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This paper aims to provide an overview of the development of approaches to measuring and reporting on intangibles since the mid‐1990s, and to identify intellectual capital self‐accounts as a possible means of continuing this process in a beneficial way.

Principally a literature review, the paper provides the opportunity to extend earlier, initial thoughts on the promise of intellectual capital self‐accounts.

Given the importance of primary intellectual capital (“people”) in the creation of intangibles (secondary intellectual capital), the paper draws attention to the limited role hitherto ascribed to people in reporting on intangibles in particular.

The value of the paper lies principally in the identification of possible content for self‐accounts in the context of brands and health and wellbeing as important intangibles.

This paper analyses what is seen as a crisis of authority in financial reporting. It considers the view that an element of authority may be restored to accounting through communicative reason. The paper argues that the justice‐oriented rationality of traditional, Habermasian, communicative ethics is incapable of providing a solid foundation for the re‐authorisation of financial reporting. The paper argues that a more adequate foundation might be found in an enlarged communicative ethics that allows space to the other of justice‐oriented reason. The inspiration for the enlargement is found in Ricoeur's analysis of narrative, his exploration of its role in the figuration of identity, and in his biblical hermeneutics which reveals the necessity of an active dialectic of love and justice.

The article's aim is to refine prospects for theorising in public sector accounting (PSA) research in order to capture the methodological benefits promised by its multi-disciplinarity.

The study primarily employs a bibliometric analysis of research outputs invoking New Public Management (NPM). Applying a content analysis to Hood (1991), as the most cited NPM source, bibliographic methods and citation/co-citation analysis for the period 1991 to 2018 are mobilised to identify the disciplinary evolution of the NPM knowledge base from a structural and longitudinal perspective.

The analysis exhibits disciplinary branching of NPM over time and its imprints on post-1990 PSA research. Given the discourse about origins of NPM-based accounting research, there are research domains behind the obvious that indicate disciplinary fragmentations. For instance, novelty of PSA research is found in public value accounting, continuity is evidenced by transcending contextual antecedents. Interestingly, these domains are loosely coupled. Exploring the role of disciplinary imprints designates prospects for post-NPM PSA research that acknowledges multi-disciplinarity and branching in order to deploy insularity as a building block for its inquiries.

Criteria for assessing the limitations and credibility of an explorative inquiry are used, especially on how the proposal to develop cumulative knowledge from post-1990 PSA research can be further developed.

A matrix suggesting a method of ordering disciplinary references enables positioning of research inquiries within PSA research.

By extending common taxonomies of PSA intellectual heritages, the study proposes the ‘inquiry-heritage’ matrix as a typology that displays patterns of theorisation for positioning an inquiry within PSA disciplinary groundings.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze common emplotments of interpretations of the financial crisis of 2007‐2010.

The paper presents a text analysis.

The paper finds that the same “strong plots” are commonly used to explain financial crises to the general public.

The paper provides useful information on interpretations of financial crises.

This study seeks to collaborate with the discussions on the usefulness of the narrative approach in accounting. In this context, this study aims to elaborate small collective stories, developed from interviews, to expose the population’s perception of the social and environmental impact (positive and negative externalities) resulting from iron ore mining in the city of Congonhas-Minas Gerais (MG).

This research, using counternarratives, aims to elaborate small collective stories, developed from 52 interviews, to expose the population’s perception of externalities resulting from the exploitation of iron ore in the city of Congonhas-MG, Brazil, to give more insight for social and environmental accounting reporting. A qualitative investigation is used with a narrative approach that focuses on a specific event in the participants’ lives.

The authors sought to create a sense of collective experiences of the interviewees through narratives representative of the residents’ perception of externalities in the form of small collective stories. However, it can be observed that the local population recognizes the impact of numerous externalities. Likewise, the use of narratives allows the reader to experience another reality – a reflection on the impact of business activities in a given context. Unlike conventional corporate social reporting, models based on qualitative information can be inclusive, produced by/for the community toward action that transforms the local reality.

This study intends to contribute to the debate on reporting models that are developed by and for external stakeholders. This approach has the potential to improve participants’ both awareness and engagement, supporting transformative social action. This study makes several contributions. It contributes to the literature with a narrative approach, which is not often used in the accounting literature; it brings insights from the Latin American context, which is especially valuable given how the Anglo-American accounting literature includes few papers addressing this context; it presents the view of marginalized communities that are too often overlooked (this narrative approach offers important insights into the lived experience of people at a very granular level).

