Advances in Public Interest Accounting – serie

This eighth volume in the series deals with a variety of topics in the field of advances in public interest accounting.

This research publication has two major aims. First, to provide a forum for researchers concerned with critically appraising and significantly transforming conventional accounting theory, practice, teaching and research. Second, to increase the social self-awareness of accounting practitioners, educators, and researchers, encouraging them to assume a greater responsibility for the profession's social role. With chapters on topics as wide as gender, ethnicity and demographic factors influencing promotions to managers for auditors, and auditors' compliance with employment eligibility verification, this collection features papers by leading academics from both sides of the Atlantic and beyond.

"Advances in Public Interest Accounting" is a research publication with two major aims. First, it aims to provide a forum for researchers concerned with critically appraising and significantly transforming conventional accounting theory, practice, teaching and research. Second, it aims to increase the social self-awareness of accounting practitioners, educators, and researchers, encouraging them to assume a greater responsibility for the profession's social role. We seek original manuscripts exploring all facets of this broad agenda. Illustrative of these aims, authors are concerned with: expanding accounting's focus beyond the behavior of individual corporate entities, encompassing the conflicts of interest within the accounting-regulatory process and effected groups; exploring alternatives to traditional economic and sociology models, beyond conventional efficiency and profitability measures of corporate performance; recognizing and examining the influences of gender and feminist theory, class and race, on accounting practice, education, and research. They are also concerned with: incorporating the significance of accounting as a communicative practice, as social dialogue, and as a social arbiter; recognizing and examining the effect of accounting practice on environmental issues and on the externalities imposed on local and global communities; examining accounting's participation in multinational expansion, consolidations, and changing economies undergoing transformations, such as Eastern and Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union, and the European Community; and, addressing the impact of new advances in information technologies.

Paradigms, intellectual insights, and buzzwords have always reflected and informed social practices and have provided impetus and rationalization for macro policies. "Corporate Governance" has become a recent manifestation, creating interplays of political, private, academic, cultural, and economic consequences. This issue of "Advances in Public Interest Accounting" offers provocations challenging the received views of Corporate Governance, illuminating the controversies and ethical outcomes of using it as a prescription for public action. Whether, how, and why Corporate Governance provides innovation, mystification, or creative participation for diverse populations with diverse interests is examined in this issue. With an eclectic group of academics representing a wide range of countries, perspectives, narratives, and themes, Volume 11 provides the space for creating new sensibilities for advocating for the public interest.

Returning to its roots in activism and economic justice, this issue exposes accounting practice as a contested terrain by examining its role as a social force encompassing issues of value, governance, ethics, politics, and class. Arguing that the view of the discipline as objective and fair is a myth, these papers illuminate the detrimental social consequences of failing to recognize accountings role in the social environment. Investigating accounting's use of independence as a protective shield in obscuring winners and losers regarding financial activity, the papers illustrate accountings contribution to the failures of free markets worldwide: systemic global poverty, questionable privatization of public enterprises and public goods, and greater divides between so-called first and third world nations. Revealing the integrated nature of regulation, accounting, and ethics, the papers in this volume question the logic of merely fine tuning current systems proposing instead visionary and innovative change by probing deeply into our beliefs, social practices, and consciousness.

Sustainable environments, global networks, ethical financial reporting, and emancipatory accounting are increasingly shaping social and accounting dialogue. This volume contributes to a visionary accounting practice in its expansive coverage of issues and geographical perspectives prompting changes in social beliefs and levers of power. Examining these concerns with surveys and contributions from Australasia, North America, Europe, and Africa, the authors expose significant influences of the World Bank, the nature of global social investment funds, and how social responsibility is defined, perceived, and managed. Corporate and government accountability, enhancing the integrity of audited financial statements, and reforming balances of nature and power, are among the dialogue in this volume. Revealing the interconnectedness of accounting practice, corporate social responsibility, technology, the natural environment, spirituality and behavior, the authors provide new visions and potential for enhancing social policies and economic justice.

