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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.

The purpose of this paper is to show how management control researchers can improve their practical impact through research designs that recognise the many dimensions of organizational reality.

Managerial knowledge in the academy and managerial practice may become detached from one another as practitioners and academic discourses are influenced by different sources of texts and modes of legitimisation. Although this can be a problem in accounting research, management accounting researchers have developed the necessary elements for critical engagement with practice. Identifying a common ontological basis for researchers and practitioners, it is argued that pragmatic constructivism explains how managers construct their reality through integrating logic, facts, values and communication. It is also argued that management consultants have implicitly understood this view of reality in the way that they package their solutions. Academic researchers can replicate the pragmatic constructivist ontology whilst adopting more explicitly theoretical and critical approaches.

The paper proposes the academy can productively imitate some of the knowledge creation of the consultant yet still retain both theoretical rigour and academic values.

The paper presents a research design that can improve the impact of business school research whilst maintaining academic integrity.

Compares the philosophical backgrounds of the disciplines of economics and accounting in view of complexity theory. The relationship which has existed between the two is examined as well as the problems of such inter‐disciplinary studies. Decision making, target costing and the need for future collaboration are discussed in light of the theory.

This paper aims to discuss the alternative perspectives for studying management accounting and organizational change. It provides a comprehensive basis for the research of accounting and organizational change conducted in terms of theories used, influential factors, systems applied, dynamics and aspects of change.

The paper applies a “theoretical framework” for studying accounting and organizational change based on obtaining an institutional perspective. By achieving this theoretic construction in the integration of a number of different works, this can summarize the common elements, contrast the differences and work in a way that extends the methodology. It is determined exclusively on a hybrid approach through the adoption of alternative perspectives and complements recent recommendations for bridge building and methodological pluralism among the different debates and perspectives concerning accounting and organizational change research.

The findings emphasize that the nature of organizational change is not static, rather, it is dynamic and varying over time. Organizational changes are occurring in both extra- and intra-organizational factors that shaped changes in accounting systems in organizations. The study concludes that accounting and organizational change literature has divided theoretical strands into two main perspectives: rational perspectives and interpretive and critical perspectives. Rational perspectives represented by the conventional mainstream of research can be classified into two approaches, normative economic models and positive economic models, which are grounded in neoclassical economic theories. On the other hand, the interpretive and critical perspectives emerged as alternatives to rational perspectives to explain accounting and organizational change within its broader social and economic context.

The paper has significant implications for the ways in which change dynamics can emerge, diffuse and implement at multilevel of institutional analysis. It also explains the interaction between the accounting and organizational change, which identified that change is both shaped by, and shaping, wider socio-economic and political processes. This broad sensitivity to the nature of change has important implications for the ways of studying accounting and organizational change. Hence, it has important implications for the way in which successful change can be defined in accounting and organizational change literature.

The study contributes to both accounting and organizational change literature by providing a comprehensive review about the development of institutional theory as it examines how the organization is simultaneously subjected to a high level of efficiency and considerable institutional demands. Thereafter, the domain of accounting and organizational change research itself will be extended.

This systematic literature review analyses the determinants and consequences of executive compensation-related shareholder activism and say-on-pay (SOP) votes. The review covers 71 empirical articles published between January 1995 and September 2017. The studies are reviewed within an empirical research framework that separates the reasons for shareholder activism and SOP voting dissent as input factor on the one hand and the consequences of shareholder pressure as output factor on the other. This procedure identifies the five most important groups of factors in the literature: the level and structure of executive compensation, firm characteristics, corporate governance mechanisms, shareholder structure and stakeholders. Of these, executive compensation and firm characteristics are the most frequently examined. Further examination reveals that the key assumptions of neoclassical principal agent theory for both managers and shareholders are not always consistent with recent empirical evidence. First, behavioral aspects (such as the perception of fairness) influence compensation activism and SOP votes. Second, non-financial interests significantly moderate shareholder activism. Insofar, we recommend integrating behavioral and non-financial aspects into the existing research. The implications are analyzed, and new directions for further research are discussed by proposing 19 different research questions.

The evolution of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) was nurtured by economists and accountants loyal to the philosophical basis of what is often referred to as “Western” market economies, being classical and neoclassical contracting theories. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how a particular Asian cultural attribute (guānxì ) impacts on the efficacy of fair value measurement.

