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Previous literature on earnings management (EM) indicates that managers are motivated to adjust reported income to serve their own self-interests, and to try and influence capital markets. However, previous research has failed to provide an appropriate theoretical underpinning for EM and has ignored the effect of cultural and environmental factors on shaping managers’ motivations. Therefore the purpose of this paper is to draw on interpretive methodology and new institutional sociology (NIS) theory to identify the external factors that motivate managers of Egyptian companies to use EM to modify financial statements.

The research adopted an interpretative methodology and interview methods. Interviewees were conducted with 34 participants, who were divided into four different categories; executives, financial analysts, auditors and stock exchanges’ authorities.

This paper provides empirical evidence on the range of external factors that motivate Egyptian corporate executives to adjust the earnings number in financial statements. These external factors include the expectations of investors, lenders and employees, the impact of stock exchange listing rules, beating an earnings target, and the privatisation of key state-owned companies.

The authors recognise that the paper has a number of limitations. The research is concerned solely with EM in Egypt and, therefore, it would not be safe to generalise the results to other contexts, even in the Middle East. Further research on the behaviour of managers towards EM in other countries would be useful to test validity of the results reported in this paper.

The principal contribution of this paper is to build on the previous EM literature to include external factors within the Egyptian context which motivate Egyptian managers to manage the earnings of companies in an upward direction. It adds additional EM motives to available literature including: employees, stock exchange’s rules, privatisation and meeting industrial norms. Also, the paper provides evidence of the effect of concentrated share ownership on managers’ likelihood to engage in EM behaviour. The paper also extends NIS theory to recognise the importance of the interplay between institutional and economic environment by including economic reform, and non-financial providers as factors that can explain the EM behaviour.

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.

This paper reports the findings of an empirical investigation into the disclosure of corporate accounting information to trade union decision makers. These findings are evaluated against earlier normative and descriptive literature on corporate disclosure to trade unions and an attempt is made to derive some implications for the design of accounting reports for use in the context of collective bargaining. The research methodology used was a case study of decision making in one trade union, the Amalgamated Textile Workers' Union (ATWU) which represents most of the manual workers in the Lancashire cotton industry.

This paper explores the nature of audit automation as control within audit firms. The themes of the paper are control over the work process and audit staff, deskilling and resistance, and competition, which are analysed using the theoretical framework provided by Coombs et al., who applied Giddens’ structuration theory to research the impact of information technology in organizations. Building on a previous survey study we interviewed audit staff at all levels in two Big 5 audit firms. The results show that audit automation cannot be viewed simply as a technology for improving the quality and/or productivity of the audit process. It also has value as a symbol of the firm’s market competitiveness and hence helps to promote the firm both to clients and internally. In addition, the research shows that audit automation offers considerable opportunities for greater managerial surveillance and control, but at the same time it facilitates a less hierarchical and more informal organisational structure.

Little is known of the actualities or possibilities of corporate social reporting in Thailand. This study aims to move towards an appreciation of this neglected but important area. This survey focuses on the annual reports of Thai companies, and thereby contributes to a tradition of related prior empirical work upon corporate social accounting practices which has to date largely focused upon English‐speaking and Western contexts. Its concern is to gain insights into and to critically appraise various dimensions of these annual reports, so as to construct a critique of corporate social disclosure in Thailand. Pursuing a critical perspective sensitive to the context of Thailand, it is concluded that the various aspects of the Thai accounting disclosure that are analysed are disabling, and more generally that the Thai practices explored fall short of their potential to function as enabling communication.

The paper aims to examine a detailed case study of enterprise resource planning (ERP) customization failure in an Egyptian state‐owned company (AML) by drawing on new institutional sociology (NIS) and its extensions. It explains how ERP customization failure is shaped by the interplay between institutionalised accounting practices, conflicting institutions, power relations and market forces.

The research methodology is based on using an intensive case study informed by NIS, especially the interplay between conflicting institutions, power relations and market forces. Data were collected from multiple sources, including interviews, observations, discussions and documentary analysis.

The findings revealed that the inability of the ERP system to meet the core accounting requirements of the control authorities (the central agency for accountability) was the explicit reason cited for the ERP failure. The externally imposed requirements of the uniform accounting system and planning budgets were used to resist both other institutional pressures (from the holding company for engineering industries) and market and competitive pressures.

There are some limitations associated with the use of the case study method, including the inability to generalize from the findings of a single case study, some selectivity in the individuals interviewed, and the subjective interpretation by the researchers of the empirical data.

The paper identifies that the interplay between institutional pressures, institutionalised accounting practices, intra‐organizational power relations, and market forces contributed to the failure to embed ERP in a major company. Understanding such relationships can help other organisations to become more aware of the factors affecting successful implementation of new ERP systems and provide a better basis for planning the introduction of new technologies.

This paper draws on recent research and thinking in sociology, especially the development and application of NIS. In addition, the paper is concerned with ERP implementation and use and management accounting in a transitional economy, Egypt, and hence contributes to debate about exporting Western accounting practices and other technologies to countries with different cultures and different stages of economic and political development.

This paper seeks to introduce, summarise, and reflect on the key themes and findings raised by the seven papers selected for this special issue devoted to management accounting in less developed countries (LDCs).

The conclusions are drawn from desk research generally and the articles contained in this collection.

This paper finds that accounting research in LDCs needs to address issues of poverty reduction, corruption, community involvement, history, culture, and politics, and examine a wider spectrum of organisations ranging from households to non‐governmental organisations.

Effective management accounting in LDCs may require broader, simpler, open and transparent, sometimes informal systems developed locally.

This paper presents a collection of mainly empirical papers on an important but neglected topic, namely how management accounting might aid economic development in poor countries.