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The purpose of this paper is to examine Johnson and Kaplan's claim that “external reporting influences managerial accounting information” in an emerging capital market, the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The paper relies on a survey instrument and institutional theory analysis in order to: first, explore accountants' perceptions of the extent to which financial accounting conventions‐based information is utilized, instead of managerial accounting information, in internal decision making; and second, articulate respondents' perception to the UAE's wider social and institutional context expressed in terms of accounting regulars, accountancy profession and partnership with multinational companies.

In line with Johnson and Kaplan's claim and contrary to the studies of Hopper et al., Joseph et al. and Scapens et al., the paper's findings show evidence of financial reporting domination on managerial accounting information in the UAE. Locating such results in a UAE companies social and institutional context, the paper reveals that the activities of regulators and accountancy professionals pay more attention to financial reporting, an issue which contributes towards reinforcing respondents' general perceptions that management accounting is subservient to the demands of financial reporting requirements.

Although the paper's findings trigger the importance of the UAE's institutional context in reinforcing accountants' perceptions, the interaction between financial accounting requirements and managerial accounting information is an area that needs further in‐depth case‐study‐based investigation in emerging market economies.

The paper's findings highlight the type of information that UAE's managers utilize when making decisions. These findings are in the interest of business investors and the accountancy profession that aims at increasing practitioners' professional knowledge.

This is one of few papers that combine survey results and institutional theory analysis to explore whether financial accounting dominates managerial accounting information and, at the same time, provides an understanding of the underlying reasons behind that domination in an emerging market economy such as the UAE.

In this article, we make the point that managerial domination as described by pragmatic sociology is an appropriate notion to make sense of complex forms of domination in contemporary organizations. Based on Lemieux’s work on ‘grammars’, we complement approaches of complex domination put forward by pragmatic sociologists such as Boltanski and Thévenot. We illustrate these ideas by means of an ethnographic study of the financial intermediation industry. Our analysis sketches out an alternative conceptualization of power in such environments, and by so doing, helps us delineate the features that characterize complex financial domination. We conclude by arguing that this type of domination is the result of specific contradictions inherent to the grammars of financial intermediation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the construction of social and environmental strategies and the related implementation of management control by a key organisation located in a pivotal Asian location in the global hospitality industry. In doing so, it sets out to elucidate the forms and processes of strategic social and environmental control as well their relationship to the traditional financial control system.

The study employs field-based case study of a single case operating in both regional and global context. Drawing upon documentary, survey and interview sources, the study employs structuration theory to inform its design and analysis.

The findings reveal the interaction of top-down global corporate framing and bottom-up local-level staff initiatives that combine to develop a locally focussed and differentiated social and environmental programme and expedite an associated management control and accountability system. The study also reveals the dominance of the traditional financial control system over the social and environmental management control system and the simultaneously enabling and constraining nature of that relationship.

Signification and legitimation structures can be employed in building social and environmental values and programmes which then lay the foundations for related discourse and action at multiple levels of the organisation. This also has the potential to facilitate modes of staff commitment expressed through bottom-up initiatives and control, subject to but also facilitated by the dominating influence of the organisation’s financial control system.

This study reveals the importance of national and regional governmental, cultural and social context as both potential enablers and beneficiaries of organisational, social and environmental strategy and control innovation and implementation.

The paper offers an intra-organisational perspective on social and environmental strategising and control processes and motivations that elucidates forms of action, control and accountability and the relationship between social/environmental control and financial control agendas. It further reveals the interaction between globally developed strategic and control frameworks and locally initiated bottom-up strategic initiatives and control.

The not-for-profit (NFP) context displays unique characteristics that include stakeholder diversity, multiple stakeholder agendas, and the pervasiveness of philanthropic values and related organisational mission. This study investigated accountants’ perceptions of NFPs’ characteristics that enable and inhibit their communication along with the strategies they adopt to overcome their communication challenges.

