is about a firm's capabilities and abilities to make a difference to a user. When writing an intellectual capital statement, firms locate employees, customers, processes and technologies and orient them towards a user. However, the statement as such is a means of ‘dis-locating’ knowledge resources making them amenable to intervention. There are certain broad types of intervention that allows a classification of strategies of intervention to be proposed. These terms are portfolio management, improvement activities and productivity. Such forms of intervention circumscribe the aspiration to transform knowledge from something internal to the person into something that is the effect of a collective arrangement. They allow—through intellectual capital statements—the dark, tacit knowing of individuals to come into the open space of calculation and action at a distance.     

Challenges and opportunities in disclosure research—A discussion of ‘the financial reporting environment: Review of the recent literature’

Beyer et al. (2010) review the financial reporting literature related to voluntary and mandatory firm disclosures, and sell-side analyst reports. The discussion summarizes their approach, highlights some of their main conclusions, and presents alternative ideas about promising avenues for future research.     

Communicating the ‘migrant’ other as risk: space,EU and expanding borders

Forced migration and border spaces as fault lines posing risks to society through the notion of ‘Othering’, remain under-explored in risk literature. With Europe facing its biggest humanitarian crisis with forced migration and displacement due to conflict zones, the borders of the European Union have received renewed attention in media. Refugees and the displaced are often depicted as ‘migrants’ and are seen as transgressing borders as illegitimate entities. Although increasing attention has been paid to border patrol and issues of securitization since 9/11, the ‘migrant’ body as ‘risky body’ in political and policy discussions is under-conceptualized and theorized in risk literature. We examine political discourses of the UK Government to discern how the migrant and the expanding borders of the EU are framed as forms of societal and economic risk and equally how these are mitigated with and through the discourse of space and borders. We take a constructionist approach to the ‘migrant’ problem in the EU and UK where risk is socially constructed through political discourse.     

What about your qualitative cousins? Adapting the pitching template to qualitative research

This paper reviews the pitching template proposed by Faff ( 2015 ). The article highlights the usefulness of this template for researchers. It is observed that there is scope for adapting this tool, with a template suitable for qualitative researchers being proposed. In the light of the various methodological differences through different research paradigms, it is envisaged that this adaptation will assist in bridging the schism between qualitative and quantitative research. It is also hoped that the proposed enhanced template will encourage qualitative researchers to submit to mainstream accounting journals and quantitative researchers to comprehend the value of qualitative research.     

The Third Policeman: ‘The true and fair view’, language and the habitus of accounting

This paper explores the role and context of the ‘true and fair view’ (‘TFV’) in accounting and auditing. Utilising the work of Bourdieu as a lens, the paper argues that the world of the TFV is a subjective world with which we think we are objectively familiar. Bourdieu's ‘practical theory’ of habitus suggests that the TFV is shaped by the practice of ‘native virtuosos’ who have a ‘feel for the game’. The paper argues that the conceptualisation of the TFV privileges practice and authenticates the accounting habitus. Hence, whilst language maintains and reinforces social structures, it is in turn created by the routines of practice. By dominating the declaration of the TFV, the auditor effectively reinforces the status quo and the constitution of hierarchy and inequity that exists in the accounting field: the TFV, in Bourdieu's terms, ‘becomes what they are’.     

Regulatory technologies,risky subjects,and financial boundaries: Governing ‘fraud’ in the financial markets

Among the myriad changes to have impacted the regulation of financial markets in recent years, one of the most significant yet least recognized is the growing role of technology in the regulatory process where it is used to detect emerging problems in the marketplace and guide the enforcement process. Current applications range from surveillance technologies, to datamining and risk profiling tools, to data visualization and graphing programs. Using the term ‘regulatory technologies’, this paper examines in detail two such technologies and assesses not only their benefits and limitations, but also their more subtle role in shaping the very criteria through which financial transactions and market actors are represented, framed, and assessed for their regulatory merit. To the extent that this process hinges on the ability to make distinctions on the grounds of risk, typicality, and appropriateness, these technologies play a critical role in shaping the boundaries of enforcement and thus the scope and depth of the regulatory vision. This is revealed to have significant implications for our understanding of the place of technology in regulation and for the types of questions that must be addressed in discussions of financial governance.     

