{"title":"The effect of systems of management controls on honesty in managerial reporting","authors":"Aishwarrya Deore , Susanna Gallani , Ranjani Krishnan","doi":"10.1016/j.aos.2022.101401","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.aos.2022.101401","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>While budgetary controls with capital rationing are theoretically optimal and widespread in practice, empirical research documents their association with higher employee dishonesty compared to budgetary controls without rationing. In this study, we examine whether combining budgetary controls with mission statements in a system of management controls decreases employee dishonesty. We predict that the system's effect on dishonesty depends on the interaction of the social norms conveyed by each control instrument within the system. We study two types of budgetary controls that differ in whether they include budget rationing and two types of mission statements that differ in whether they emphasize integrity or financial values. We provide experimental evidence that mission statements reduce employee dishonesty more if combined with budget rationing controls than non-rationing budgetary controls. This effect is enhanced when the mission statement conveys a norm of integrity, as opposed to a norm of financial performance. Our results suggest that mission statements can mitigate the downsides of budget rationing, but this effect is less pronounced when the norms conveyed by each instrument are redundant.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48379,"journal":{"name":"Accounting Organizations and Society","volume":"105 ","pages":"Article 101401"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42860994","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The assetization of baseball players: Instrumentalizing promise with signing bonuses and human capital contracts","authors":"Pier-Luc Nappert, Maude Plante","doi":"10.1016/j.aos.2022.101402","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.aos.2022.101402","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The idea that humans can be assets because their skills and work are resources that create value has been at the core of a long-standing concern among accounting scholars. This paper explores how minor league baseball players experience being considered assets and how they decide to partake in their assetization. Drawing on a range of data sources–59 interviews, archival material, and work experience–this study offers a voice to the assetized subject, and highlights that being an asset is a desired status. Assetization is a value-enhancing experience that depends on the adherence to a promise. Our results also show that financial instruments such as human capital contracts can be promissory mechanisms allowing assetized subjects to enhance their human capital value and assume the dual role of investee-investor, which further conditions an enactment of the entrepreneur of the self.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48379,"journal":{"name":"Accounting Organizations and Society","volume":"105 ","pages":"Article 101402"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49065932","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jan C. Hennig , Carolin Ahrens , Jana Oehmichen , Michael Wolff
{"title":"Employee stock ownership and firm exit decisions: A cross-country analysis of rank-and-file employees","authors":"Jan C. Hennig , Carolin Ahrens , Jana Oehmichen , Michael Wolff","doi":"10.1016/j.aos.2022.101390","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.aos.2022.101390","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>While multinational firms invest large amounts of money in employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) to reduce turnover, there is little evidence regarding ESOPs' effectiveness in retaining rank-and-file employees and none on a global scale. Building on psychological ownership (PO) arguments, we predict that a rank-and-file employee's ESOP participation will be negatively associated with a firm exit decision and that this effect will be stronger in contextual settings that are more conducive to turnover. For our analysis, we used internal data from a large multinational firm covering 190,453 rank-and-file employees and approximately 650,000 employee years. We find that ESOP participation is associated with a lower likelihood of individual firm exit decisions. We also find this effect to be more pronounced in countries with favorable labor market conditions and lower uncertainty avoidance (UA). Additional tests support our argument that PO arising from ESOP participation is particularly important for rank-and-file employees, who often only invest small amounts. Overall, our study provides cross-country evidence regarding the retention effect of ESOP participation for rank-and-file employees.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48379,"journal":{"name":"Accounting Organizations and Society","volume":"104 ","pages":"Article 101390"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42865993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Brian M. Goodson , Jonathan H. Grenier , Eldar Maksymov