This qualitative interview-based study is informed by Giddens’ structuration theory. Thirty NFP accountants, from three Australian states, were interviewed. Thematic analysis was used to identify the relationships between NFP organisational characteristics and accountants’ communication strategies, and their interactions with organisational structures.

The study reveals important relationships between many stakeholders with limited financial acumen, organisational resource constraints, the currency of NFP information technologies, the dominance of operational mission over financial imperatives, and the supply of organisational accountants. Accountants’ structural adaptations emerge in their adopting multiple forms of communications reframing.

The NFP environment exhibits a mix of characteristics, some of which pose challenges for accountants’ communication while others facilitate their communication.

Increasingly, governments are relying on NFPs for the provision of services once provided by the state. Enhancing NFP accountants’ communication has the potential to improve outcomes for NFPs.

The study broadens prior research on accountants’ communication beyond formal written reporting to recognise and articulate their informal communication strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the perspectives of accounting lecturers regarding the contents of accounting textbooks. It focusses on the ideological character of introductory financial accounting (IFA) textbooks prescribed in the first year of accounting degrees in Indonesia.

The ideological analysis is informed by Thompson’s (1990) concept of ideology, which was used in a critical sense to refer to its role in serving unequal power relations. Semi-structured interviews of Indonesian accounting lecturers were utilised to collect data.

In the interviews, the lecturers revealed that the prescribed IFA textbooks focussed on prioritising shareholder interests. The mainstream view among the lecturers was that accounting textbooks realistically exhibited the natural form of accounting, whilst lecturers with an Islamic accounting and finance background notably viewed the character of IFA textbooks as serving an ideological role or permeating propaganda. The latter suggests that alternative worldviews, relevant and nuanced to the Indonesian context, are promoted in accounting education.

The findings presented in this paper should provide a basis for further research into the ideological character of accounting textbooks by analysing the internal structure of accounting textbooks and investigating the broader perspectives of other users and individuals involved in the production of accounting textbooks.

An awareness of the ideological representation of accounting textbooks can provide insights for universities, publishers and policy makers concerned with lecture structure, textbook design and regulation formulation in accounting education.

This is the first paper to empirically explore the ideological character of accounting textbooks prescribed in an Islamic developing country setting.

Institutional theory is becoming one of the dominant theoretical perspectives in organization theory and is increasingly being applied in accounting research to study the practice of accounting in organizations. However, most institutional theory research has adequately theorized neither the institutionalization process through which change takes place nor the socio‐political context of the institutional formations. We propose a social theory based framework for grounding and expanding institutional theory to more fully articulate institutionalization processes. Specifically, we incorporate institutional theory and structuration theory and draw on the work of Max Weber in developing a framework of the context and the processes associated with creating, adopting and discarding institutional practices. We propose that the expanded framework depicts the socio‐economic and political context better and more directly addresses the dynamics of enacting, embedding and changing organizational features and processes. Expanding the focus of the institutional theory based accounting research can facilitate a more comprehensive representation of accounting as the object of institutional practices as well as provide a better articulation of the role of accounting in the institutionalization process.

This paper aims to study the influence of political-economic reform and especially privatisation on the quality of financial reporting of the Egyptian companies.

The paper analyses data from official documents and 34 interviews with company executives, financial analysts, external auditors and Stock Exchange regulators to inform our understanding of the relationship between changes in the Egyptian environment and the quality of financial reporting.

The findings of the research suggest that the recent Egyptian political-economic reform, resulting in privatisation has significant influence on negative accounting practices and hence on lowering the quality of financial reporting through its effect on: departure from uniform accounting system and public accounting regulations; issuing new stock exchange regulative rules; reviving the role of Stock Exchange; and increasing competition within Stock Exchange regarding raising funds.

This paper contributes to the literature by identifying the effect of socio-cultural factors on motivating executives to 7 exercise negative accounting practices and hence producing low-quality financial reports (FRs) and by highlighting the fact that accounting practices cannot be generalised worldwide due to the absence of universal socio-cultural factors which shape these practices. This paper employs new institutional sociology theory and contributes to that theory by acknowledging the active interplay between institutional context and economic environment.

