Enhancing student engagement in large management accounting lectures

The education literature suggests a student-focused teaching strategy to improve students’ engagement in a lecture. However, in traditional accounting lectures students take the role of passive and anonymous recipients of knowledge. This paper reports on two cycles of an action research project, developing and refining a blended learning model, with the purpose of enhancing students’ engagement in the lectures of a large management accounting course. Results of our study find that engagement was enhanced with the implementation of this model. This study contributes to the accounting education literature through reporting evidence from action research and the effective implementation of a blended learning model that accounting educators can use.     

On patients’ interests and accountability: reflecting on some dilemmas in social audit in primary health care

The NHS in the UK continues to undergo rapid reforms incorporating New Public Financial Management techniques with limited attention only given to the theoretical underpinning and practical limitations of participatory health choice and evaluation. The study adopts a reflexive approach to realizing the aim of implementing empowering social audit—a paradigm founded in a polyvocal citizenship perspective (PCP). The paper explores the ethical dilemmas in implementing social audit in Primary Health Care. The research follows on from consultation with patients to reflect on concerns of accountability, patients’ interests and values. Democratic participation and informed choice are inextricably bounded by the existing economic, informational and power relationships. These potentially constricting factors are discussed using the illustrative case of generic prescribing. Patients preference for voice participation and their affirmation for “accountability" (albeit under-defined at present) should encourage engagement with a community development approach for new social accounting and social audit.     

The impact of an independent inspectorate on penal governance,performance and accountability: Pressure points and conflict “in the pursuit of an ideal of perfection”

This paper examines the impact of an independent Inspectorate on the enactment, of and accountability for, penal reform in the Australian State of Western Australia. Intended to improve system wide custodial outcomes through the introduction of a privately managed operator acting as standard bearer and innovator, the reform agenda was predicated on an overhaul of governance, performance, systems and reporting practices in the sponsoring department and the state's public prison network. Insights from three credos of imprisonment, theorizations of ‘hierarchical’ and ‘intelligent’ governance and accountability, the interplay of values in changing practice, and the ways in which inspectors establish particular inspection regimes, frame analysis of reform implementation and the inspection regime in action over a ten year period. Using archival material, this research examines how the Inspectorate, in making things auditable, altered perceptions and organizational realities of a network of actors. It is contended that the governance and accountability tensions inherent in managerialism, exemplified in its reliance on ‘neutral’ accounting technologies to incentivise, manage and monitor custodial outcomes, privilege instrumental hierarchical governance and accountability regimes that ignore the rehabilitative aspects of imprisonment. Further, conflicting publicly espoused and privately held values play vital roles in moulding performance in a penal setting, and are fundamental to changing outcomes in networks. The Inspectorate's public values and intelligent accountability regime resonate with the Department's policy objectives and public values, but are shown to have been initially inconsistent with network actors’ hidden private values. The research concludes that the appointment of an independent Inspectorate has facilitated the accountability of those responsible for prison quality and positively influenced the treatment of prisoners. A secondary concern is investigating conflicting propositions about the relative governance, performance and accountability of privately and publicly operated prisons.     

The structuration of legitimate performance measures and management: day-to-day contests of accountability in a U.K. restaurant chain

This paper reports on a longitudinal field study of accounting systems and their relationship to accountability in a U.K. restaurant chain. It is based on interviews and observations involving restaurant managers, the operations management hierarchy, and head office managers. In contrast to earlier studies of accounting and accountability this paper presents evidence to suggest that local managers’ uses of central performance reports may serve to disseminate head office’s strategic vision to operating units. It also suggests that the contests of accountability around performance measurement systems that have previously been reported in connection with major organizational transformations are a feature of everyday organizational management. With reference to structuration theory three modalities of such contests of accountability (signification, legitimation, domination) are distinguished and some of their interrelationships explained. Within an overall frame of strict hierarchical relationships, restaurant chain management exhibited considerable diversity with respect to the uses of performance measures, reflecting diverse local and central factors.     

