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This paper aims to provide empirical evidence on formal stakeholder participation (or “lobbying”) in the early phase of the International Sustainability Standards Board’s (ISSB’s) standard-setting.

Drawing on a rational-choice framework, this paper conducts a content analysis of comment letters (CLs) submitted to the ISSB in response to its first two exposure drafts (published in 2022) to investigate stakeholder participation across different groups and jurisdictional origins. The analyses examine participation in terms of frequency (measured using the number of participating stakeholders) and intensity (measured using the length of CLs).

Preparers and users of sustainability reports emerge as the largest participating stakeholder groups, while the accounting/sustainability profession participates with high average intensity. Surprisingly, preparers do not outweigh users in terms of participation frequency and intensity; and large preparers outweigh smaller ones in terms of participation intensity but not participation frequency. Internationally, stakeholders from countries with a private financial accounting standard-setting system participate more frequently and intensively than others. In addition, country-level economic wealth and sustainability performance are positively associated with more participating stakeholders.

This study is of interest for organizations and stakeholders involved in or affected by standard-setting in the field of sustainability reporting. The finding of limited participation by investors and from developing countries suggests the ISSB take actions to enhance the voice of those stakeholders.

The imbalances in stakeholder participation that were found pose potential threats to an important aspect of the input legitimacy of the ISSB’s standard-setting process.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to explore stakeholder participation by means of CLs with the ISSB in terms of frequency and intensity.

This paper aims to analyse the character and strength of the claims made in an emerging literature offering a sociology of financial reporting principles.

The analysis evaluates exemplary works in the literature against the characteristics of the paranoid style first identified by Richard Hofstadter: overheated claims of a far-reaching, malign and collusive machinery of influence; a reductive, rationalistic and dualistic reading of events; weak empirics; and weak theorisation.

A significant stream within the literature is coming to be constructed in the paranoid style. Paranoid stylistics, used as a diagnostic tool, alerts us here to distorted judgement.

Alternative ways of avoiding the dangers of paranoid-style readings are suggested, ranging from resisting the temptations towards such readings to a radical re-working of the epistemics of “socio-accounting”.

The danger of allowing the conclusions advanced in the literature to go unchallenged is that they may influence society’s attitude to accounting, public policy-making and scholars’ willingness to contribute to the crafting of reporting principles and standards.

Although paranoid style analysis has been widely used to examine narratives in other academic fields, to the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to apply it to scholarly accounting.

The current study investigates the impact of directors' attributes on the extent of compliance with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) fair value disclosure requirements. The attributes investigated include directors' human capital (accounting qualification) and social capital (political association), directors' share ownership and the power distance between the chief executive officer (CEO) and the rest of the board members.

The study uses disclosure analysis to measure the extent of compliance with the fair value disclosure requirements of IFRS. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression is used to test the relationship between the disclosure score and directors' attributes. Data were collected from the annual reports and websites of the sample companies.

Contrary to conventional belief, this study's findings suggest that directors' social capital and the power distance between the CEO and the rest of the board act as more powerful factors than directors' human capital in explaining corporate mandatory disclosure. Specifically, the results indicate that powerful actors form a dominant coalition and co-opt influential constituents from the institutional domain to neutralize the effect of legal coercion and the accounting expertise of board members and Big Four audit firms on the extent of compliance with institutional (fair value) rules.

This study utilizes Oliver's (1991) framework of strategic response to institutional processes in the Bangladeshi context. Although the study provides new insights into corporate disclosure practices, findings are not generalizable due to different institutional settings in different countries. Therefore, future studies could replicate the approach in different institutional settings.

The findings of this study will be of interest to the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) as it focuses on a developing country that has adopted IFRS 13 and other fair value-related standards relatively recently.

The disclosure analysis contained in this study represents the first comprehensive analysis of the extent of compliance with the fair value disclosure requirements of IFRS. Furthermore, this study considers the impact of directors' social capital and finds that it is a more powerful determinant of the extent of compliance with IFRS as compared to human capital.

