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This study aims to explain the driving forces behind the development of accounting regulatory institutions in post-colonial Libya.

The historical method is used to interpret relevant documentary evidence in the development of accounting in Libya vis-à-vis developments in the country’s post-colonial political-economic history.

The development of accounting regulation in Libya is traced to post-colonial political-economic history that occurred independent of the country’s colonial past. The immediate aftermath of colonialism (1951-1968) showed that Western accounting practices used by Western businesses operating in Libya were imbued by pro-Western ideology. Basic legislative requirements for accounting and auditing emerged during this period through legislation. Two distinct epochs surfaced during Muammar Gaddafi’s rule: initially, the state advocated a centrally planned economy, but in the 1980s, an ideological shift occurred, which opened the Libyan economy to the global market. The first epoch saw the formation of accounting regulatory agencies consistent with the state-centred organisation of society, and the second epoch engendered the development of accounting standards consistent with the developments in market-centred societies during the era of globalisation.

The study offers unique historical evidence on the development of accounting regulation in a developing country independent of its colonial history. The study enhances our understanding of how the interplay between the political economy and the ideological basis of the state determines the historical path of accounting as a basis for predicting the possible future direction of accounting development.

Practical accountving skills such as the ability to use commercial computerised accounting programmes (CCAP) is increasingly becoming expected of accounting graduates. To understand the impact of CCAP on learning, this paper aims to examine students’ motivations for and perceptions about learning CCAP in two accounting subjects trialled in an Australian university.

A survey of students who completed the course was conducted twice, before training and assessment using CCAP and after completing the CCAP-based learning activity and the associated assessment task.

The results show that students demonstrate strong positive attitudes towards learning CCAP, and using CCAP elicits active student engagement in the learning processes. The findings also show room for further enhancement of student engagement by integrating CCAP learning tasks with teamwork and developing CCAP-based learning and assessment tasks suitable for higher-order learning outcomes.

The survey respondents in this study are drawn from only one higher education institution in Australia and are predominantly an international cohort. This makes the conclusions of the study exploratory in nature and thus further studies are needed before generalising the conclusions.

By providing insights into student motivations to and perceptions about the use of CCAP in accounting curricula, the study sheds light on the potential of CCAP to enhance learning and aspects of consolidating the role of CCAP as a learning tool.

This study aims to examine the setting of International Standards on Auditing (ISA) 701 on disclosing key audit matters (KAMs) to explore the role of standard setting in maintaining or reconstituting the relationship of the auditing profession with preparers and users of financial reports.

This study draws on concepts from the sociology of the professions literature and the regulatory space metaphor. Data comprises comment letters and other documents pertaining to the setting of ISA 701.

The study shows that the KAM reporting requirement is part of the ongoing re-calibration of the regulatory arrangements governing auditing, which started in the early 2000s. This study interprets standard setting as a site for negotiating the relationships between linked ecologies in the audit regulatory space, namely, the auditing profession, preparers of financial statements and users of audited reports. This study identifies three processes involved in setting ISA 701, namely, reconstitution of the rules governing auditors’ reports as a link between the three ecologies, preserving boundaries between the auditing profession and preparers and negotiation aimed at balancing competing interests of the interrelated ecologies.

The study offers insights into the role of regulatory rule setting as a central medium through which the adaptive relationship of the profession with its environment is negotiated.

The purpose of this study is to examine international financial reporting standards (IFRSs) adoption in Ethiopia to explain transnational political-economic antecedents of this change and its associated consequences on the regulatory landscape of accounting.

Using a neo-Gramscian theory of globalization and the state, the study examines interview and document review evidence pertaining to IFRS adoption in Ethiopia by focusing on the period from 1991 to 2014.

The study illustrates that a dialectical rather than deterministic interaction between global and national forces explains IFRS adoption in Ethiopia, i.e. IFRS adoption falls within the broader scheme of universalizing regulatory institutions in the globalizing world economy. Compared to the commonly understood trends of IFRS adoption circumscribed within a pre-existing regulatory framework, this study illustrates IFRS adoption as a primary driver of major reforms to the accounting regulatory landscape.

This study contributes original theoretically grounded insights into the transnational political-economic rationale for IFRS adoption and consequences of the adoption on the accounting regulatory landscape.

This paper aims to interpret the role and professional issues of public sector performance auditing (PA) as a mechanism of neoliberal governmentality in the New Public Management (NPM) era by drawing on a Foucauldian conceptual lens to chart directions for future research.

The study uses the Foucauldian concepts of visibility and identity to interpret PA against the background of neoliberal imperatives of public sector management.

As the growing emphasis on PA in recent decades can be understood as driven by the concurrent development of neoliberal and NPM rationalities, the relatively underexploited concepts of visibility and identity allow further inquiry into important PA issues. This paper identifies avenues for future research under the following three themes: the issue of visibility in neoliberal governmentality and potential for auditors-general to expand the domain of influence of National Audit Offices through the PA role; the potential for PA as a unified distinct specialisation; and the neoliberal idea of professional identity as the individual expert and its interplay with the potential emergence of PA as a distinct function within the accounting profession.

This conceptual paper is anticipated to stimulate future PA research. Key areas in this respect include the position and authority afforded to PA and the possibility of transformation in auditors’ conception of their professional worldview.

This paper charts direction for future research by interpreting PA using Foucauldian concepts of visibility and identity that remain to be exploited in PA research.

The purpose of this study is to understand the efforts of key social actors in influencing the reform of Iranian public universities budgeting system, from incremental to performance-based budgeting (PBB), the tensions that arose as competing efforts of institutional change were undertaken, and ultimately the impact of these efforts on the extent to which the Iranian government transitioned to a system of PBB in public universities.

