The roles of accounting in organizations and society

The paper seeks to contrast the roles that have been claimed on behalf of accounting with the ways in which accounting functions in practice. It starts by examining the context in which rationales for practice are articulated and the adequacy of such claims. Thereafter consideration is given to how accounting is implicated in both organizational and social practice. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for accounting research.     

Multidimensional accounting and distributed databases: Their implications for organizations and society

The motivation behind multidimensional accounting is elaborated and extended to an accounting system built upon a database. This system may serve as the predecessor to a national system of distributed databases that integrates micro-accounting and macro-accounting systems. Two implications for organizations and society are examined: first, the need to standardize information requirements, and second, the need to protect privacy. Recent advances in the application and development of cryptosystems are examined. These advances enhance security and the protection of privacy within a database in a simple and inexpensive fashion.     

Fraud dynamics and controls in organizations

This paper develops an agent-based model to examine the emergent dynamic characteristics of fraud in organizations. In the model, individual heterogeneous agents, each of whom can have motive and opportunity to commit fraud and a pro-fraud attitude, interact with each other. This interaction provides a mechanism for cultural transmission through which attitudes regarding fraud can spread. Our benchmark analysis identifies two classes of organizations. In one class, we observe fraud tending toward a stable level. In the other class, fraud dynamics are characterized by extreme behaviors; organizations with mostly honest behavior suddenly change their state to mostly fraudulent behavior and vice versa. These changes seem to occur randomly over time. We then modify our model to examine the effects of various mechanisms thought to impact fraud in organizations. Each of these mechanisms has different impacts on the two classes of organizations in our benchmark model, with some mechanisms being more effective in organizations exhibiting stable levels of fraud and other mechanisms being more effective in organizations exhibiting unstable extreme behavior. Our analysis and results have general implications for designing programs aimed at preventing fraud and for fraud risk assessment within the audit context.     

Tracking the numbers: Across accounting and finance,organizations and markets

This introductory essay reviews recent advances in the emergent field of social studies of finance (SSF) and, subsequently, sets out to illustrate how a closer engagement with SSF might benefit research interests in accounting and vice versa. Finally, it provides a sketch of how mutual engagements across the fields might be intensified in what is identified as an emerging accounting and finance track in the discourse of social science. The prospects of a broader field of research exploring the use of financial numbers across social settings, markets, organizations and cultures are projected, and the possibility of articulating a strong sociological programme of research is considered.     

Rational, rationalizing, and reifying uses of accounting data in organizations

This paper reports the results of a longitudinal field study of information use in a public sector organization. The investigation focused on the extent to which the use of cost accounting data by military repair facilities in the U.S. fits one of three conceptual models of information use. The models reflected the technical-rational, socio-political and institutional perspectives on organisations. Data were obtained by visiting 14 military installations, interviewing 95 people in depth, examining archival data, and conducting in-depth studies of problem areas within the cost system. The study included data covering a period of 22 years. Results indicated little use of the cost data consistent with the technical-rational perspective. Most uses of the data were consistent with either the social-political or institutional perspectives. The study also revealed interesting dynamic properties of the system over time such as the change in the patterns of data use from socio-political and institutional to technical-rational, and the creation of new users for the system.     

The new society of organizations

Managers in every organization from the largest publicly owned company to the smallest not-for-profit face the same unsettling imperative: to build change into their organization's very structure. On the one hand, this means being prepared to abandon everything that the organization does. On the other, it means constantly creating the new. Unless this process of abandonment and creation goes on without ceasing, the organization will very soon find itself obsolescent--losing performance and with it the ability to attract and hold the people on whom its performance depends. What drives this imperative is the nature of the organization itself. Every organization exists to put knowledge to work, but knowledge changes fast, with today's certainties becoming tomorrow's absurdities. That is why any knowledgeable individual must likewise acquire new knowledge every several years or also become obsolete. Familiar as the term "organization" is, we have only begun to reckon with the implications of living in a world in which the fundamental unit of society is--and must be--destabilizing. That is why questions of social responsibility now arise so often and from so many quarters. We need new ways to understand the relationship between organizations and their employees, who may in fact be unpaid volunteers, independent professionals whose organization is a network, or knowledgeable specialists who can--and often do--move on at any moment. For more than 600 years, no society has had as many competing centers of power as the one in which we now live. Drucker explains why change is--and must be--the only constant in an organization's life and explores the consequences for managers, individuals, and society overall.     

Behavioral accounting research: Pathologies,paradigms and prescriptions

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate behavioral accounting research by analyzing the quantity and quality of its interactions with the more basic social sciences and with the more applied disciplines, and by contrasting these interaction patterns with those observed in another accounting research setting. The empiricism is based upon the technique of citation analysis. The qualitative interpretation of the results is that behavioral accounting research is pre-paradigmatic but progressing.     