Advances in Public Interest Accounting aims to provide a forum for researchers concerned with critically appraising and significantly transforming conventional accounting theory, practice, teaching and research. The series also aims to increase the social self-awareness of accounting practitioners, educators, and researchers, encouraging them to assume a greater responsibility for the profession’s social role. Topics addressed include, but are not limited to: Expanding accounting’s focus beyond the behaviour of individual corporate entities, encompassing the conflicts of interest within the accounting-regulatory process and effected groups; Exploring alternatives to traditional economics and sociology models, beyond conventional efficiency and profitability measures of corporate performance; Recognizing and examining the influences of gender and feminist theory, class and race, on accounting practice, education, and research Incorporating the significance of accounting as a communicative practice, as social dialogue, and as a social arbiter; Recognizing and examining the effect of accounting practice on environmental issues and on the externalities imposed on local and global communities; Examining accounting’s participation in multinational expansion, consolidations, and changing economies undergoing transformations, such as Eastern and Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union, and the European Community; Addressing the impact of new advances in information technologies.

Volume 5 in a series which aims to articulate allegiances underlying accounting practice and research; increase the social self-awareness of accountants; and, encourage them to form new alliances and assume responsibility for the profession's social role.

This sixth volume in the series deals with such topics as managing the organizational environment, the values of accounting and education, segregation in the professions and expectations of professional success in accounting.

This seventh volume in the series deals with a variety of topics in the field of advances in public interest accounting.

Accounting's contribution to reality construction is envisioned in this volume of critical research, examining accounting's role in contemporary issues: ethics, sustainability, financial instability, post SOX legislation, education, and performance appraisals to name a few. Do CEOs manage rather than reveal environmental liabilities in their never-ending quest for reporting earnings? Under the scrutiny of negative publicity, does the banking community revise images, mask impending crises, and distort regulatory processes? Will shifts in litigation risk influence financial reporting? How do demands and perceptions from powerful external stakeholders change education or organizational processes? How might accounting positively engage in social movements, grass-roots empowerment, and change? These are among the explorations in this volume through case studies, interviews, analysis and interdisciplinary perspectives. Exposing accounting's impact on major social struggles of our times, these works contribute to the debates by revealing that the discipline can be a vital technology in the tool box of governance, political, economic and social practice, holding a key for affirmation and empowerment.

Traditional economic and accounting theories focus on investor - owned enterprise which deal with the production of goods and services to maximise its economic value for shareholders. This book offers an alternative perspective. It focusses on non-profit organisations that produce goods and services with the intention of maximising social value for the broader community. Traditional accounting theories face limitations when dealing with these organisations as their bottom line is not based on the traditional model. Nonetheless, such entities have to consider economic and financial equilibrium as a requirement for long-term survival. Accordingly, this book presents research addressing three main subjects: the limitations of conventional accounting for nonprofit organisations, the meaning of accountability in relation to their broad scope remit; and the potential of social and environmental accounting for contributing to the accountability of social and non-profit organizations. After a description of different types of NPO organization, the authors analyse the performance measurement adopted by NPOs and propose the development of broader and multidirectional accountability models.

Giving voice to the marginalized, broadly defined, is the aim of this volume in its examination of social life increasingly marked by global inequality and the extension of market rationalities to all arenas. Revealing the outcome to populations, stakeholders, and the environment when policies resting on narrowly constrained logics are employed, these researchers lead the way in probing accountings participation in significant struggles of our times. In order to better appreciate the consequences of economic globalization, the works examine contemporary rhetoric, governance, politics, and strategies and the manner in which accounting technologies are integrated. These works maintain that transformation is inevitable and they search for possibilities of change that can be manifested in socially equitable practices and improved social justice by enhancing accountability.

