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The current study examines the effect of socialization on the inculcation of professional accounting values. Three sources of socialization are examined: public accounting firms, non-public accounting firms (industry) and accounting professional associations. Specifically, the study compares the professionalism of public and industry accountants. Consistent with expectations, the results suggest that public accountants have stronger beliefs in professional autonomy and self-regulation than industry accountants, and that industry accountants have stronger beliefs in professional affiliation, social obligation and professional dedication than public accountants. It was hypothesized that while professional associations promote all professional values, public accounting firms and industry have different promoting priorities. Public accounting firms foster beliefs in self-regulation and professional autonomy while industry opposes these values, resulting in public accountants having stronger beliefs in these values. Conversely, it was posited that industry encourage beliefs in professional affiliation, social obligation and professional dedication to a greater extent than public accounting firms. The result is that the industry accountants have stronger beliefs in these values than the public accountants. Investigating these issues increase understanding of the importance of the socialization process fostering accounting professional values and identifying areas of potential conflict and reinforcement accountants face when working in public accounting and industry.

The use of accounting to help apply the principles of scientific management to business affairs is associated with the adoption of standard costing and budgetary control. This first British industry‐based study of the implementation of these calculative techniques makes use of the case study research tool to interrogate archival data relating to leading iron and steel companies. We demonstrate the adoption of standard costing and budgetary control early on (during the inter‐war period) by a single economic unit, United Steel Companies Ltd, where innovation is attributed to the engineering and scientific background and US experiences of key personnel. Elsewhere, significant management accounting change occurred only with the collapse in iron and steel corporate profitability that began to become apparent in the late 1950s. The process of accounting change is addressed and the significance for our study of the notions of evolution and historical discontinuity is examined. The paper is contextualised through an assessment of initiatives from industry‐based regulatory bodies and consideration of the economic circumstances and business conditions within which management accounting practices were the subject of radical revision.

This study conducts a systematic review using 452 academic and industry articles from an initial set of 60,899 records obtained by 3 databases from 2012 to 2020. The authors compare and contrast blockchains with existing legacy systems. The authors identify existing regulation, accounting standards, guidelines and potential amendments in under-explored areas such as taxation, accounting treatment of crypto-assets/liabilities and detailed auditing procedures. The study aims to highlight the trends, differences and gaps between academic and industry literature. The authors provide a behavioral, social, cultural, organizational, regulatory, ethical, accountability and managerial perspectives of blockchain adoption in accounting. Finally, the study develops two adoption frameworks.

The authors' study follows (Moher et al., 2009) and (Briner and Denyer, 2012) methodology to conduct the systematic review and the steps are mentioned below. The authors construct a final sample of 452 from a preliminary search of three multi-disciplinary databases from 2012 to 2020. First, the authors motivate the review and formulate the research questions. Second, the authors aggregate relevant literature from both industry and academia and implement quality assessments. Third, the authors analyze the literature and construct the final sample of articles. Fourth, the authors conducted textual analysis, keyword frequencies and identify gaps, trends and similarities between academic and industry literature and develop the authors' frameworks

The authors identify 3 (ABDC, B and A* ranked) journals as publishing top article numbers with the highest article count for 2017 with 96 articles in academia and 2019 for the industry with 21 articles. Second-highest publications for academia occur in 2018 with 77 followed by, whereas in the industry, publications occur in the year 2016 with 16 articles. Two co-authors appear most popular with 103 articles. Word clouds, a mind map and article theme counts are used to identify nine key research clusters: data management, financial applications, sustainability, accounting and auditing, business and industrial, education, governance, privacy/security and disruptive technology.

Systematic reviews can have selection biases mainly due to search and selection criteria distortions when constructing the final sample of articles. The authors address selection bias by refining our search keyword combinations by using different permutations and using keywords from articles already collected. The authors employ three databases and review the reference list of articles collected to add more articles that may have been missed into our sample. In addition, to avoid inconsistent coding of domains/themes and interpretations, the authors carefully review our domain identifications and all our analysis twice independently using two research assistants to obtain the same conclusions.

The authors' unique contributions include reviewing additional papers, differentiating between industry, academic articles, common trends and gaps in much scattered prior literature. The authors identify existing accounting standards, guidelines, limitations and possible amendments required in future for blockchain adoption in accounting in taxation, accounting treatment of crypto-assets/liabilities and detailed audit procedures. Blockchains are compared with legacy accounting technologies and two frameworks for adoption developed. The authors' results could impact the understanding of existing regulation, accounting standards, future amendments, areas requiring clarity and future collaborative research between academia and industry across multi-disciplines. Practical implications to academics, professional bodies, regulators and industry practitioners exist.