Using a literature review and research of studies of the adoption of IFRS in China, studies of both guānxì and fair value in Chinese accounting research, this study unbundles Williamson’s governance structure and contracting theory to examine how guānxì is positioned orthogonally to fair value (market-oriented valuation) principles for financial reporting. This is followed by a case study of the events surrounding the collapse of China Medical Technologies.

Guānxì is integral to Asian economies and economic transactions. Resulting conditions, characterised by relational contracting, may not meet the qualitative characteristics of neutrality and faithful representation in fair value measurement of assets and liabilities. The same may be true when insider or “trusted party transaction” values prevail for large ticket transactions among entities in any jurisdiction.

Future research on the impact of guānxì may be constrained by its often hidden, and yet dynamic, character; and the varieties of its manifestations.

This study highlights how difficult it may be to achieve both comparability and relevance in the asset and liability recognition and measurement rules in Asian (and possibly also other) economies adopting accounting principles that are developed in a Western context.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect a critical perspective drawing from phenomenology, especially informed by a reading of Heidegger, to enhance and extend appreciation of the need to question accounting’s meaning or delineation and how research might be undertaken into the accounting phenomenon and related areas.

To illustrate and clarify argumentation in terms of accounting mobilization and the domain of accounting research, the mainstream and strongly positivistic accounting perspective adopted in the USA is critically assessed. At the same time, the authors elaborate how much of interpretive research (including much of that labeled critical) is also lacking in terms of the perspective articulated here.

The paper stresses the case for questioning the taken-for-granted and conventional. It promotes reflexivity, cautious pragmatism, attentiveness to the value of the existing, responsibility to difference and otherness and openness to new possibilities as part of a deeper critical orientation.

The paper draws from phenomenology, especially in Heideggerian terms to open-up new conversational domain to debate accounting.

The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.

There was unfinished business to address in the version of the planner–doer model developed in Thaler and Shefrin (1981). The unfinished business involved identifying and modeling the crucial roles played by temptation and mental accounting in pensions and savings behavior. The present paper has two objectives.

The first objective is to describe the key lessons learned in transitioning from the model in Thaler and Shefrin (1981) to the model in Shefrin and Thaler (1988), a transition which addressed some of the unfinished business. The second objective is to describe as yet unfinished business associated with developing a multicommodity, intertemporal version of the planner–doer framework, incorporating the concepts of temptation and mental accounting, to replace the neoclassical theory of the consumer.

Doing so will provide a theoretical foundation for nudges related to household budgeting, spending, saving, borrowing and investing.

This paper presents the first behavioral theory of the consumer, focusing on the manner in which consumers actually make decisions about budgeting, spending. borrowing and saving. The approach in the paper can be viewed as a behavioral counterpart to the neoclassical theory of the consumer. In contrast to the neoclassical approach, which assumes that consumers set and follow utility maximizing budgets, the empirical evidence indicates that only a small minority of consumers describe themselves as setting and following budgets. The behavioral theory presented here focuses on the heuristic nature of consumers' actual budgeting processes and extends the approach described in Thaler and Shefrin's 1981 seminal paper on self-control. The core of the present paper is a working paper which Shefrin and Thaler began in 1980, and as such represents unfinished business from that time. The first part of this paper describes earlier unfinished business from the 1981 framework that the authors subsequently addressed as they developed the behavioral life cycle hypothesis during the 1980s.

Schumacher recognized that we separate the economic system from natural and social systems at our peril. Following Schumacher's alternative “economics,” my purpose is to understand economics differently by engaging alternative ways of perceiving and knowing. Can we conceive of an economics that embodies the requisite social and environmental values, and can the associated accountings hold the responsible actors justly accountable? I compare the premises and characteristics of Schumacher's Buddhist economics with the prevailing neoclassical formulations, illustrating the narrowness of the current perspective and highlighting the critical issues. I consider the Social and Environmental Accounting project and the extent to which it has been, and potentially will be, able to move accounting, business, and society toward a more holistic conceptualization of accounting and accountability. Assimilating the two economic perspectives in developing a more holistic and integrated accounting is offered as a path to consider on our journey toward an accounting “as if people mattered.”