The accountant will have a central role in saving the planet … really? A reflection on ‘green accounting and green eyeshades twenty years later’

There is widespread but not universal acceptance that organisations should provide ‘accounts’ of not only their financial performance, but also of their social and environmental performance. There have also been various suggestions across time that traditional financial reporting frameworks, albeit with some modification, have relevance to calls for greater corporate accountability. This paper seeks to dismiss such suggestions. For the accounting profession to be able to meaningfully contribute to extending accountability beyond investors, lenders, and creditors (and it undoubtedly serves these interests well) it will need to abandon many core accounting conventions and principles – something that is deemed unlikely to occur – at least in the readers’ lifetime. This paper also highlights the apparent absurdity of using market-based mechanisms (such as cap-and-trade systems for pollutants) to solve social and environmental problems that were effectively caused by ‘the market’. Having questioned the role of the accounting profession in contributing to broad-based corporate accountability, the paper concludes by questioning the role of accounting and business educators in instilling some form of personal social responsibility in the minds of students.     

Ethnographic Accounting Research: Field Notes from the Frontier

Ethnographic fieldwork in accounting is scarce and remains a “frontier” methodology, unfamiliar to most accounting researchers. Building on our field research project on corporate accountability and stakeholder engagement, set in the Canadian Arctic, we illustrate in this article the use and explanatory power of ethnographic methods for studying social groups and individual actors in the broader accounting universe. We share our fieldwork strategies and provide a few practical tips for conducting ethnographic research in both corporate and community environments. We then argue that ethnographies provide accounting researchers with untapped opportunities to discover vast reservoirs of knowledge inaccessible to other research methods, and offer a path to humanize accounting research.     

公司治理结构和会计控制观

研究公司治理结构 ,可识别会计信息的主要使用者 ,以确定会计观。美国公司股权分散型特征 ,决定了会计决策有用观导向 ;德日公司机构控制型特征 ,决定了会计受托责任观导向 ;我国公司治理结构 ,既有德日式的机构控制型 ,又有东亚式的拥有者管理型 ,我国以会计控制观导向建立会计规范体系 ,既现实 ,又必要、可行 ,体现了中国会计特色。为与国际会计协调 ,我国会计规范体系可实行“一国两制” :一般企业会计以会计控制观为导向 ,上市公司会计以决策有用观为导向 ;或所有企业会计均以会计控制观为导向 ,上市公司会计再实行以决策有用观为导向     

Governance and the quasi-public organization: a case study of social housing

The paper describes the results of a 3-year study of a social housing organization in England, tracing its transition from local authority-financed social agency into an ‘independent’ social business financed by lenders and following a merger its further transition into a complex business managing £200 million of assets.The study is concerned with the accountability to and by a quasi-public sector Board and how that Board was (or was not) able to exercise effective governance. It asks: Who is accountable? To whom are they accountable? For what are they accountable?The paper builds on the contrast made by Roberts [Acc. Organ. Society 16 (1991) 355; J. Roberts, From discipline to dialogue: individualizing and socializing forms of accountability, in: R. Munro, J. Mouritsen (Eds.), Accountability: Power, Ethos and the Technologies of Managing, International Thomson Business Press, London, 1996; Hum. Relat. 54 (2001) 1547] between a formal, hierarchical system of accountability based on a calculative accounting, and an informal, socializing form of accountability based on a sense-making narrative. The research identifies the limitations of accounting reports and the inadequacy of the narratives surrounding management/Board interaction. The paper identifies a space between the calculative and the narrative that is vacant and where governance is problematic and which impedes broader social accountabilities.     