This paper aims to clarify what ‘narrative analysis’ may entail when it is assumed that interview accounts can be treated as (collections of) narratives. What is considered a narrative and how these may be analyzed is open to debate. After suggesting an approach of how to deal with narrative analysis, the authors critically discuss how far it might offer insights into a particular accounting case.

After having explained what the authors’ view on narrative analysis is, and how this is linked with the extant literature, the authors examine the socialisation processes of two early career accountants that have been articulated in an interview context.

The approach to narrative analysis set out in this paper could help to clarify how and why certain interpretations from an interview are generated by a researcher. The authors emphasise the importance of discussing a researcher’s process of discovery when an interpretive approach to research is adopted.

The application of any method, and what a researcher thinks can be distilled from this, depends on the research outlook he/she has. As the authors adopt an interpretive approach to research in this paper, they acknowledge that the interpretations of narratives, and what they deem to be narratives, will be infused by their own perceptions.

The authors believe that the writing-up of qualitative research from an interpretive stance would benefit from an explicit acceptance of the equivocal nature of interpretation. The way in which they present and discuss the narrative analyses in this paper intends to bring this to the fore.

Whenever someone says he/she engages in narrative analysis, both the “narrative” and “analysis” part of “narrative analysis” need to be explicated. The authors believe that this only happens every so often. This paper puts forward an approach of how more clarity on this might be achieved by combining two frameworks in the extant literature, so that the transparency of the research is enhanced.

This paper aims to analyse the nature and extent of convergence within the literature of the narrative turn in narrative accounting research.

The paper offers an actor–network–theoretic perspective drawing on Latour’s theory of citation and Shwed and Bearman’s development of that theory to analyse patterns of convergence.

The paper finds that across the exemplars of narrative turn research examined, there is only a limited level of epistemic engagement so that exemplars achieve their status without undergoing trials of strength.

The paper argues that the resources of the relevant academic community are spread so thinly that each seam – each research question, methodology or method and research context – is mined by no more than a small handful of researchers unable to generate a meaningful volume of contestation. Steps are suggested to better focus research activity.

The use of Latour’s theory of citation to analyse patterns of convergence in accounting research is innovative. The paper proposes a substantial change in the community’s approach to narrative turn research on accounting narratives.

Readability formulas have been criticised as a method for scoring accounting narratives because of their focus on word‐ and sentence‐level features and not on whole‐text aspects, their lack of regard for the interests and motivation of the reader, and their inappropriateness for evaluating adult‐based and technical accounting narratives. The literature of linguistics offers theoretical and practical validation for application of a texture index which addresses these criticisms. The paper shows how the general model drawn from applied linguistics can be tailored to the specific situation of an accounting narrative – the Operating and Financial Review. Rules which provide for objectivity in replication are specified and illustrated for a sample narrative. Illustrative empirical analysis shows that there is no evidence of association with the Flesch readability score. This suggests that the texture index is potentially a powerful tool for analysis of accounting narratives and association testing.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether investor reactions to accounting narratives are uniform across cultures or if there are predictable systematic culture-based differences, particularly for investors from interdependent cultures, such as in Asia.

This research paper builds on the experiment conducted in Riley et al. (2014) by collecting data from investors from interdependent cultures and comparing their investment judgments to the “baseline” judgments of the investors from Riley et al. (2014).

In comparing independent and interdependent culture investors, a culture by construal interaction is observed. Whereas the independent culture investors in Riley et al. (2014) made less favorable investment judgments of a company with a concretely (vs abstractly) written negative narrative, this effect is attenuated for interdependent culture investors.

This study extends the literature on accounting narratives by providing evidence that investors’ culture and linguistic characteristics of accounting narratives “interact,” suggesting that future studies in this area should account for culture as a variable. As for limitations, the independent and interdependent participant data were predominantly collected from different universities, so the differences observed may be due to institutional, not cultural differences. However, the populations are matched on key demographic measures.

The results have practical implications for investor relations professionals and international standard-setting bodies.

This study is believed to be the first to examine how investors’ culture may affect their reactions to the features of accounting narratives.