Class,social deprivation and accounting education in Scottish schools: Implications for the reproduction of the accounting profession and practice

This paper investigates the links between class, deprivation and subject choice in the area of business studies, including Accounting and Economics, in Scottish secondary schools. Given the paucity of prior research, this study is necessarily exploratory but its findings will provide a basis for future research in Scotland and elsewhere. First, the literature on the link between deprivation and education is reviewed. Pierre Bourdieu's conceptualisiation of habitus, field and capital are introduced and provide the theoretical framework for the ensuing discussion. Second, the implications for accounting education at both school and university, and for the accountancy profession are examined. Third, the results of interviews, analysis of statistical data provided by the Scottish Government and the Scottish Qualifications Authority and two questionnaire surveys, one of Heads of Departments of Scottish secondary schools and the other of first year accounting students at Scottish universities, are reported in order to explore whether there are any indications of links between class, deprivation and subject choice in the area of business studies in Scottish schools. Finally, the implications of the research findings are discussed and conclusions offered.     

Understanding the changes in accounting thought

Financial accounting and reporting are in the midst of one of the most significant revolutionary changes in modern history. The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework that will contribute to the dialogue surrounding these developments. We use Kuhn’s [Kuhn, T. S. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press] framework on the theory of scientific revolution to describe how changes in the need for information, coupled with the lack of relevant accounting information, led to reporting anomalies that have spurred a revolutionary shift in accounting paradigms. We are moving from an accounting paradigm that existed in the age of an industrial economy to an accounting paradigm that fits the economy in an information age. This redirection has resulted in the following: a change in the conceptualization and application of relevance and reliability, an increased use of fair value versus historical cost measurements, a renewed emphasis on principles versus rules, and an evaluation of the composition of the basic financial statements.     

Ownership changes and access to external financing

This paper examines access to external financing in the privatization context and provides new evidence on the effects of financing constraints on performance and investment. Ownership reforms increase firms’ reliance on external financing. Empirically, performance and investment changes around ownership reforms are increasing in country-level measures of access to credit. The presence of a severe prior public financing constraint contributes to stronger investment growth after privatization. Privatized enterprises do not outperform publicly owned industries, all else given. Our analyses rely on new international sector- and firm-level data and correct for potential endogeneity of ownership changes.     

An accounting change and information processing changes

Additional experimental evidence is presented about information processing changes made by individuals in response to an accounting change. Subjects apparently changed their information processing in response to a nonlinearity effect, but not in response to an accounting change and additional information about the change.     

Adverse effects of uniform written reporting standards on accounting practice,education, and research

When transactions have multiple attributes, achieving uniformity in their classification depends on whether similarities or dissimilarities are of interest; uniformity with respect to both is not possible. The pursuit of uniform written standards at the expense of social norms diminishes the effectiveness of financial reporting in stewardship and governance, and in keeping the security markets informed. A shift to written standards discourages thoughtful classroom discourse on alternatives which develop professional judgment. It also engenders ‘‘by the book” attitudes and drives talent away from accounting programs and, ultimately, from the accounting profession. Judgment and personal responsibility being the hallmarks of a learned profession, the dominance of uniform written standards weakens the claim that accounting programs belong in universities alongside architecture, dentistry, engineering, law, and medicine. Uniformity discourages research and debate in academic and practice forums and promotes increasingly detailed rule-making. It shuts the door on learning through experimentation, making it difficult to discover better ways of financial reporting through practice and comparison of alternatives. Improved financial reporting calls for a careful balance between written standards and unwritten social norms.     

Issues in the relationship between theory and practice in management accounting

In recent decades the interest of academic researchers in the practical aspects of management accounting has waned. This editorial explores some of the reasons of this development. Over the past few decades we have witnessed the establishment of management accounting in academia as a social science. This has increased the credibility of the accounting academics. However, it has also meant that academic researchers have neglected the technical core of their discipline and its problems and issues which have a direct practical relevance. It is concluded that there is a need for academic researchers to have a stronger focus on the technical core of the subject and to harness the findings of empirical research so that they can be used to develop and support practice.     