{"title":"When law students think like audit litigation attorneys: Implications for experimental research","authors":"Brian M. Goodson , Jonathan H. Grenier , Eldar Maksymov","doi":"10.1016/j.aos.2022.101399","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.aos.2022.101399","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Prior research suggests that drivers of audit litigation periodically change, requiring continuing research to understand them. Yet, our understanding of the factors influencing the judgments of audit litigation attorneys—who resolve most audit disputes via settlement—remains limited, primarily due to the limited availability of these attorneys for experimental research. We seek to remedy this impediment by examining judgments of audit litigation attorneys, law professors, and law students to assess whether law students—an accessible pool of participants with technical legal knowledge—can proxy for audit litigation attorneys in some settings. Our results suggest that law students can reasonably proxy for audit litigation attorneys in decision settings more reliant on the application of <em>technical</em> legal knowledge primarily acquired in law school, relative to the application of <em>strategic</em> legal knowledge primarily acquired through legal experience. We validate a theoretical model and provide guidance on when law students should and should not be used as proxies. Our findings open fruitful avenues for future research of important audit litigation topics that have not been sufficiently examined, likely due to researchers’ lack of access to audit litigation attorneys.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48379,"journal":{"name":"Accounting Organizations and Society","volume":"104 ","pages":"Article 101399"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43675718","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The cultural fields of accounting practices: Institutionalization and accounting changes beyond the organization","authors":"Keith Robson , Mahmoud Ezzamel","doi":"10.1016/j.aos.2022.101379","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.aos.2022.101379","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Research interest in the institutionalization of accounting has risen appreciably in the past twenty years. Much of this work has been occupied with regulations and professional norms, often in individual firm settings. However, social spaces around, i.e., institutional fields, and beyond corporations, regulatory agencies and professional organizations are important in the process of accounting innovation and transformation. This paper draws attention to these social spaces by developing the concept of <em>the cultural fields of accounting practices</em><span> as an institutional field level analysis that has so far been relatively neglected in the accounting literature. In developing this concept, we outline how we define and characterise cultural fields, emphasizing their cultural-cognitive character, their lack of formal governance, their dispersion and the varying social space they can inhabit (from bounded technology fields to global ‘world culture’ Meyer, 2009; Lechner & Boli, 2005). Our term ‘cultural fields’ references both the wider, field-level processes that are not captured by a focus upon professional norms and state regulations, and the ‘cultural-cognitive’ character of cultural field-level processes that we argue merit wider consideration in accounting research. We identify three linked features of the cultural fields of accounting practices: the dispersed sites of the cultural production of accounting; the diverse, shifting and hybridised logics; and the role of arbiters of tastes and the carriers of ‘best practices’. We draw on these key features to discuss and offer examples of researching accounting that would address these processes of accounting development and institutionalization.</span></p></div>","PeriodicalId":48379,"journal":{"name":"Accounting Organizations and Society","volume":"104 ","pages":"Article 101379"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45162819","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"When and why tangible rewards can motivate greater effort than cash rewards: An analysis of four attribute differences","authors":"Jongwoon (Willie) Choi , Adam Presslee","doi":"10.1016/j.aos.2022.101389","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.aos.2022.101389","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48379,"journal":{"name":"Accounting Organizations and Society","volume":"104 ","pages":"Article 101389"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49537568","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Recoupling work beyond COSO: A longitudinal case study of Enterprise-wide Risk Management","authors":"Fatma Jemaa","doi":"10.1016/j.aos.2022.101369","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.aos.2022.101369","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The present study examines how organizational designers of Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) form an ensemble of structures, routines, and tools, consistent with the field-level ideal type. This longitudinal case study is theoretically informed by literature on decoupling and recoupling to account for these actors' efforts. The case studied demonstrates that recoupling actors draw on three modes of action—discursive, material, and relational—to address the two forms of decoupling identified by Bromley and Powell [2012. From smoke and mirrors to walking the talk: Decoupling in the contemporary world. The Academy of Management Annals, 1(6), 483–530]: policy–practice and means–ends. This study contributes to current research in three ways. First, it unpacks risk experts' efforts to address different forms of decoupling, reinvigorating debates on recoupling. Second, it shows that ideal-typical ERM is shaped by a succession of external templates. Third, it draws attention to the preeminent role of double-embedded actors who link successive templates to enable the formation of an organizational ERM that is consistent with the field-level ideal type. Together, these findings contrast with those of previous studies that argued that ERM working ensembles are inexorably inconsistent with the ideal type.