Search results

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.

Woman's use of violence has been mainly conceptualised through woman's experiences of victimization. However, more recent perspectives emphasise the female agency, responsibility and meaning of woman's violence. Listening to the voices of victims of women's abuse is a powerful way of learning about woman's use of violence and its impact on the victims. We conducted focus groups with 41 men from four countries who experienced female-perpetrated abuse. Four major types of abuse were identified: psychological abuse and coercive control followed by physical violence and sexual violence. Psychological abuse ranged from verbal assaults and gaslighting to provoking physical altercations and reporting false accusations. Patterns of control included deliberate isolation, threatening false accusations and financial domination. Men reported that women initiated physical violence for various reasons, including jealousy and rage. Some women used different objects that could seriously hurt, including knife, while others slapped, bit, punched or kicked. Several men reported female-perpetrated sexual abuse. Woman's use of violence in the intimate relationship should be treated seriously. A more gender-inclusive approach to partner abuse is required that can focus on a better prevention of abuse for all victims.

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.

This paper examines the historical evolvement of competing institutional logics (i.e. religion, profession, state, market and community) underpinning Islamic accounting standardisation projects and power relations between internal actors representing these logics.

The paper adopts a case-study approach and analyses two Islamic accounting standardisation projects implemented at the national and international levels. Documentary review and semi-structured interviews are used for data collection. Analysis is informed by the “Institutional Logics Perspective” and Bourdieu's notion of “power as capital in a field”.

Research findings illustrate how some local actors pre-dispose themselves in promoting strict compliance to IFRS, while others endeavour to ensure compliance to “Islamic Sharia requirements” in financial reporting. In this power dynamic, there is an ongoing “constructive resistance” actively exerted by the latter group against the former, preserving the existence of religion-based reporting demands in Islamic accounting standardisation approaches. The paper also highlights chronological “dynamic” accounts that explain the evolvement of institutional logics prevailing in these projects over different historical stages at both national and international levels.

This paper's findings contrast and challenge the existing assumption that the “epistemic community” promoting IFRS agenda always faces “passive responses” from local actors. Moreover, the paper's offering of a dynamic view to institutional logic mapping extends the previously used “static analyses” of logics prevailing in Islamic accounting standardisation projects.

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.

This study offers a Bourdieu-oriented analysis of the tax compliance practice for indigenous entrepreneurs in New Zealand. It examines the intersection of accounting and tax for Māori entrepreneurs and their relational interactions with the Inland Revenue Department (IRD)/state/Crown and accountants by considering the contextual factors of history, culture and society of Māori.

Qualitative research was adopted using face-to-face in-depth interviews with 34 participants and reviewing government documents. The authors analyse the tax compliance practice by drawing on Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital and habitus to conceptualise the tax field as a site of struggle for power and control by the IRD, accountants and indigenous entrepreneurs.

This study demonstrates how the tax field is structured as a game between tax reporting, taxpaying and monitoring functions. The position within the field is determined by the actor's access to the relevant capitals and habitus. It identifies how accounting, given its centrality to tax compliance, facilitates the power relations between the IRD, accountants and Māori entrepreneurs. The Eurocentric accounting-based tax reporting and the contextual factors illuminate how indigenous entrepreneurs are being dominated in the tax field. They experienced cultural dissonance with conflicting responsibilities when traversing the collectivistic indigenous and tax fields. Their collectivism involves sharing resources as they cherish whanaungatanga (relationship, kinship) and manaakitanga (kindness, generosity), which are at odds and are not valued in the tax field.

It is an empirical illustration of the connection between accounting, tax and power for indigenous taxpayers and their relationship with the IRD/Crown and accountants. It has practical implications for developing and enhancing tax compliance in jurisdictions with indigenous taxpayers. Such an understanding is helpful for policymakers, government, business agencies and the accounting professions when assisting, empowering and educating indigenous groups regarding tax compliance.

This paper responds to the call for accounting research with modern-day indigenous peoples rather than historical ones. The paper fills a gap in the accounting and tax literature by examining the tax compliance practice of indigenous small and medium enterprise (SME) entrepreneurs using Bourdieu's framework. It identifies how the role of accounting creates, maintains and reinforces power structures in the tax field. Tax/accounting reporting based on Eurocentric rules disempowers and alienates indigenous entrepreneurs. They misrecognise their actions in reproducing the existing power structures in the tax field due to deeply held historical and cultural factors about the fear of the Crown/state and their practice of rangitaratanga (esteeming authorities).

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.