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, has been a leading figure in this endeavor, 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.
Author(s): Christopher S. Chapman, David J. Cooper, Peter Miller
Year: 2009
Language: English
Pages: 464
Contents......Page 8
List of Figures......Page 10
List of Tables......Page 11
Preface and Acknowledgement......Page 12
List of Abbreviations......Page 15
1. Linking Accounting, Organizations, and Institutions......Page 18
2. Everyday Accounting Practices and Intentionality......Page 47
3. Institutional Perspectives on the Internationalization of Accounting......Page 65
4. Studying Accounting in Action: The Challenge of Engaging with Management Accounting Practice......Page 82
5. Management Accounting in a Digital and Global Economy: The Interface of Strategy, Technology, and Cost Information......Page 102
6. Organizationally Oriented Management Accounting Research in the United States: A Case Study of the Diffusion of a Radical Research Innovation......Page 129
7. On the Relationship between Accounting and Social Space......Page 154
8. What is the Object of Management? How Management Technologies Help to Create Manageable Objects......Page 174
9. Governance and Its Transnational Dynamics: Towards a Reordering of our World?......Page 192
10. Governing Audit Globally: IFAC, the New International Financial Architecture and the Auditing Profession......Page 222
11. The Study of Controller Agency......Page 250
12. Sketch of Derivations in Wall Street and Atlantic Africa......Page 276
13. Behavioural Studies of the Effects of Regulation on Earnings Management and Accounting Choice......Page 307
14. Accounts of Science......Page 332
15. Financial Accounting without a State......Page 341
16. Socio-Political Studies of Financial Reporting and Standard-Setting......Page 358
17. On the Eclipse of Professionalism in Accounting: An Essay......Page 384
18. All Offshore: The Sprat, the Mackerel, Accounting Firms, and the State in Globalization......Page 413
Bibliography of Anthony Hopwood’s Writings......Page 432
A......Page 438
B......Page 439
C......Page 441
D......Page 442
F......Page 443
G......Page 444
H......Page 446
J......Page 447
L......Page 448
M......Page 449
N......Page 450
P......Page 451
R......Page 453
S......Page 454
T......Page 456
W......Page 457
Z......Page 458