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48379,"journal":{"name":"Accounting Organizations and Society","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 101369"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49048847","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How better client service performance affects auditors' willingness to challenge management's preferred accounting","authors":"Michael A. Ricci","doi":"10.1016/j.aos.2022.101377","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.aos.2022.101377","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Client service is a defining feature of the auditing profession. Auditors are coached to manage their daily interactions with client managers by providing better client service (e.g., communicating timely, minimizing disruptions, and being accessible). However, the effects of better client service performance on auditors’ judgments about accounting issues are not well understood. Psychology theory suggests that better client service performance could either impair or improve auditors’ judgments, depending upon whether performance is framed as an expression of goal commitment (i.e., the importance of a goal) or as an indication of goal progress (i.e., moving forward on a goal). In an experiment, I find theory-consistent evidence that with commitment framing, better client service performers are less willing to challenge management’s preferred accounting than worse performers. With progress framing, this deleterious effect of client service performance is eliminated. However, inconsistent with theory, progress framing does not cause better client service performers to be more challenging than worse performers. Taken together, this study provides new evidence about the age-old tension between client satisfaction and audit quality. Satisfying clients by providing better service can compromise audit quality, but not necessarily.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48379,"journal":{"name":"Accounting Organizations and Society","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 101377"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48093935","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Organizational responses to multiple logics: Diversity, identity and the professional service firm","authors":"Fiona Anderson-Gough , Carla Edgley , Keith Robson , Nina Sharma","doi":"10.1016/j.aos.2022.101336","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.aos.2022.101336","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This paper is located within the research problematic of multiple logics with reference to professional service firms (PSFs), and in particular audit firms. Within this multi-logic (“hybrid”) and complex organization, we are specifically concerned with the impacts of new institutional logics that reflect social and political movements - in this case diversity legislation - and how these new logics are absorbed and managed within the organizations’ structures and practices. Based upon a study of large and medium sized audit firms in the UK, we consider the organizational responses to the demands for improved diversity among firm members, especially the senior elite, in the context of the passing of the Equality Act, 2010, and subsequent legislation which both consolidated and extended UK laws on discrimination. Our study indicates how such organizational sites have value for demonstrating how the conflict between logics shifts its terms of reference. While most of the conflict between logics of commercialism and professionalism has been successfully managed through mechanisms of hybridization, we bring to the fore how the struggles between ideas about merit and diversity in professional evaluation processes and practices are more intractable. Our work contributes to an understanding of both the dependencies (<em>blending</em>) and co-existences (<em>separation</em>) that can exist between diversity, commercial and professional logics of practice in multi-logic organizations. We further highlight the role of <em>identity scripts</em> that shape how individuals situationally <em>demarcate</em> their identities as they struggle with the demands for diversity that challenge dominant logics.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48379,"journal":{"name":"Accounting Organizations and Society","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 101336"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361368222000034/pdfft?md5=5d5437fc9f57da1b733dfd56a1eed055&pid=1-s2.0-S0361368222000034-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47032256","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Conscious and nonconscious goal pursuit in multidimensional tasks","authors":"Joanna Andrejkow , Leslie Berger , Lan Guo","doi":"10.1016/j.aos.2022.101376","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.aos.2022.101376","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Multidimensional tasks are often characterized by goal conflict as individuals struggle to simultaneously balance and monitor multiple performance goals. Motivated by the recent psychology research on conscious and nonconscious goal pursuit, we hypothesize that conveying the importance of one performance goal <em>consciously</em> while priming the other performance goal <em>nonconsciously</em> will help individuals more effectively pursue multiple performance goals simultaneously and ultimately improve overall task performance. We conduct a laboratory experiment, using a real-effort multidimensional task, to test our hypotheses and find evidence to confirm our predictions. Our research contributes to the scant accounting research on nonconscious processes. It also provides a novel solution to the goal conflict problem in a multidimensional task setting.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48379,"journal":{"name":"Accounting Organizations and Society","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 101376"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48361936","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}