Most fraud research in accounting has focused on controls rather than offenders' subjective experience, meaning that our understanding of motive in fraud (defined as linguistic devices employed to justify, interpret, or excuse actions) remains underexplored. This is particularly the case for employee fraud, which has been largely neglected relative to top management fraud or financial statement fraud. To provide a richer understanding of how fraud offenders make sense of their offending, we interviewed 30 serious employee fraud offenders to better investigate their typal vocabularies of motive. We focus on holistic narrative accounts to provide insights into the common justifications and excuses presented by employee fraud offenders. We develop a taxonomy of narrative constructions based on the explanatory locus of the accounts offered by offenders. We identify three common justifications, (1) inconsequentiality motives, (2) permission motives, and (3) unfair treatment motives, and three common excuses, (4) personal crisis motives, (5) addiction motives, and (6) appeasement motives. We draw implications for researching fraud, organizational control, and ethics in accounting education.

Drawing on Robert Michels's “iron law” of oligarchy, this study examines a governance crisis that unfolded at one of the world's largest professional accounting bodies (PABs)—CPA Australia. We leverage Michels's century‐old contribution to the social sciences to explore how this crisis sheds light on the challenges that PAB governance arrangements can pose when PAB leadership and membership priorities conflict. By applying Michels's seminal work to theorize the origins, escalation, leadership collapse, and eventual resolution of this PAB governance crisis, we illuminate how governance arrangements fueled conflict and fostered a democratic deficit that frustrated sections of the membership in their attempts to debate issues, exercise accountability on leadership matters, and become involved in governance reform. Overall, our analysis reveals that despite espoused principles of equity and participation, PABs are vulnerable to oligarchy impacting how their leaders relate to the interests of their members. Implications for the capacity of PABs to accommodate member conflict and for member participation in the current‐day professional context are discussed.

Arguably the world's most iconic platform organization, Uber relies on a disaggregated labour force and a technology application accessible to users on mobile devices. The company contracts with over three million drivers worldwide and has curated an infrastructure of platform-based control characterized by algorithmic processes. The effects of this new wave of control on the driver-led workforce are unclear. Drawing on interviews with 36 Uber drivers, mainly from Australia and France, this research investigates how the ‘gig economy’ workforce engages with platform-based control. We find that the platform organization's control algorithms operate with strong disciplinary effects. Drawing on Foucault's concept of self-formation, we examine worker responses to the new order of work. We highlight the way workers engage in practices to ‘take care of oneself’, by enduring, subverting or exiting the conditions of algorithmic management. We find that these practices are related to the distance embedded in the field between management and the workforce. In this way, we argue that the gig economy operates differently upon the ‘governable self’ and urge caution in relation to the use of algorithms to control at a distance.

Art represents one of the world’s most sacred cultural resources, with the total value of artworks currently in circulation worldwide estimated to exceed $1.5 trillion. Despite its undoubted historical and cultural significance, art, like other culture-based assets, has been frequently qualified as ‘difficult to value’. This study aims to understand the ways in which valuation work constructs artworks as being of value. Building upon research into categorisation and valuation work, we present our findings based on 41 interviews with agents specialised in art valuation (art dealers, art auctioneers, and art valuers) in the United States and Australia, combined with one year of participant observation at a major international art institution. We distinguish four categories of artworks according to their degree of cultural recognition: decorative art, emerging art, trending art, and blue-chip art. Depending on how an art production is categorised, we find that actors engage in three different modes of overlapping and mutually constitutive valuation work: interpreting, credentialing, and projecting value. This categorisation of cultural significance makes the valuation of artworks both hierarchical and performative.