Accounting, Organizations, and Institutions

Accounting has an ever-increasing significance in contemporary society. Indeed, some argue that its practices are fundamental to the development and functioning of modern capitalist societies. We can see accounting everywhere: in organizations where budgeting, investing, costing, and performance appraisal rely on accounting practices; in financial and other audits; in corporate scandals and financial reporting and regulation; in corporate governance, risk management, and accountability, and in the corresponding growth and influence of the accounting profession. Accounting, too, is an important part of the curriculum and research of business and management schools, the fastest growing sector in higher education. This growth is largely a phenomenon of the last 50 years or so. Prior to that, accounting was seen mainly as a mundane, technical, bookkeeping exercise (and some still share that naive view). The growth in accounting has demanded a corresponding engagement by scholars to examine and highlight the important behavioural, organizational, institutional, and social dimensions of accounting. Pioneering work by accounting researchers and social scientists more generally has persuasively demonstrated to a wider social science, professional, management, and policy audience how many aspects of life are indeed constituted, to an important extent, through the calculative practices of accounting. Anthony Hopwood, to whom this book is dedicated, was a leading figure in this endeavour, which has effectively defined accounting as a distinctive field of research in the social sciences. The book brings together the work of leading international accounting academics and social scientists, and demonstrates the scope, vitality, and insights of contemporary scholarship in and on accounting and auditing.Preface ; 1. Linking Accounting, Organizations and Institutions ; 2. Everyday Accounting Practices and Intentionality ; 3. Institutional Perspectives on the Internationalization of Accounting ; 4. Studying Accounting in Action: The Challenge of Engaging with Management Accounting Practice ; 5. Management Accounting in a Digital and Global Economy: The Interface of Strategy, Technology, and Cost Information ; 6. Organizationally Oriented Management Accounting Research in the U.S.: A Case Study of the Diffusion of a Research Innovation ; 7. On the Relationship between Accounting and Social Space ; 8. What is the Object of Management? How Management Technologies Help to Create Manageable Objects ; 9. Governance and its Transnational Dynamics: Towards a Re-ordering of our World? ; 10. Governing Audit Globally - IFAC, the New International Financial Architecture and the Auditing Profession ; 11. The Study of Controller Agency ; 12. Sketch of Derivations in Wall Street and Atlantic Africa ; 13. Behavioral Studies of the Effects of Regulation on Earnings Management and Accounting Choice ; 14. Accounts of Science ; 15. Financial Accounting Without a State ; 16. Socio-political Studies of Financial Reporting and Standard Setting ; 17. On the Eclipse of Professionalism in Accounting: An Essay ; 18. All Offshore: The Sprat, the Mackerel, Accounting Firms, and the State in Globalization