Critical reflections on research approaches, accounting regulation and the regulation of accounting

The design and choice of research approaches, the nature of accounting regulation and the reactions to these regulations in organisations, involving, in effect, the regulation of accounting, are three themes of considerable importance in accounting research. They are the three themes that have dominated the research agenda of the author throughout his academic career. This paper explores the nature of these three key research themes developing some critical reflections on what has been discovered about each of these themes using the author's sole and joint research and publications as a vehicle for this analysis.     

Elusive boundaries,power relations,and knowledge production: A systematic review of the literature on digitalization in accounting

A third wave of technological advancements, which is often referred to as “digitalization,” is affecting organizations across the board. This paper aims to present a comprehensive synthesis of the extant scholarly work on digitalization in the accounting literature. It does so through a systematic literature review that focuses on articles on digitalization published by the highest-ranked accounting journals in the period 2007–2017. By conducting a thorough review, we extend Rom and Rohde's (2007) literature review on integrated information systems (IIS) in management accounting. Furthermore, we utilize a modified version of the framework proposed by Rom and Rohde (2007) to classify and interpret the literature. This allows us to understand the differences between IIS and digitalization in accounting, and to illuminate avenues for future research. The paper concludes with an overview of three main differences in how IIS and digitalization have influenced accounting, and three concurrent avenues for future research on digitalization in accounting: the elusive boundaries of accounting, power relations, and knowledge production for decision making.     

Sustainability accounting regulation in Spanish public sector organizations

In 2011, the Spanish government made sustainability accounting mandatory for public sector organizations. This paper documents why, despite the new legislation, the quantity and quality of sustainability accounting practices remains low.     

25 Years of Giddens in accounting research: Achievements, limitations and the future

Twenty five years ago, Giddens’ structuration theory (ST) was introduced into accounting research as a reaction to the history-less, apolitical and technical-efficiency focus of traditional functionalist research. A quarter of a century later, this growing stream of research consists of some 65 published papers and has become one of the dominant alternative approaches used to explore accounting as an organizational and social practice. We review this literature based on the following two research questions; (i) what are the major achievements of this literature, and in what respects has it contributed to our understanding of accounting in relation to other alternative streams of accounting research, such as those grounded in critical theory, actor-network theory (ANT), new-institutional sociology (NIS) and practice theory? and; (ii) what are the limitations of the ST strand and, considering these (and its relative strengths), how should it be advanced in the future? Overall, we find that the mobilization of ST as a general ontological framework has generated three major and largely unique contributions, namely; (i) the introduction of a duality perspective; (ii) the conceptualization of accounting as an interwoven totality comprised of structures of signification, domination and legitimation, and; (iii) an ontological basis for theorizing how, when and why socially embedded agents may produce both continuity and change in accounting practices. However, we also conclude that it is difficult to identify a particular and distinctive empirical imprint of the ST literature, and that some of the theory’s ‘competitive advantages’ are far from fully exploited. Based on these identified strengths and weaknesses of the ST perspective, we consider an array of directions for future scholarly effort.     

Rationalities, domination and accounting control: A case study from a traditional society

Previous studies on management control in less developed countries have mainly concentrated on the state and privatised enterprises. Drawing upon Weber's work [Weber M. The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. New York, NY: Scribner; 1958; Weber M. General economic history. New York, NY: Collier Books; 1961; Weber M. Economy and society: an outline of interpretive sociology (two volumes). New York, NY: Bedminster; 1968; Weber M. Economy and society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press; 1978] on traditional society, and a Weberian framework developed by [Colignon R, Covaleski M. A Weberian framework in the study of accounting. Accounting, Organiztions and Society 1991;16(2):141–57], this paper seeks to understand ‘private management practices’, including accounting, in a stock exchange listed company (public limited company). The case study evidence indicates that organisational controls are biased to serve the dominant owners or family/sponsors of the company instead of general shareholders. The paper argues that family dominance is facilitated by the external and internal layers within which the company is operating. The greater understanding of traditional societies developed in Weber's works [Weber M. Economy and society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press; 1978] is very useful in explaining why managers work to serve the family. Domination by family via trusted managers using accounting calculations instead of bureaucracy is highly relevant, as the case study shows. These findings are not dissimilar to those of previous studies conducted in privatised and family-owned companies in Bangladesh and elsewhere. The paper calls for more research on management accounting practices employing Weber's works, especially in traditional societies.     

Review: Time machines,ethics and sustainable development: accounting for inter-generational equity in public sector organizations

This review paper explores the key challenges associated with effective inter-generational equity accounts in relation to the governance of public sector organizations and sustainable development transformations. Three different approaches to inter-generational equity accounting are evaluated and an outline for future research is provided.