The authors' study identifies significant implications on organizations, environment, culture and society in general. The authors identify that social engagement projects may be easily initiated and implemented with decentralized accounting information systems. Transparency and efficiency would change organization culture, ways accountants and even employees interact with each other and community. Anonymity in blockchains can be used for criminal activities. Coding of negative social dynamics to smart contracts may persist. Transparency of personally identifiable information may place individuals at risk. Regulation and standards would need to identify equity, ethics in blockchains which notwithstanding energy consumption, and could enable environmental protection increasing societal sustainability.

To the authors' knowledge, this is the first study that compares academic and industry literature of 452 articles to identify gaps and similarities from 2012 to 2020 using three multi-disciplinary databases. The authors' study is the first study to in detail existing accounting standards, unclear areas, future amendments for International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) standards on taxation, financial reporting and all aspects of auditing procedures. The authors further categorize prior literature into these key areas and develop two frameworks (DAERPS and DAIS) that are linked to our review results and prior literature. The authors identify the impact of blockchain adoption on key stakeholders, regulation, society, culture, organization, accountability and ethics.

We develop a conceptual framework as a basis for thinking about the impact of extractive industries and emancipatory potential of alternative accounts. We then review selected alternative accounts literature on some contemporary issues surrounding the extractive industries and identify opportunities for accounting, auditing, and accountability research. We also provide an overview of the other contributions in this special issue.

Drawing on alternative accounts from the popular and social media as well as the alternative accounting literature, this primarily discursive paper provides a contemporary literature review of identified issues within the extractive industries highlighting potential areas for future research. The eight papers that make up the special issue are located within a conceptual framework is employed to illustrate each paper’s contribution to the field.

While accounting has a rich literature covering some of the issues detailed in this paper, this has not necessarily translated to the extractive industries. Few studies in accounting have got “down and dirty” so to speak and engaged directly with those impacted by companies operating in the extractive industries. Those that have, have focused on specific areas such as the Niger Delta. Although prior studies in the social governance literature have tended to focus on disclosure issues, it is questionable whether this work, while informative, has resulted in any meaningful environmental, social or governance (ESG) changes on the part of the extractive industries.

The extensive extractive industries literature both from within and outside the accounting discipline makes a comprehensive review impractical. Drawing on both the accounting literature and other disciplines, this paper identifies areas that warrant further investigation through alternative accounts.

This paper and other contributions to this special issue provide a basis and an agenda for accounting scholars seeking to undertake interdisciplinary research into the extractive industries.

The purpose of this study is to provide a harmonisation framework for the diverse accounting practices by extractive industries.

The study takes a three-stage approach. The first involves a comprehensive literature review of the historical evolution of accounting regulations by extractive industries. The second involves constructing an accounting practice index for extractive industries. The third involves constructing a harmonisation framework.

The accounting practice index provides empirical evidence of the wide diversity of accounting practices by extractive industries. Analysis of the literature review addresses the several attempts by accounting and regulatory bodies to standardise the diverse practices of accounting by extractive industries and reasons for the lack of successful standardisations. The authors extract lessons from these previous attempts and propose a harmonisation framework.

The proposed harmonisation framework can be used to align together the diverse accounting practices by extractive industries and enhance comparability and consistency of accounting figures and statements produced by these industries. Harmonising the diverse accounting practices is crucial for investment decision-making.

The harmonisation framework is the first of its kind that could enhance the comparability of accounts of extractive industries’ firms and be used to harmonise diverse accounting practices by other industries.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the application of the fundamental principle of accounting conservatism within the EU food and drink industry. Furthermore, the authors would also investigate in-depth the above relationship in two different subsamples (income smoothers and non-income smoothers).

All EU-listed companies of the food and drink industry were identified covering the year 2019. Eckel's model was used to classify listed companies as smoothing or non-smoothing, and Basu's model was adopted to test the degree of conditional conservatism.

The results indicate that conservatism is strongly present in food and drink industry and also in its subindustries. We also showed that non-smoothing firms had higher levels of conditional conservatism in terms of more opportunity to recognize future economic losses because the market could use the stock return data to anticipate future losses contained in the information regarding profits.

One limitation of this work is the small size of the investigated companies. The authors demonstrate that the likely increased use of conservatism produces better credibility in the EU markets. Practical implications indicate a higher degree of monitoring of the accounting practices adopted by firms. Regulators have to set accounting policies to enhance the quality of the informational environment, investors and shareholders might exercise control over executives' decisions, and lenders might impose contractual clauses requiring the timely disclosure of “bad news.”

This industry is “belted” from any external speculations. This research made it possible also to observe theoretical relationships between the financial information provided by the EU food and drink industry that contributes to the market distinction between smoothers and non-smoothers.