Popular television formats,The student-as-consumer metaphor,acculturation and critical engagement in the teaching of accounting

This paper discusses six television programme formats which were self-selected by Australian university students to facilitate their group-based presentations of accounting subject matter to fellow students in seminar and tutorial classes. This paper is a reflection upon the experiences of these formats (news and current affairs, game shows, tabloid television, soap operas, children's programmes and situation comedies) using an evaluative framework comprising the student-as-consumer metaphor, notions of ‘acculturation’ and a model of ‘critical engagement’. The television programme format appears to be beneficial in serving accounting students' psychological and emotional needs and in providing them with a shared cultural structure by which to address accounting issues. This shared structure facilitates students' critical and creative engagement with accounting.     

Towards a dialectical interpretation of the contemporary mode of capitalist accounting

This paper seeks to apply the Hegelian and Marxian dialectic to the interpretation of the present mode of capitalist financial accounting in its totality; as a unified mode of its particularities and universalities. The paper considers that whereas the recent changes in the conceptual framework and standards of accounting seem to be an entire transformation of capitalist accounting from traditional cost based accounting to advanced value based accounting, the general concept of accountability, the essence of the archetype of capitalist double-entry system, and the determination of accounting from the circulation of capital have been underlying the present mode of capitalist accounting. This paper also argues that the contradiction of accounting recognition or profit calculation inherent in the present mode of capitalist accounting corresponds to the contradiction in the contemporary mode of capitalist economy: the split of the investment of the enterprise’s capital into productive and non-productive assets, and the split of investors into those who solely deal with securities or fictitious capital and those who invest in productive capital by way of shareholding.     

政府会计改革的公共受托责任视角解析

受托责任学派认为,受托责任是现代会计存在之根本原因,公共受托责任是政府会计的基石。然而,政府的公共受托责任与以营利为目的的企业经营受托责任有较大的差别。本文在考察公共受托责任构成及其对政府会计的影响,及公共受托责任与国际政府会计发展趋势的基础上,对我国政府公共受托责任现状进行分析,并对我国政府会计的改革提出建议。     

Understandings of accountability: an autoethnographic account using metaphor

The practical engagement of developing social accounts has provided me with an opportunity to consider different understandings of accountability. My reflective personal account, an autoethnography, explores difference in approaches to and insights into accountability in practice. The changed understandings of accountability developed during and after the production of two sets of social accounts with a not-for-profit organization. As part of the sense making process within the personal account, generative metaphor is used to enable reflection on the problem of accountability within social accounts. In this case the problem is both acknowledging and recognising the effect of my approach to and understandings of accountability during the production and reporting of two social accounts. The first social account was developed with a more formal and instrumental approach to accountability than the second which drew upon the initial experience and understanding of the first included a broader and more complex view of accountability. The recognition of a changed appreciation of accountability through the experience provides a deeper view of how accountability can be played out in practice with a not-for-profit community based organization. The result is my acknowledgement of a broader more encompassing notion of the complexity of accountability as part of a fragmented and changing world (Miller, 2002). By acknowledging this complexity I have opened a space that enables me to recognise the influence of my approach to accountability in practice. There is a need to recognise how we approach accountability in order to counter the current dominance of calculative forms of accountability from the ‘business case’ perspective supporting control of powerful elites that steer society. An accountability that includes complexity and the non-calculative is a more appropriate form for a not-for-profit organization rather than a dominant calculative accountability.     

The Financial Accountability of Australia's Medicare System: A Generational Accounting Analysis

The financial sustainability of publicly funded health care systems is sensitive to the demographics of ageing populations, which have a significant bearing on their financial management, accountability and reporting of their financial performance. This paper examines historical and current trends in demographic structure of Australia's population that are likely to impact on the financial management and accountability practices affecting Australia'suniversal public health care system ('Medicare'). The pay-as-you-go financed funding status of Medicare as represented under both currently required, cash-based accounting principles and proposed accrual-based accounting principles are criticised for not recognising the obligations of the Australian government under Medicare. An alternative system of generational accounting is proposed that projects the financial management costs of Medicare. Data are taken from both historical trends in expenditure and ageing as well as projected demographics. The analysis implies that there is significant intergenerational-inequity in the funding of Medicare, which is not recognised under accrual-based accounting principles that are now being used to evaluate the financial accountability and performance of government entities.     