The principles of sustainable development argue that organizations should make decisions not only based on economic or financial factors but also based on the long-term social and environmental consequences. The Code on Corporate Governance is one of the drivers for corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting in Malaysia. Additionally, the way managers execute their responsibilities may be affected by their own tradition, beliefs, values, and culture. Thus, this chapter aims to examine the relationship between corporate governance characteristics and CSR disclosure and to investigate the influence of cultural values (Board’s Culture Domination) on the relationship between corporate governance and corporate social responsibility. A sample of 150 companies from the main board of Bursa Malaysia for year ended 2006 are chosen for the purpose of this study due to the year of the introduction of Bursa Malaysia CSR Framework. Based on available data, a CSR index is constructed. Hierarchical regression analysis is used to examine the relationship between the CSR disclosure index and the independent variables and also the moderating effect of Board’s Culture Domination. Results show that government ownership and audit committees have a positive and significant influence on CSR disclosure. Furthermore, the findings show that the Board’s Culture Domination moderate the relationship between audit committee, number of shareholders, foreign ownership, and CSR disclosure.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the accounting and governance of public private partnerships (PPPs) that are structured as joint venture partnerships. Drawing on Giddens’ structuration theory, the paper examines how human agents interact with these joint venture structures and analyses the effects on financial disclosures and public accountability for taxpayers’ investments.

The authors adopt a cross-case analysis to investigate two such PPP schemes, which form part of the UK’s programme of investment in primary healthcare, known as the Local Improvement Finance Trust (LIFT) policy. The authors employ a combination of interviews and analysis of financial statements and publicly available official documents.

The corporate structure of these LIFT schemes is very complicated so that the financial accounting is opaque. The implication is that the joint venture mechanism cannot be relied upon to deliver transparency of reporting. The paper argues that the LIFT structures are deliberately constructed by human agents to act as barriers to transparency about public expenditure.

The financial reporting undermines public accountability and transparency as both are necessarily restricted. Policy makers should pay attention to not only the private sector technologies but also the manner in which structures are used to reduce transparency and consequently undermine public accountability.

The paper provides detailed analysis from the perspective of structuration theory to show how human agents use structures to impact on financial reporting and public accountability.

The purpose of this study is to examine the association between external audit fees, and board and audit committee characteristics of 736 Malaysian listed firms. It is hypothesised that good corporate governance practices reduce auditors' risk assessments, resulting in lower audit fees. Drawing on the existence of a clearly identifiable ethnic domination of board membership and ownership of Malaysian listed firms, the study also posits that Bumiputera‐controlled firms pay higher audit fees because of their weaker governance practices.

This study employs a cross‐sectional analysis of 736 firms listed on the Bursa Malaysia for the financial year ending in 2003. Multiple regression analysis is used to estimate the relationships proposed in the hypotheses.

Overall, the results of this study reveal that external audit fees are positively and significantly related to board independence, audit committee expertise, and the frequency of audit committee meetings. The study also finds a strong negative association between external audit fees and Bumiputera‐owned firms. An additional analysis into the internal governance structures of firms in the sample show that Bumiputera firms practice more favourable corporate governance practices compared to their non‐Bumiputera counterparts.

This study is a unique contribution in that it provides data on corporate governance practices in Malaysia for a large sample in the period after the corporate governance reforms taken by Malaysian capital market regulators and participants. Previous studies have shown that Bumiputera‐controlled firms pay higher audit fees than non‐Bumiputera‐controlled firms. These studies have not tested theoretical explanations for this fee differential. A theoretical explanation provided in the current study is that Bumiputera‐controlled firms pay higher audit fees than non‐Bumiputera‐controlled firms partially because of differences in corporate governance practices. The study finds conflicting results with previous research suggesting that corporate governance practices have changed in Malaysia since the amendments of Bursa Malaysia Listing Requirements, 2001.