Knowledge that Transforms

Focusing on Italian accountants ( Commercialisti ), who are usually professionals working alone or in small firms, we examine how small practitioners experience and navigate the dynamics between professionalism and commercialism. Drawing on empirical material from roundtable meetings and interviews with Commercialisti , and using a framework that examines how culturally patterned dispositions shape their experiences of field and capital conversion dynamics, we explore how these professionals engage reflexively with concerns about recognition. Our analysis shows how reflexive engagement with field positioning amidst tensions between professionalism and commercialism is tied to small practitioners' concerns about recognition, stemming from experiences of ‘failed capital conversions’. We unpack these concerns through Commercialisti' s reflections on their quest for ‘fair compensation’, which functions for them as recognition that matters not only for economic survival but also for sustaining their position in a symbolic hierarchy dominated by large firms and prestigious peers. In doing so, we demonstrate how Commercialisti' s concerns about fair compensation, while economic in form, are deeply symbolic in function and how reflexivity plays an ambivalent role in such pursuits of recognition. While reflexivity enhances awareness of lacking status and power and triggers aspirations to address these constraints, it simultaneously heightens frustration about the structural and symbolic conditions that limit the feasibility of such strategies. This ambivalence produces a ‘reflexive impasse’ at the intersection of hierarchical nostalgia and fatalist resignation, leaving Commercialisti caught between attachment to institutionalized norms and a prevailing sense that change is unattainable, which stalls identity transformation despite ongoing efforts to reclaim recognition.

This study experimentally examines how the leadership style of the audit committee (AC) chair (controlling or open) influences the amount of discretionary information that auditors intend to share with the AC, in the context of common meeting formats (i.e., AC meetings with versus without management present, or private meetings between the auditor and AC chair). Participants are highly experienced auditors, including partners and (senior) managers, from Big 4 accounting firms. We predict and find that an open AC chair mitigates the chilling effect of management's presence on the number of discretionary issues shared with the AC. Compared to those who attend AC meetings only, auditors who engage in private meetings with the AC chair before AC meetings plan to disclose fewer discretionary issues to the AC in subsequent AC meetings, but disclose more discretionary issues in total across meetings. AC chair leadership style has no impact on their discretionary information sharing in these private meetings. These results suggest that open AC chairs can mitigate the adverse effect of management's presence on auditors' discretionary information disclosure and have implications for regulators aiming to enhance corporate governance.

In this study, we examine how workers resist management controls in the home workplace. Drawing on Scott's (1985, 1990) theorization about the everyday forms of resistance, especially his seminal concepts of infrapolitical resistance and hidden transcripts, and mobilizing a netnographic approach, we examine the comments posted on Reddit during a 10-month period, in which workers talk about their resistance to the ways in which they are controlled in the home-based work environment. We uncover six hidden transcripts representing workers' infrapolitical resistance to management control in the home workplace, which we categorize into two sets: resistance thoughts and beliefs and individual acts of resistance. Home office workers describe and discuss their resistance attitudes and ideas around 1) the new limits of acceptable levels and types of controls, 2) the very worth of the managerial role, and 3) employers' cultural controls. Also, home office workers resist via their actions by 4) performing “empty labor; ” 5) quitting their job in response to return-to-office mandates; and 6) selectively meeting productivity-related controls. Bringing a new empirical site − the home as a workplace − to the management control literature, we theorize about the ways in which home office workers transform productivity into a site of resistance, turn the control gaze back on the managers, and use the home office to resist controls.

We propose a more expansive analysis of accounting regulation, highlighting the significance of a regulatory network and the importance of examining the recursive processes involved in the transition from formal law to practice. Our analysis is grounded in the sociology of law and is exemplified by the case of a corporate disclosure regulation for Canada's extractive industry. The paper examines how the regulator, in concert with intermediary actors, works to clarify and influence the practice of law, what we refer to as operationalization. In providing a historically and socially contextualized analysis, the paper treats regulation as a dynamic process that includes multistakeholder working groups, legislative debates, regulatory procedures, and shifting meanings of compliance and enforcement. We examine operationalization as a distinct regulatory dynamic and explore its significance for an expanded understanding of accounting regulation.