Reclaiming ‘Sense’ from ‘Cents’ in Accounting Education

Abstract

This essay adopts an interpretive methodology of relevant literature to explore the limitations of accounting education when it is taught purely as a technical practice. The essay proceeds from the assumption that conventional accounting education is captured by a positivistic neo-classical model of decision-making that draws on economic rationale to inform and report on corporate activities and make value judgements about accounting. Accounting with its emphasis on transactions and recording makes little sense unless accountability and stewardship objectives are effective. This essay calls for an increased use of active learning strategies (experiential and in-context activities) to connect students to the social realities of accounting. Cognitive dissonance, as an explicit objective of accounting education, provides the means to challenge accounting as a rational stage of endeavour through critical and dialogical perspectives in accounting. Two types of learning pedagogies based on ‘in’ and ‘out’ of classroom activities were discussed and analysed.     

Reforming central government: An evaluation of an accounting innovation

This paper examines a significant accounting innovation in central government accounting – the introduction of Resource Accounting and Budgeting (RAB) in the UK. This innovation is studied through the lens of Rogers diffusion theory. The study setting is the Scotland Parliament. This research shows that, in the terms of diffusion theory, RAB can be classified as an accounting innovation. However, the implementation of RAB is problematic. While the reform of the UK central government system was initially sought as a mechanism to enhance democratic accountability, this paper shows that RAB does not connect with parliamentarians. The introduction of RAB flows as much from a managerial agenda as it does from the aim of democratic accountability.     

The Public Accountability Value of a Triple Bottom Line Approach to Performance Reporting in the Water Sector

Global water resources are subject to increasing supply constraints. We respond by exploring how novel public sector performance reporting can service public accountability. Here our focus is an exploration of the drivers and utility of a unique ‘sustainability’‐focused, publicly disclosed, performance reporting initiative undertaken by a water agency in Australia. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with a range of individuals from 2013 to 2014. A disclosure index was also constructed to assess the quality of the disclosures. While the key purpose of the reports was to provide managerial accountability with intra‐governmental stakeholders, they were also drawn on to serve a secondary public accountability purpose with external stakeholders. We argue that the prioritisation of internal stakeholders could threaten utility for public accountability purposes. However, in this case, the reports were also found to be largely relevant to the general public. The study demonstrates that reporting developed for managerial accountability purposes can be designed and targeted also to contribute usefully to ancillary public accountability objectives. Our engagement with the public sector to explore the role and effectiveness of novel reporting strategies in support of sustainability and accountability objectives is topical, and contributes to understanding potential solutions in other contexts.     

论绩效评价导向政府会计体系的构建

政府公共受托责任解除的根本途径是政府绩效信息的全面披露,但定量信息的缺乏制约了政府绩效评价理论与实务的发展。会计作为货币化的经济信息系统,具备提供定量信息的天生优势,本应为政府绩效评价提供数据支持。但现有的政府会计体系在绩效评价支持方面并未发挥出应有作用。因此,有必要以绩效评价为导向构建政府会计体系。     

Evaluating the Implementation of a Mandatory Dual Reporting System: The Case of Indonesian Local Government

Informative and transparent financial information in the public sector is crucial for improving public sector management and eradicating corruption. Given this, Indonesia has reformed its public sector accounting, reporting and accountability systems by implementing a dual reporting system known as ‘cash towards accrual’, following similar reforms in developed countries. Drawing on the experience of five local governments (districts) in Indonesia, this study finds that the implementation of the dual reporting system has helped local governments to produce transparent and informative reports. However, the accrual‐based contents of the dual reports produced by the new reporting system are underused for decision making. In addition, there has been a significant increase in costs associated with the implementation of the new accounting regime in the jurisdictions studied. The study also finds that the ability of the users to use information generated by the new accounting system is more important than just a legal and mandatory requirement to use the new system.