Search results

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the actions of the accounting profession, the state, universities, and academics have inhibited the development of South African accounting research.

A multiple history approach using traditional archival material and oral history is used.

Since the late nineteenth-century, a network of human and non-human actors has ensured that accounting education in South Africa retained a technical focus. By prescribing and detailing the accounting syllabuses required for university accreditation, the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA) and its predecessors exercise direct control over accounting education. As a result, little appetite exists for a discipline based on academic enquiry or engagement with international scholars. While the SAICA claims to support accounting research, this support is conditional on its meeting the professional body’s particular view of scholarship.

The limitations associated with this research are that it focusses on one particular professional body in one jurisdiction. The South African situation provides a cautionary tale of how universities, particularly those in developing countries, should take care not to abdicate their responsibilities for the setting of syllabi or course content to professional bodies. Accounting academics, particularly those in a developing country currently experiencing major social, political, and economic problems, are in a prime position to engage in research that will benefit society as a whole.

Although actor network theory has been used in accounting research and in particular to explain accounting knowledge creation, the use of this particular theoretical lens to examine the construction of professional knowledge is limited. This study draws on Callon’s (1986) four moments to explain how various human actors including the accounting profession, the state, universities, and accounting academics, along with non-human actors such as accreditation, regulation, and transformation, have brought about South African academic disengagement with the discipline.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how an accounting association and its key members define, control, and claim their knowledge; adopt a closure and/or openness policy to enhance their status/influence; and respond to structural/institutional forces from international organisations and/or the state in a particular historical context, such as a globalised/neo-liberalised setting.

The authors draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical tools (field, capital, habitus, and doxa) to understand how public sector accrual accounting was defined, and how the Korean Association for Government Accounting was formed and represented as a group with public sector accounting expertise. The research context was the implementation of accrual accounting in South Korea between 1997/1998, when the Asian financial crisis broke out, and 2006/2007, when accrual accounting was enforced by legislation. The authors interviewed social actors recognised as public sector accounting experts, in addition to examining related documents such as articles in academic journals, newsletters, invitations, membership forms, newspaper articles, and curricula vitae.

The authors found that the key founders of KAGA included some public administration professors, who advocated public sector accrual accounting via civil society groups immediately after Korea applied to the International Monetary Fund for bailout loans and a new government was formed in 1997/1998. In conjunction with public servants, they defined and designed public sector accrual accounting as a measure of public sector reform and as a part of the broader government budget process, rather than as an accounting initiative. They also co-opted accounting professors and CPA-qualified accountants through their personal connections, based on shared educational backgrounds, to represent the association as a public sector accounting experts’ group.

These findings suggest that the study of the accounting profession cannot be restricted to a focus on professional accounting associations and that accounting knowledge can be acquired by non-accountants. Therefore, the authors argue that the relationship between accounting knowledge, institutional forms, and key actors’ strategies is rich and multifaceted.

The purpose of this paper is to assess Nigerian students’ level of awareness of the tripartite accounting (TA), unmask the ills of the propaganda for professional practice as the core of the accounting profession and emphasise the TA. Awareness of the fact that the frontiers of accounting is increasingly expanding beyond professional practice is inchoate in Nigeria. The role of accounting extends further to research and policy formulations for governments and corporate organisations, as it assumes a multi-dimensional sine qua non for reporting, budgeting and budgetary control, environmental impact measurement, forensics and other socio-political and economic policy measures.

Questionnaires were administered to 100 final-year students from the Department of Accounting in Bowen University, Iwo.

There is unilateral stereotype of the profession always tending to practice as the core of the accounting profession; there is little awareness of the benefits of undertaking research and/or policy-based accounting, limiting students’ focus to becoming only professional practitioners, which results in low number of senior academics in the field of Accounting evident in most tertiary institutions and the evident inadequacies of Nigeria’s standards-setting and policy-making systems and mechanisms.

Tertiary institutions should be the “place of orientation” for the TA, nurturing and developing students’ interest, hence, the strong proposal for balancing TA through clamour for institutional interrelationship to ensure effectiveness, efficiency, progress and sustainability of the profession.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a contextual analysis of the professional accounting education system of South Africa (SA).

The paper uses the Global Model of Accounting Education (Watty et al., 2012) to describe the accounting education system of SA, which is then compared with similar case studies of Australia, Japan and Sri Lanka. Information about the SA accounting education system is contextualised from multiple sources, using data triangulation.

Several similarities between the SA accounting education system and that of Australia are found, such as the role and involvement of the professional bodies in the accreditation processes, with less similarities with that of Japan and Sri Lanka. The comparisons illuminate the economic development of each country and the level of involvement in the education programmes by the profession. Specific challenges in SA include the entrance hurdles to higher education and emphasis on an accounting degree.