The valuation consequences of voluntary accounting changes

Firm management typically claims that voluntary accounting method changes (VACs) are made to enhance the informativeness of earnings by better matching accounting practices with economic reality. In contrast, skeptics argue that managers adopt new accounting procedures to opportunistically manage earnings and influence their firm’s stock price. In this paper, we investigate these alternative motives for VACs. Specifically, we investigate whether VACs cause equity prices to deviate from their fundamental values in the short-term by studying the long-run stock-price performance for a sample of firms that voluntarily change accounting methods. In addition, we investigate changes in earnings informativeness by examining the behavior of earning response coefficients and the relationship between earnings and future cash flows in years surrounding the VAC event. In contrast to prior research, we find little evidence that a strategy based solely on the earnings effect of a VAC can generate abnormal returns. While we find weak evidence of post-VAC abnormal returns for extreme VACs, this result appears to be driven by the accruals anomaly documented in Sloan [Sloan, R. G. (1996). The Accounting Review, 71, 289–315]. Our evidence further suggests that earnings informativeness is not significantly altered by voluntary changes in accounting methods. Taken together, our evidence suggests the market recognizes the financial statement effects of alternative acceptable accounting methods and efficiently processes the valuation implications of VACs.

Further tales of the schism: US accounting faculty and practice credentials

The recent report of the Pathways Commission (American Accounting Association, 2012) contains 22 specific objectives pertaining to the improvement of accounting education. Several of these call for higher degrees of cooperation and collaboration between accounting academics and accounting practitioners. The fact that a schism of sorts has developed between these groups needs to be better understood if progress can be made in bridging that divide. This paper studies one aspect of this issue by focusing on the extent to which accounting academics hold practice credentials. Several hypotheses are offered to explore patterns whereas academics become less likely to share this critical designation with accounting practitioners. The paper suggests that practice credential differences might indicate divergent values and priorities that will pose an obstacle to the cooperation envisioned by the Pathways Commission. Suggestions for reform in ways that would benefit higher education are offered.     

会计报告、会计方程与会计误差

会计方程是会计报告的理论基石。现行会计方程以资产恒等于负债加所有者权益为核心。会计科学的本质是计量科学,计量科学的重要特征是存在计量误差。会计对资产的计量是估计与判断的结果,而估计与判断必然产生会计误差。但现行会计方程没有反映会计误差,从而影响了以会计方程为基石的会计报告的科学性和有用性。本文引入会计误差的概念,对会计基本方程进行探讨,在此基础上,对会计误差的内涵、产生与影响、会计误差与托宾q的关系等问题进行研究,旨在对会计报告改革有所帮助。     

会计准则的新变化及对审计的影响

财政部不久前颁发了《企业会计准则--无形资产》等8个具体会计准则,对企业无形资产、借款费用资本化等事项的会计核算及相关信息披露作了进一步规范,并对债务重组、非货币性交易等准则进行了修订,使之更加稳健和务实.     

Thinking practice: Iteration,peer review,and policy analysis in a governmental accounting class

All accounting graduates need strong critical thinking skills to succeed. However, possessing these critical thinking skills upon graduation is particularly crucial for new accountants working in the field of governmental accounting. As public servants at the local, state, and federal levels, they may face both short-term budget constraints and long-term sustainability concerns that cannot be solved with technical skills alone. Due to the proliferation of standards and technical practices across the accounting profession, governmental accounting educators may find it difficult to incorporate critical thinking instruction into their courses. In response to these concerns, this paper presents a project developed for inclusion in a governmental and nonprofit accounting course. Over the course of one semester, students choose a governmental policy topic of interest, conduct background research, evaluate the costs and benefits associated with a policy issue, and prepare recommendations in a written format addressed to the appropriate legislative committee. The project also incorporates review and iterative components that allow students to revise their written work based on feedback from the instructor and classmates. We report results of pre- and post-surveys that suggest that the project offers promise as a vehicle for promoting critical thinking skills among governmental accounting students.     

Action and reaction: Decisive factors in developing accounting practice

The article describes the development and introduction of a system for budgeting in a middle-sized Swedish city. The budgeting system is described and the interaction between policy-making and budgeting is discussed. Based on observations of the design process and the subsequent use of the budgeting system, conclusions are presented. Particular attention is paid to the method used in the design process — action and reaction.     

Interaction between tax and accounting practice: Accounting for stock-in-trade

This paper studies the issue of interaction between tax and accounting practice through an examination of the process followed by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) when formulating Recommendation on Accounting Principles (RoAP) No. 22 as a replacement for RoAP No. 10. We show that the ICAEW had a clear intention of persuading the Board of Inland Revenue of the legitimacy of replacement cost as a basis of stock valuation, and that the preparation and publication of RoAP 22 succeeded, to a significant extent, in achieving that outcome. We also reveal that RoAP 22 appears to have affected the way in which some companies valued their stock and how their bases of stock valuation were disclosed in corporate published accounts.     