The current study aims to analyze the role of International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) in sustainability issues and its impact on the attitude of practitioners (auditors) in industrial companies. The current study relies on the analytical method, one of the tools of the inductive approach, by examining the literature of researchers, international and local organizations, publications, series, alerts, and topics dealt with by the IFAC, as well as reviewing studies, theoretical and applied research, periodicals, books, and statistics. And specialized publications for this subject, which is related to other sciences – such as – environmental science, economic, and political sciences. The study reached many results, the most important of which are: (1) The first half of the current decade has seen high interest from the IFAC, has led to the issuance of International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (IAASB) international standard on assurance engagements 3410, (GHG) Statements. (2) Sustainability has become important to a growing number of enterprises, and may have a significant influence, in certain cases, the financial statements, also became the sustainability of the topics under increasing attention from users of financial statements. Thus, the financial statements will need a practitioner to take into consideration sustainability issues and a private greenhouse gas when auditing the financial statements. This study is distinguished by analyzing the role of the IFAC and the IAASB for the period from 1998 to 2023 regarding sustainability issues.

This paper offers a way of revivifying classical accounting research in the form of a pragmatist neoclassical programme with a sound epistemological underpinning.

The paper draws on a pragmatist perspective on financial accounting and accounting research springing from John Dewey's theory of inquiry.

Although a pragmatist underpinning does not entail specific methodological prescriptions, it can provide fruitful insights in research design. The paper discusses the structure and content of a research programme drawing on a pragmatist underpinning and sets out proposals for a practical research agenda. Although the agenda is shaped around the topic of identifiable intangibles, much of the paper has substantially wider relevance.

The approach justifies a revival in scholarly research employing classical methods and directed at improving accounting methods and standards.

The approach would promote closer engagement between scholarly accounting and practitioners such as standard-setters, making some contribution to closing the widely acknowledged gap between research and practice.

The paper offers a neoclassical programme of research drawing considerably more extensively on pragmatist philosophy than did theorisation in the classical period.

This paper aims to examine sites of dissonance or consensus between global investor responses to the draft standards, International Financial Reporting Standards S1 (IFRS) (General Requirements for Disclosure of Sustainability-related Financial Information) and IFRS S2 (Climate-related Disclosures), issued by the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB).

A thematic content analysis was used to capture investor views expressed in their comment letters submitted in the consultation period (March to July 2022) in comparison to the ex ante position (issue of draft standards, March 2022) and ex post summary feedback (ISSB staff papers, September 2022) of the ISSB.

There was investor consensus in support of the ISSB and the development of the draft standards. However, there were sites of dissonance between investors and the ISSB, notably regarding the basis and focus of reporting (double or single/financial materiality and enterprise value); definitional clarity; emissions reporting; and assurance. Incrementally, the research further highlights that investors display heterogeneity of opinion.

The ISSB standards will provide a framework for future sustainability reporting. This research highlights the significance of such reporting to investors through their responses to the draft standards. The findings reveal sites of dissonance in the development and alignment of draft standards to user needs. The views of investors, as primary users, should help inform the development of sustainability-related standards by a global standard-setting body apposite to current policy and future reporting requirements, and their usefulness to users in practice.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper makes an original contribution to the comment letter literature, hitherto focused on financial reporting with a relative lack of investor engagement. Using thematic analysis, sites of dissonance are examined between the views of investors and the ISSB on their development of sustainability reporting standards.

This study investigated the visibility of carbon emissions allowances accounting in the financial reports of 32 clean development mechanism (CDM) projects in the UAE to uncover the obstacles to setting consistent standards for carbon emission accounting. As carbon emissions are monetized as credits, consistent accounting standards can aid decision-makers in the development of carbon emission mitigation strategies.

This study used a grounded theoretical framework for exploring the terms used in the policy documents of international accounting bodies regarding accounting standards and guidelines for carbon emission credits. Raw qualitative data were gathered, and an inductive approach was used by analyzing documents from various sources using the qualitative data text analysis software QDA Miner 6.

The findings showed that the financial statement reports of the corporations did not include disclosure of the carbon credit account. This omission was due to the lack of global standardization of carbon credit accounts and emission allowance recognition. This may hinder the production of a comprehensive report containing accurate and valuable financial information relevant to all stakeholders.

The study is among the first to use a grounded theoretical framework to investigate whether corporations are applying common standards and guidelines for carbon emissions accounting.

This paper aims to examine the perceptions of owners and accountants of small- and medium-sized entities (SMEs) on the users and their financial information needs of SME financial reporting.

Postal questionnaire surveys with owners and accountants of SMEs were used to identify users and their financial information needs. In total, 1,498 questionnaires were sent to SME owners and accountants. A total of 358 questionnaires were returned, generating 323 useable questionnaires. The management branch of stakeholder theory is used for the study which asserts that company management is expected to meet the expectations of those stakeholders who are more powerful than others.