The application of the Global Model of Accounting Education helps to identify the similarities in the global accounting arena and illuminates the uniqueness of the SA accounting education system. This study illustrates the establishment of an accounting education system that aligns with the International Education Standards (IESs).

The study contributes to the discussions around challenges in accounting education, specifically those associated with accreditation and a strong controlling relationship between academe and the profession.

This paper seeks to present an invited response to a paper describing the historical relationship between the New Zealand Institute of Chartered Accountants (and its predecessor body) and the universities in New Zealand.

The paper is conceptual and takes the form of a commentary/review of the findings of the principal paper.

The paper adds to the description in the principal paper and presents additional factors that are necessary in assessing the relationship between the professional body and the university sector.

The paper extends the discussion in the principal paper with some reflection on the nature of professionalism and argues that a broader appreciation of professionalism is necessary to judge the effectiveness of the relationship in question.

This paper adds to a focus of the social accounting literature (on perceptions and attitudes to social accounting) by seeking to offer insights into Syrian accountants' attitudes towards, and perceptions of, social accounting in Syria in the first decade of the twenty‐first century, with particular attention to its role, future development and implementation.

The paper takes the form of an analysis of interviews of Syrian accountants; contextual analysis (and an appreciation of the prior literature).

Syrian accountants' perceptions are shaped by developments in Syria's socio‐political and economic context, encompassing imperialism/colonialism, globalisation and cultural specificities, including Islam. Interviewees perceived a significant role for a social accounting – that would parallel the Western form of social accounting – in enhancing well‐being in the dynamic context. At the same time, they were reluctant to see the development and implementation of this accounting in Syria as an urgent issue, so that this social accounting might be left initially at least with an even more marginal part to play than in the West. The study suggests that a combination of forces – global developments, Western imperialism and Syria's colonial history – have had a substantively repressive rather than progressive impact on the development of social accounting in Syria vis‐à‐vis its more positive potential.

All limitations of interview research apply. This study focuses on Syria in a context when economic transition was a major issue. Further studies of economies in transition would be of interest.

An awareness of how the local and the global interact in debates over social accounting can provide insights for policy makers concerned with accounting regulation.

The focus on Syria, a non‐Western country, enriches the social accounting literature, which focuses mainly on Western developments.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the performance of accounting researchers in winning competitive Australian Research Council (ARC) grants, when compared with researchers from the medical, engineering and law professions, during a period of heightened questioning of accounting methods, bounded by the end of the dot.com boom in 2001 and the global financial crisis in 2008. Protection and expansion of a profession's core knowledge through effective research is regarded as a hallmark of ongoing professional recognition and success in winning ARC grants is one indicator of the strength of this research. Reasons for the absolute and relative performance of accounting researchers in winning ARC grants are explored.

ARC statistics for the 2000‐2008 period were analysed, along with additional data from the relevant professional associations and the Commonwealth Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations.

The results indicate that Australian accounting researchers are performing poorly in absolute and relative terms when compared with their professional peers. Some evidence exists that accounting research cultures seem to flourish in only a handful of universities, and that accounting academics are overloaded with teaching to the detriment of research.

The study adds to the growing interest in the value added by accounting research to the accounting profession, the corporate sector and society at large. While the publishing record of Australian accounting researchers appears healthy, when compared with their accounting peers overseas, they perform poorly in winning competitive grants relative to researchers from other professions. This may be a timely wakeup call to the accounting profession that the social acceptance of accounting knowledge should not be taken for granted.

Accounting academics in the South African system understand their primary responsibility to be the teaching of prospective Chartered Accountants (CAs) rather than the advancement of knowledge through research. The purpose of this study is to determine what factors motivate accounting academics who are CAs to obtain doctorates in an environment dominated by the profession, where promotion is possible to Full Professor without a Doctorate but not without the professional qualification of CA. And did these doctoral CAs face challenges on their journey, such as resistance from colleagues?

A total of 22 academic CAs with doctorates and 18 academic CAs studying towards doctorates were surveyed to gain a deeper understanding of who they are, what their motivations were for undertaking the doctorate journey and what they experienced.

The main finding of this study is that the culture of accounting departments in South Africa is beginning to shift from being teaching orientated towards being more research orientated. The CAs are pursuing doctorates for the purpose of career progression and for intrinsic personal reasons. The main challenges that they faced on their journey were finding the time for family and a social life and a lack of support from colleagues and their institution. However, support seems to be improving.

The change to a research-orientated culture in South African departments of accounting, as envisioned by Van der Schyf (2008), is only now starting to take place. These CAs with doctorates provide evidence of that change.

The value of this study is to provide accounting academics and the profession with a better understanding of, and a greater sensitivity to, accounting academics operating under the influence of the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA). The study also adds to the limited amount of literature on the motives and experiences of doctoral students, especially accounting doctoral students.