Data comprises of semi-structured interviews with managers and experts involved in the budget setting process and an analysis of budgetary policy documents, reports and archival material such as legislation. An institutional work lens is employed to interpret the findings.

While actors advocating the change were engaged in institutional work directed at disrupting the old budgetary rules by disassociating the rules moral foundations and creating new budgetary rules (through new legislation), universities undertook subtle resistance by engaging in extended evaluation of the new proposed PBB rules thereby maintaining the old budgetary rules. The reforms undertaken to introduce PBB in Iranian universities achieved minimal success whereby incremental budgeting continued to constitute by far a larger percentage of the budget allocation formula for university budgets. This finding illustrates change and continuity in university budgetary systems resulting from institutional work of actors competing to control the basis of resource allocation under the proposed PBB system by proposing contradicting models.

The findings highlight the importance of understanding the interplay of institutional work undertaken by competing social actors as they seek to advance their goals in shaping budgetary reforms in the public-sector. Such an understanding may inform policy makers who intend to introduce major reforms in public-sector budgeting approaches.

Unlike prior studies that largely focused on how organization-level budgeting practices responded to changes in public budgeting rules (i.e. at the site of implementation of the rules), this paper highlights how strategies of change and resistance are played out at the site of setting budgetary norms.

The effect of political connections of agency costs has attracted considerable research attention due to the increasing recognition of the fact that political connection influences corporate decisions and outcomes. This paper aims to explore the association between corporate political connections and agency cost and examine whether audit quality moderates this association.

A data set of Bangladeshi listed non-financial companies is used. A usable sample of 968 firm-year observations was drawn for the period from 2005 to 2013. Asset utilisation ratio, the interaction of Tobin’s Q and free cash flow and expense ratio are used as alternative proxies for agency costs; membership to Big 4 audit firms or local associates of Big 4 firms is used as a proxy for audit quality.

Results show that politically connected firms exhibit higher agency costs than their unconnected counterparts, and audit quality moderates the relationship between political connection and agency costs. The results of this paper suggest the importance of audit quality to mitigate agency problem in an emerging economic setting.

The findings of this paper could be of interest to regulators wishing to focus regulatory effort on significant issues influencing stock market efficiency. The findings could also inform auditors in directing audit effort through a more complete assessment of risk and determining reasonable levels of audit fees. Finally, results could inform financial statement users to direct investments to firms with lower agency costs.

To the knowledge of the authors, this study is one of the first to explore the relationship between political connection and agency costs, and the moderating effect of audit quality of this relationship.

This study aims to investigate the moderating role of audit quality on the association between business group affiliation of firms and earnings management in the South Asian emerging economy of Bangladesh.

A usable sample of 917 firm-year observations was drawn from companies listed on the Dhaka Stock Exchange from 2005 to 2013. Data were collected from the annual reports of sample companies. Earnings management was measured using the absolute value of discretionary accruals, and two proxies were used to measure audit quality: auditor size and industry specialisation.

Results showed that the level of discretionary accruals is positively associated with business group affiliation status, and higher audit quality reduces this association. This suggests that in environments without strong investor protection, complex ownership structures create opportunities for controlling shareholders to expropriate minority shareholders. The controlling shareholders could then mask this practice through earnings management. The findings also show that in environments lacking strong investor protection, audit quality can help improve earnings quality for group-affiliated firms.

The results suggest that financial statement users need to consider audit quality for a reasonable evaluation of the earnings quality of business groups. The study also informs regulators by illuminating audit quality as a key area of focus in any effort directed at enhancing stock market efficiency through improved earnings quality in environments where business group affiliation is prevalent.

This study documents empirical evidence on the moderating effect of audit quality on the positive association between business group affiliation and earnings management.

This paper aims to examine ethnographic evidence on the acculturation of non-native English-speaking teachers in accounting (ANNESTs) in an Australian university to understand the process, strategies and outcomes of the acculturation process.

Ethnographies of five ANNESTs representing diverse cultural backgrounds were studied. Data were collected from publicly available sources and informal discussions supplemented by semi-structured interviews.

The findings show that integration – that is, learning and participating in the Australian host culture while maintaining original cultural values – is the most popular acculturation strategy, followed by assimilation, whereby ANNESTs interact primarily with the host culture and retain loose links with their original culture. ANNESTs covered in this study fall into different stages of the acculturation process depending on their English language competency, the extent of contact with native Australians, cultural proximity and length of residence in Australia.

This paper concludes that challenges of acculturation confronting ANNESTs concern broader cultural issues than language proficiency alone. Institutional support directed at enhancing teaching effectiveness of ANNESTs should be devised from this perspective.

Given the cultural relevance of accounting systems and the influence of culture on the learning and teaching styles of ANNEST, the study illuminates that ANNEST’s acculturation strategies could facilitate or hinder the ANNEST’s speed of cultural understanding necessary to productively engage in the learning and teaching.

The purpose of this paper is to articulate the conceptual foundations of the role of internal auditing in corporate governance by drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality.

The paper is a literature-based analysis of the role of internal auditing from a Foucauldian perspective.

It is argued that Foucault’s notion of governmentality provides conceptual tools for researching internal auditing as a disciplinary mechanism in the corporate governance setting of contemporary organizations. The paper develops an initial conceptual formulation of internal auditing as: ex post assurance about the execution of economic activities within management’s preconceived frameworks and ex ante advisory services to enhance the rationality of economic activities and accompanying controls.

The paper is expected to initiate debate on the choice of theory and method in internal auditing research. The propositions and research agenda discussed can be used to address research questions of an interpretive nature that could enrich the current understanding of internal auditing.

This paper extends the Foucauldian analysis of accounting to incorporate internal auditing. It offers original propositions as a research agenda and discusses ontological and epistemic considerations associated with adopting the Foucauldian framework for internal auditing research.