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.     

Behavioral changes following the collaborative development of an accounting information system

This research examines physician response to implementation of an activity-based costing (ABC) system developed and designed with physician input. We analyze changes in resource utilization for treatment of cataract patients and find changes in practice patterns, where physicians redeployed resources toward more severely ill patients and decreased average length of stay. We also find preliminary evidence of improvement in financial performance. We contribute to research investigating the influence of user participation on accounting system success, ABC system success, and hospital accounting information systems.     

Islam, nature and accounting: Islamic principles and the notion of accounting for the environment

Islamic principles are suggestive of a variety of implications for governance and accounting. Reflecting upon Islamic principles, we here engage with the notion of accounting for the environment. Drawing from key Islamic texts and relevant prior literature, we elaborate and discuss key Islamic principles of relevance and delineate what they suggest for accounting. Our endeavours here are consistent with a concern to contribute to a critical theoretical project seeking to develop a progressive and emancipatory universalism that is respectful of difference, a project with its accounting implications. In concluding, we point, among other things, to the irony whereby Western transnational corporations have sought to promote their particular brand of corporate social (and environmental) responsibility accounting in Arab countries, variously influenced by Islam, with little to no mention of a notion of accounting for the environment integral to and deeply rooted in Islam.     

Moral will,accounting and the phronemos

This commentary examines the work of Everett and Tremblay (2014) and their contribution to critical accounting. They examine three key ethical dilemmas that confront modern accounting practice. They examine a set of in-depth interviews, the autobiography of the former Vice President of Internal Audit of WorldCom, Cynthia Cooper, and the documents of the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) to shed light on accounting and audit ethics. The dilemmas confronting the accounting profession are complex and multi-faceted, which they place in their socio-economic context using ideas from Pierre Bourdieu. I add ideas from Lovibond (2004),MacIntyre (1984) and McDowell (1993) as well as audit work by Jere Francis. My solution involves accountants acting like the phronemos. The phronemos is Aristotle's term for a wise and ethical person who has the capacity to judge and act appropriately. This ideal of the phronemos is used to examine the ethical ambiguities in accounting that involve analyzing the critical role that accounting curricula, education and pedagogy play in making better judgments. This critical accounting focus was also a focus in Chabrak and Craig's work on accounting education. They examined professional credentialing and professional education. Like Everett and Tremblay, they also point us toward the public interest role of accounting and our societal need for better and informed judgments. The comment concludes with the observation that Aristotle's notion of the phronemos is an ideal type that promotes virtue ethics to address the drift in accounting away from ethics and its public interest role.     

Reporting accounting changes and fundamental errors: a teaching note

Mastering the requirements for reporting accounting changes and fundamental errors in comparative statements is a challenging topic for many accounting students. Because authoritative literature focuses on identifying events and associating them with reporting methods, many illustrative examples confound the differences between reporting methods with the differences between the factual situations in which the methods apply. This paper presents a single-context teaching aid that focuses on mastering basic reporting methods inherent in the International Accounting Standard governing accounting changes and in the US generally accepted accounting principles. Suggestions are also provided for class discussions of issues surrounding the reporting of accounting changes and fundamental errors.     

Magic,accounting and morale

This paper compares some uses made of accounting by modern societies with the use of witchcraft in less advanced ones. A common factor is a need for machinery to accommodate awkward facts in a way which does not undermine the fundamental beliefs of the culture. Western examples of this behaviour are analysed, and it is hypothesised that it occurs because low morale increases sensitivity to good and bad news. Such sensitivity affects the efficiency and existence of the organization.     

百家会计师事务所排名变迁的初步分析

国务院办公厅转发了《财政部关于加快发展我国注册会计师行业若干意见的通知》(以下简称通知),文件高度肯定了加快发展我国注册会计师行业,对于提高经济发展质量,维护国家经济信息安全具有重要意义。为了解我国注册会计师行业发展,本文拟对2003年至2009年百家会计师事务所排名变迁进行初步分析,以进一步评价行业的发展状况。因为自2003年中国注册会计师协会公布百家会计师事务所榜单以来,事务所排名已经成为社会各界了解注册会计师行业发展的风向标。尤其是近年来随着财政部积极推动行业做大做强,会计师事务所竞相合并,排名次序受到各界广泛关注。排名的位次不仅影响会计师事务所的声誉,而且也成为会计师事务所增加业务承揽的筹码。