New development: Faith,community organizing and migration—the case of ‘regularization’

When civil society organizations pool their muscle, it is amazing what they can achieve. The London Citizens ‘Strangers into Citizens’ campaign has put the idea of a conditional amnesty for illegal immigrants on the political table—and won powerful backers, including the Mayor of London and the Catholic Church.     

Size effect,methodological issues and ‘risk-to-default’: evidence from the UK stock market

The hedging effectiveness of dynamic strategies is compared with static (traditional) ones using futures contracts for the five leading currencies. The traditional hedging model assumes time invariance in the joint distribution of spot and futures price changes thus leading to a constant optimal hedge ratio (OHR). However, if this time-invariance assumption is violated, time-varying OHRs are appropriate for hedging purposes. A bivariate GARCH model is employed to estimate the joint distribution of spot and futures currency returns and the sequence of dynamic (time-varying) OHRs is constructed based upon the estimated parameters of the conditional covariance matrix. The empirical evidence strongly supports time-varying OHRs but the dynamic model provides superior out-of-sample hedging performance, compared to the static model, only for the Canadian dollar.     

Market efficiency and accounting research: a discussion of ‘capital market research in accounting’ by S.P. Kothari

Much of capital market research in accounting over the past 20 years has assumed that the price adjustment process to information is instantaneous and/or trivial. This assumption has had an enormous influence on the way we select research topics, design empirical tests, and interpret research findings. In this discussion, I argue that price discovery is a complex process, deserving of more attention. I highlight significant problems associated with a naı̈ve view of market efficiency, and advocate a more general model involving noise traders. Finally, I discuss the implications of recent evidence against market efficiency for future research.     

Australia’s ‘two-strikes’ rule and the pay-performance link: Are shareholders judicious?

To improve accountability of executive compensation, Australia introduced the ‘say-on-pay’ legislation in 2011, which is widely known as the ‘two-strikes’ rule. We investigate the consequences of this new rule for the pay-performance link in Australian firms. Employing a matched-pair design, we find that pay changes of the chief executive officer and the key management personnel were not significantly positively related to the stock returns of the firms that registered a ‘first strike’ in 2011 under the ‘two-strikes’ rule. However, the relations improved significantly in 2012. Our results also suggest that the shareholders of the ‘first-strike’ firms may have been over-enthusiastic about their voting power in 2011 but exercised this power more judiciously in 2012. Our findings provide important insights for the global debate on governance of executive compensation.     

Re-theorizing the configuration of organizational fields: the IIRC and the pursuit of ‘Enlightened’ corporate reporting

This paper studies the emergence of the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) and its attempts to institutionalize integrated reporting as a practice that is critical to the relevance and value of corporate reporting. Informed by Suddaby and Viale’s [(2011). Professionals and field-level change: institutional work and the professional project. Current Sociology, 59, 423–442] theorization of how professionals reconfigure organizational fields, the paper delineates the strategies and mechanisms through which the IIRC has sought to enroll the support of a wide range of stakeholder groups for the idea of integrated reporting in order to deliver a fundamental reconfiguration of the corporate reporting field. The paper’s analysis reinforces the significance to any such field reconfiguration of the reciprocal and mutual arrangements between influential professionals and other powerful actors but does so in a way that (a) refines Suddaby and Viale’s theorization of processes of field-level change and (b) pinpoints the fundamental policy challenges facing the IIRC. Gieryn’s [(1983). Boundary work and the demarcation of science from non-science: strains and interests in professional ideologies of scientists. American Sociological Review, 48 (6), 781–795] notion of boundary work is operationalized to capture some of the complexity and dynamism of the change process that is not sufficiently represented by Suddaby and Viale’s more sequentialist theorization. From a policy perspective, the paper demonstrates just how much the IIRC’s prospects for success in reconfiguring the corporate reporting field depend on its ability to reconfigure the mainstream investment field. Ultimately, this serves to question whether the IIRC’s conceptualization of ‘enlightened’ corporate reporting is sufficiently powerful and persuasive to stimulate ‘enlightened’ investment behavior focused on the medium and long term – and, more generally stresses the theoretical significance of considering connections across related organizational fields in institutional analyses of field reconfiguration efforts.