The users of Sri Lanka SME financial information were limited to owners, banks and Department of Inland Revenue. Users and financial information needs of owners varied in relation to the size of the SME. Financial information are useful for making capital investment and planning decisions for owners regardless of the size of the SME. By sharing information with outside parties, disclosures can diminish information asymmetries between the firms and its stakeholders. The top three reasons for which owners use SME financial information are for planning purposes, estimating income tax liabilities, and taking marketing and pricing decisions.

Since the study focuses only on the views of owner-managers and accountants of SMEs, the holistic understanding of uses of SME financial information by other user groups cannot be achieved.

The results of this study provide international and local standard setters with an indication of future direction for SME financial reporting.

This paper extends existing knowledge on users and their financial information needs of SMEs in developing countries. Consequently, the findings of this paper make a valuable contribution to the work of practitioners such as local and international standards-setters and regulators who may be considering developing/revising financial reporting framework for SMEs either worldwide or in developing countries.

Although SME financial reporting has attracted enormous attention in the recent accounting literature, academic research into SME financial reporting is scant. This paper extends existing knowledge on users and their financial information needs of SMEs in developing countries. The general purpose financial reporting model and the accounting standard IFRS for SMEs in particular would not be applicable to Sri Lankan SMEs unless it modifies to reflect the financial information needs of users of Sri Lankan SME financial information.

This paper aims to assess the factors that may explain the International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) convergence, considering Hofstede’s cultural dimensions as the theoretical reference for the cultural approach proposed. Additional factors include countries’ contextual and macroeconomic characteristics.

Logistic and probit regression models were used to identify the factors that may explain the IPSAS (fully or adapted) use by countries, including 166 countries in this assessment (59 for those whose cultural dimensions are available).

The findings consistently indicate collectivism and indebtedness levels as explanatory factors, providing insights into cultural dimensions along with macroeconomic characteristics as a relevant factor of countries’ convergence to IPSAS.

There are different levels of IPSAS convergence by countries that were not considered. This aspect may hide different countries’ characteristics that may explain those options, which could not be distinguished in this paper.

As a result of this paper, the International Public Sector Accounting Standards Board may gain insights that can be applied within the IPSAS due process to overcome the main challenges when collaborating with national authorities to achieve a high level of convergence. This analysis may include how to accommodate countries’ cultural differences as well as their contextual and macroeconomic characteristics.

There is a trend of moving toward accrual-based accounting standards by countries. Because the public sector embraces a new culture following the IPSAS path, it is relevant to assess if there are cultural factors, besides contextual and macroeconomic characteristics, that may explain the countries’ convergence to those standards.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first cross-country analysis on the likely influence of cultural dimensions on IPSAS convergence as far as the authors’ knowledge.

Drawing on Suchman’s conception of cognitive legitimacy and Boswell’s account of the political functions of expert knowledge, this paper aims to study the due process followed by the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) prior to the publication of the first version of the International Integrated Reporting Framework (IIRF). Specifically, the author analyses the lobbying strategies used in the comment letters sent by a subset of lobbyists, “the experts”, represented by accounting bodies and firms, regulators and academics.

From both a form- and meaning-oriented analysis, this paper focuses on how the experts resorted to the functions of knowledge when they took part in the IIRF’s public consultation. The author first carries out a quantitative content analysis of the responses to the 2013 Consultation Draft submitted by those constituents considered as accounting expert lobbyists. Then, the author analyse how these actors framed their comments under expert knowledge to legitimise the IIRC, the IIRF and the accounting profession itself.

The findings suggest that the expert groups welcomed the opportunity, not simply to legitimise the IIRC through their democratic support, but to provide a technocratic settlement that ensures the due process is based on the mobilisation of expert knowledge as a legitimate source. By drawing on the cognitive legitimacy of expert lobbyists, the IIRC drew on the political functions of expert knowledge to reduce uncertainty and gain stability.

Analysis of the lobbying strategies used by the accounting experts whose position could make a difference and receive more attention from the IIRC makes this contribution of particular interest, especially since the first version of the IIRF sought to guide disclosure and sustainable business practices around the world.

Experts as political actors play a legitimising role since they are capable of producing relevant knowledge that, due to its nature and scope, certainly affects policymaking and sustainable development.

This research provides a sociopolitical perspective to comprehend how some lobbying strategies, in this case, of expert actors, contribute to legitimising a standard-setter body and its endeavours in the context of voluntary standards.