This paper aims to investigate financial statement comparability in the extractive industry. This paper focuses on the extractive industry because International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) contain limited guidance on the accounting treatment for exploration and evaluation (E&E) costs and IFRS 6 – Exploration for and Evaluation of Mineral Resources allowed firms to continue with existing divergent accounting treatment of E&E costs.

The authors use data from Australia, a country that adopted IFRS in 2005 with a large extractive industry. They also compare changes in cross-country comparability around the IFRS adoption date between Australian firms and adopters relative to Australian firms and non-adopters to better isolate changes in comparability that are attributable to the adoption of IFRS from other sources that are not related to the adoption of IFRS. The authors measure comparability consistent with De Franco et al. (2011) where financial statements are comparable when two firms produce similar accounting amounts for similar economic events.

For non-extractive industry firms, the authors find the comparability of financial statements of Australian firms increased with other adopters and that this increase was relatively greater than the increase with non-adopter firms. This evidence is consistent with comparability benefits associated with the adoption of IFRS. However, for extractive industry firms, the authors do not find a significantly greater increase in the comparability of financial statements of Australian firms with adopters relative to the increase with non-adopters, suggesting that the increase is likely not associated with the adoption of IFRS. In additional analysis, they find that following IFRS adoption non-extractive Australian firms have greater within-country comparability relative to extractive Australian firms, while there was no difference in the pre-adoption period.

The evidence suggests that the divergent practices for E&E costs under IFRS 6 and the lack of an accounting standard that deals with matters relating to the extractive industry hinder the comparability of financial statements in this industry.

While the studies on the use of smart robots in the production, which is known as the Industry 4.0 revolution, continue rapidly, the competition race is in the right proportion with this and businesses that do not want to fall behind the age have to follow the developments in Industry 4.0 and adapt. This chapter examines the Industry 4.0 revolution and its effect on accounting. Incorrect information from one of the business departments affects the entire system. Especially in the accounting department, which records the financial movements of the business and reports the results of them, and which is effective in making decisions that affect the whole business based on these results, the use of smart systems helps to reduce human-made mistakes and the system to act faster while also the systems used in traditional accounting are abandoned. However, brain power is still required, which must analyze the results. While the revolution is still developing, there are a lot of theories about the future. The expected outcome of these is that with the revolution, the need for brain power to analyze system outputs will increase, even if the need for human labour in the industry decreases. In this context, especially those who perform the accounting profession must constantly renew themselves.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether a negative outcome (i.e. a sanction) of an inspection by Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service for an industry-leading company affects the accounting quality of other companies in the same industry. The premise is that when peer companies observe the negative results of such an inspection on a leader in their industry, they will be more concerned about their own risk during a future inspection and more likely to increase their accounting quality.

The authors conduct a mutivariate Oridnary Least Squares (OLS) regression using 11,476 South Korean samples from 2002 to 2016. The study uses ordinary least square regressions to test the hypotheses using discretionary accruals as a proxy for accounting quality.

The authors find that peer companies reduced their discretionary accruals in the next period and that this reduction is amplified according to the severity of the disciplinary action on the industry leader and the materiality of errors in that leader’s financial statements.

This finding contributes to the literature by providing the first evidence of a spillover effect of regulatory inspection on accounting quality that financial reporting sanctions not only affect the overall accounting quality of the sanctioned company but also that of its peers in the same industry. The authors expect this study to lead to future research on the effect of other regulations on industry-wide accounting quality.

Accounting and water industry experts are developing general‐purpose water accounting (GPWA) to report information about water and rights to water. The system has the potential to affect water policies, pricing and management, and investment and other decisions that are affected by GPWA report users' understanding of water risks faced by an entity. It may also affect financial returns to accounting and auditing firms and firms in water industries. In this paper the authors aim to examine the roles of the accounting profession, water industries and other stakeholders in governing GPWA. Recognising that the fate of GPWA depends partly upon regulatory power and economics, they seek to apply regulatory theories that explain financial accounting standards development to speculate about the national and international future of GPWA.

Official documents, internal Water Accounting Standards Board documents and unstructured interviews underpin the authors' analysis.

The authors speculate about the benefits that might accrue to various stakeholder groups from capturing the GPWA standard‐setting process. They also suggest that internationally, water industries may dominate early GPWA standards development in the public interest and that regulatory capture by accounting or water industry professionals will not necessarily conflict with public interest benefits.

Accounting for water can affect allocations of environmental, economic, social and other resources; also, accounting and water industry professional standing and revenues. In this paper the authors identify factors influencing GPWA standards and standard‐setting institutional arrangements, and thereby these resource allocations. The paper generates an awareness of GPWA's emergence and practical implications.

This is an early study to investigate water accounting standard‐setting regulatory influences and their impact.