Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal: Volume 36 Issue 9

Adopting and adapting sustainability accounting: fit and faith in a family business

Rebecca Maughan

The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretically informed analysis of the evolution of environmental management accounting (EMA) and social and environmental reporting…

Shareholder sentiment at general meetings: speculating on colonialism

Sean Bradley Power, Niamh M. Brennan

Annual general meetings have been variously described as dull rituals for accountability versus entertaining theatre at the expense of accountability. The research analyses…

Digitalization in accounting–Warmly embraced or coldly ignored?

Mieke Jans, Banu Aysolmaz, Maarten Corten, Anant Joshi, Mathijs van Peteghem

The Accounting Information Systems (AIS) research field emerged around 30 years ago as a subfield of accounting but is at risk to develop further as an isolated discipline…

Between consultation and control: how incubators perform a governance function for entrepreneurial firms

Andreas Flanschger, Rafael Heinzelmann, Martin Messner

This paper examines the governance function that incubators perform for entrepreneurial firms. The authors demonstrate that this governance function has both a consultative and a…

Internal auditor independence as a situated practice: four archetypes

Gunilla Eklöv Alander

This study aims to understand independence in internal auditing by investigating how internal auditor independence is constructed when analysed in its corporate governance context.

Accountability and music: accounting, emotions and responses to the 1913 concert for Giuseppe Verdi

Elena Giovannoni, Maria Cleofe Giorgino, Roberto Di Pietra

This study aims to explore the engagement between accounting and music in the social and relational construction of accountability. The authors conceive this construction as a…

Adaptive framing of sustainability in CEO letters

Susanne Arivdsson, Svetlana Sabelfeld

This study provides insights into the external powers that can influence business leaders' communication on sustainability. It shows how the socio-political context manifested in…

Management control practices and pragmatism

Emer Curtis, Breda Sweeney

Pragmatism is very relevant to workplace management and performance measurement, yet in the accounting literature, it is a term used loosely and in a colloquial manner. By drawing…

A decade of integrated reporting studies: state of the art and future research implications

Lucrezia Songini, Anna Pistoni, Niccolò Comerio, Patrizia Tettamanzi

Over the past decade, researchers have witnessed an exponential growth in the number of publications on IR. This paper aims to understand the state of the art of the research…

Magicians, unicorns or data cleaners? Exploring the identity narratives and work experiences of data scientists

Lukas Goretzki, Martin Messner, Maria Wurm

Data science promises new opportunities for organizational decision-making. Data scientists arguably play an important role in this regard and one can even observe a certain…

Safeguarding the unknown: performance measurement, academic agency and the meaning of research quality in practice

David S. Bedford, Markus Granlund, Kari Lukka

The authors examine how performance measurement systems (PMSs) and academic agency influence the meaning of research quality in practice. The worries are that the notion of…

Accounting to promote ethical tolerance: the case of the Italian prostitution model (1860)

Marco Gatti, Simone Poli

This paper explores the role that the control system – understood as a set of financial and non-financial mechanisms – introduced by the Ministerial Decree of 15th February 1860…

Impression management at board meetings: accountability in public and in private

Helen R. Pernelet, Niamh M. Brennan

To demonstrate transparency and accountability, the three boards in this study are required to meet in public in front of an audience, although the boards reserve confidential…

Accounting for Indigenous cultural connections to land: insights from two Indigenous groups of Australia

Glenn Finau, Diane Jarvis, Natalie Stoeckl, Silva Larson, Daniel Grainger, Michael Douglas, Ewamian Aboriginal Corporation, Ryan Barrowei, Bessie Coleman, David Groves, Joshua Hunter, Maria Lee, Michael Markham

This paper aims to present the findings of a government-initiated project that sought to explore the possibility of incorporating cultural connections to land within the federal…

Navigating management control change: pathways to the future of work

Michelle Carr, Stefan Jooss

COVID-19 has forced Big 4 firms to challenge existing management control arrangements and adapt their ways of working. Yet, we know little about how management control might be…

New boundaries for sustainability accounting? A case study of multi-entity accounting and reporting in the agrifood sector

Rebecca Maughan, Aideen O'Dochartaigh

This study examines how accounting tools and techniques are used to create and support membership and reporting boundaries for a multi-entity sustainability scheme. It also…

Communication, disclosure and power games: a figurational approach to understanding CPA Australia's corporate governance scandal

Giacomo Pigatto, John Dumay, Lino Cinquini, Andrea Tenucci

This research aims to examine and understand the rationales and modalities behind the use of disclosure before, during and after a corporate governance scandal involving CPA…

Reporting controversial issues in controversial industries

Donna Marshall, Jakob Rehme, Aideen O'Dochartaigh, Stephen Kelly, Roshan Boojihawon, Daniel Chicksand

This article explores how companies in multiple controversial industries report their controversial issues. For the first time, the authors use a new conceptualization of…