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Purpose: This chapter discusses how pandemics affect the nature of financial reporting especially for financial and non-financial institutions that were deeply affected by the 2020 coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak.

Method: This chapter presents a reflective discussion of the accounting practices and financial reporting options for firms during a pandemic, ­focusing on the interface between financial reporting and pandemics.

Findings: Accounting practices or techniques such as fair value accounting, big-bath accounting, loss avoidance, and income smoothing t­echniques can help to dampen the effect of a pandemic on firm performance.

Practical Implications and Significance: Some implications about the merits and risks of accounting during pandemics are highlighted and discussed.

Originality: Although the coronavirus COVID-19 crisis is, to some extent, still unfolding, there is limited empirical evidence on the implication for accounting.

Accounting education can be considered as experience, as practice in learning to learn, and as part of education for business. Accounting techniques are important as parts of a data-processing apparatus, providing deeply significant data regarding enterprise prior experience. The objective of accounting is to provide insight into the results of management decisions. The aim of accounting education is to help students learn to learn to become professional accountants. The teacher should often mix theory with practice (the why and the how), and often indicate the contact of the course with non-accounting courses.

This study examines an issue that confronts most instructors in the first financial accounting course at the postsecondary level, that is, some students have had a high school accounting course, while others have not. Specifically, this study investigates the effect a high school accounting course has on student performance in their first postsecondary level financial accounting course (midterm examinations and course grades). The results suggest this relationship is significant and positive, yet must be interpreted carefully. For example, scholastic aptitude, time management skills, and other intrinsic values also play an important role in student achievement.

For nearly two decades, accounting educators have debated whether to continue with a preparer approach, or adopt a user perspective, or a blended model in the introductory financial accounting course. We examine the extent to which accounting programs have chosen to employ each approach, the factors that influenced their selection, as well as the relative importance of each factor. We also explore institutional and course characteristics associated with the choice of instructional method.

Our results indicate that one-third of programs employ the user perspective, and one-fifth the traditional preparer approach, while nearly half use a blend of the two. Programs using the preparer approach tend to focus on the accounting major (e.g., performance and career goals). In contrast, user approach institutions appear to emphasize performance issues and career paths of non-accounting majors.

This paper aims to offer a reflection on the alliance between accounting theory and social research in general, focussing on the conjunction of accounting theory and ethnography in particular.

The author builds on Stefan Hirschauer’s methodological reflections on ethnography and the “silence of the social” to briefly re-articulate some of the ideas the author had associated, in an earlier piece, with the investigation of tacit coordination in accounting.

Ethnography is an intrinsically theoretical practice and also a particular form of accounting. As such, it presents a paradigm case for how accounting theory builds on, and emerges from, social research in joint efforts of breaking the silence of the social. Ethnographic research, like the practice of accounting and social research more generally, is associated with a stewardship of silence and an “ethics of mattering” (Karen Barad), and accounting theory is an invitation to reflect on the underlying practices of (dis-)articulation.

The paper invites readers to engage with accounting practice as a topic of systematic theoretical interest in exploring how we put the world on the record, understand the choices we make in the process and the silences we let lie.

The paper presents the results of an empirical study in which bank loan officers evaluated a loan application which were accompanied by financial statements based on either accrual accounting or modified cash basis of accounting (MCBOA). The loan officers first decided whether to grant the loan and determined an interest rale. Second, they evaluated the financial statements information on the basis of three quality attributes: Overall reliability, freedom from clerical errors and freedom from the effects of fraud. The results verified a functional fixation hypothesis by showing that the loan officers examining the financial statements of the same company using either accrual information or MCBOA showed clear preference for the company when faced with accrual information. A conditioning factor is used to explain the results.

Accounting education is passing through a critical stage. In 1988 the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) voted overwhelmingly to require 150 semester hours of education, including a baccalaureate degree, for new members from the year 2000. AICPA together with the National Association of State Boards of Accounting (NASBA) is working to require the 150 hours education requirement to sit for the CPA examination. Twenty four states have passed various versions of this law; many more are in the process of passing it.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the new journal and articles in the first issue.

The paper attempts to introduce the journal by answering the two “W” questions – what is Islamic accounting and why Islamic accounting research is important. In doing so, it indirectly highlights the need for a specialist journal like Journal of Islamic Accounting and Business Research (JIABR) and the potential research areas.

Islamic accounting research is still at the infancy stage compared to Islamic banking and finance. One of the reasons is due to lack of exposure of research conducted in the area at international level, ending up with only a few issues getting attention. Similarly, the lack of a platform where researchers interested in the area could showcase the diverse range of research as well as network and get support on their research hindered the progress of research in this area. Hence, JIABR could be the leading journal in the area of Islamic accounting and business research if all papers related to it are channeled in this specialist journal. In this way, researchers in the areas of accounting and business would be more aware of the development and contemporary issues to take the research forward.

This paper is useful to new readers of the journal around the world who are interested but have limited knowledge in the area, and also those who wish to submit to the journal, in that it highlights some potential areas for research.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of the paper entitled “Towards a paradigmatic foundation for accounting practice” by Nørreklit, Nørreklit and Mitchell as a way to open a debate about whether a “paradigm of accounting practice” exists and, if so, the nature of the methodological approach that would be needed to discover its nature.

The paper employs a critical, reflective discursive analysis.

The main finding is that there is a confusion in the paper by Nørreklit et al. about the nature of a “paradigm of accounting practice”, which, if it exists, should be a “skeletal theory” (Laughlin), rather than a methodology. The conclusion of the commentary is that a “paradigm of accounting practice”, using this understanding, might exist, but that Nørreklit et al.'s argument for the use of “pragmatic constructivism”, as a methodology for its discovery, is open to question.

The implication of the argument of this commentary is that the search for “paradigm of accounting practice” is important and should be pursued but the choice of an appropriate methodology for this discovery still needs further consideration.

Nørreklit et al., and this commentary, re‐energise an important debate and concern about paradigms in accounting that was present in the literature in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The search for a “paradigm of accounting practice” and how best it can be discovered is an important consideration for the future development of accounting thought.