Global forces and accountability once again converge in this volume, illustrating the significant and multifaceted nature of the role of accounting in societies. The accounting discipline in its numbers, its silences, its privileging of select classifications over others, it is continually constructing knowledge, cultivates meaning, and impacts public policy in the intersection of socio-political-economic realms. The research in this volume responds to calls for examining accounting as an interdisciplinary role in neoliberal governance by examining migration, race, gender, class and the creation of the 'other'. Each paper uniquely contributes toward significantly exploring accounting's role in disenfranchising populations while identifying participants actualized and potential role in emancipatory struggles. By recognizing marginalized groups embedded power rather than casting them as victims, the authors reject an inevitability of widening inequalities and forms of violence to world populations. Rather these critical accounting researchers seriously tackle the task of transformation, providing pathways for thinking differently and aspiring for change.

Continuing the search for greater reflectivity regarding accounting’s role in society, this volume identifies the many ways accounting contributes to knowledge creation and the consequences in socio-economic realms. Accounting practice has always been concerned with fraud, legitimacy and trust. One might speculate an essential premise behind the audit of publicly held corporations is potential management deception, and thus a raison d'être for accounting and accountability. In this volume researchers, exploring themes of deception: examine financial statement manipulation in the decade after Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), consider internal control impacts on earnings management, deliberate on the usefulness of audit opinions, and contemplate tax evasion practices and their antecedents. In contextualizing the public interest these researchers contemplate cultural distinctions, conflicts of interest, regulation, and the dynamic interfaces and divides between practitioners and academics. Envisioning the facilitation of overall enhancement of the broad community, recommendations for increasing the quality of communication between scholars and professionals is deliberated. Contributing as well to the undeniable concern for broad environmental degradation, the role of the discipline in maintaining the status quo is challenged. Rather, accounting's characterization of accountability should include attributes of socio-environmental destruction: complexity, uncertainty and diffused responsibility. These emergent accounts would inform the journey of constructing more representative accounts of technological degradation. Such imaginative emancipatory accounting would enhance decision- making, develop social well-being, and unfold new forms of knowledge and possibilities.

Researching accounting’s participation in financial regulation, banking practices, managerial incentives and environmental disclosures this volume presents scholarly work adopting interdisciplinary approaches in auditing and accountability realms. Although conceptually accounting enhances public spheres and contributes to constraining overarching power, researchers question whether in practice accounting supports responsible activities. Among the provocations offered, authors ask: what is material? How are decisions to foster environmental protection best motivated? What is a set of public policies and practices by which responsible actions can be defined and fraud minimized? Questioning accounting as rational in how policy is established the authors delve into accounting interactions and conflicts. Their perspectives and insights enrich our understanding of accounting policies, organizations and relationships dismissing separate worlds of social, economic and political factors. Their research illustrates how dichotomies of private versus public and legal versus moral obscure important connections.

How do public spaces generate accountability and advance social equity? Stimulating the conversation, the articles in this volume explore the creation of meaning, the increasing confrontation between regulators and the community they are purported to serve, and the prevalent conflicts in seeking a balancing of social and economic interests. How are communities served in hospitals and schools by accounting standards and administrators? Are shareholders protected from managers’ opportunistic behaviors? How is professional status supported or denied for women in Columbia and other regions of the globe? Accounting’s role in producing worldviews, creating visibilities and in impacting our quality of life stimulates our engagement in these significant issues, reinvigorating what it means to provide accountability. We follow the legacy of public interest and critical accounting research in this volume, uncovering the discipline’s relationship to power and symbolism and its impact on our security and well-being as a challenge to conventional accounting.

A decade on from Schumacher's 1997 work, there are renewed calls for a paradigm shift from the metaphysics of materialism that informs conventional thinking, to holistic theorisations of how we should engage with the other. Twenty-first century frameworks of accountability should emancipate society from the hegemony of neoclassical economics. This special issue posits Schumacher's Middle Way thinking in the context of growing concerns about global warming and climatic changes and, teases out its implications for holistic accountability by introducing readers to the science of climate change and its implications for managing natural resources, and integrating 'western' and 'eastern' tenets of holistic knowledge without dichotomising them into 'either or' frameworks.