Knowledge that Transforms

Organisational accounts are often awarded considerable significance in societies, not least because of their proposed beneficial implications. However, we argue that in accounting research the narrative (non-financial) accounts, often given by organisations in more than one language, have been approached in a limited way. Drawing on foundational concepts from the discipline of Translation Studies, we demonstrate that accounts provided in different languages are not just one equivalent account copied across languages but in fact an ‘account multiple’ of several parallel accounts . Organisations (can) use such parallel accounts to address different audiences, simultaneously constructing different worlds where accountability does not remain the same. Alongside our theoretical discussion, we illustrate parallel accounts through an empirical analysis of the Finnish and English language account(s) a Finland-based MNC gave on its social responsibility. We argue that considering different language accounts as parallel accounts has significant implications for research on narrative reporting, including how scholars interpret organisational accounts, their use and potential implications, with consequences extending further into research transparency, ethics and quality.

Prior accounting and economics research suggests that tournaments with highly concentrated prizes attract the most talented individuals. However, this research assumes that tournament entrants have granular, reliable information about their relative skill level. Using a laboratory experiment, we replicate this result: when relative skill information is available, prize concentration leads to skill-based selection. However, when relative skill information is unavailable, and tournament choice is public, we find that highly concentrated prizes instead attract more narcissistic individuals. Together, our results suggest that high-level positions with exceptionally large prizes can attract narcissistic applicants when entry decisions are publicly observable and relative skill information is limited. These findings inform both theory and practice by clarifying when tournament prize concentration selects for skill versus personality.

Employers often give employees general pay increases that are not tied to individual performance. These pay increases can either be unconditional fixed pay raises such as cost-of-living adjustments or be tied to risky firm-level measures of performance (e.g., profit-sharing). We use two experiments and a survey to investigate how employees' position in the firm's value chain affects their psychological ownership of the firm and subsequently their preferences for different types of pay increases. We find theory-consistent evidence that employees exhibit higher levels of psychological ownership of their organization when they add value to their firm's products and services directly (i.e., are primary workers who produce goods or services) rather than indirectly (i.e., are support workers such as janitorial or safety staff) and that this in turn increases their preferences for a profit-sharing pay increase relative to an unconditional pay increase. We discuss the implications of adopting a “value chain” perspective when designing employee compensation packages.

Whereas previous research has largely focused on the top-down establishment of the business partner role, we study bottom-up efforts by individual management accountants to increase their involvement in business partnering and the association of these efforts with their personality. Taking a job crafting perspective, we argue that management accountants may self-initiate changes in their job boundaries toward business partnering. We further argue that management accountants’ job crafting is associated with their plasticity, a disposition for exploration, and the pursuit of new experiences. Drawing on a survey among management accountants employed at a large European bank, we find support for our hypotheses that plasticity has a positive association with job crafting and, through job crafting, with business partnering. Interestingly, this finding particularly holds for management accountants who are not formally required to act as business partners. Our results thus underline that plasticity is a personality trait that can give rise to self-initiated role changes toward business partnering. The results also show that the positive association between job crafting and business partnering is stronger in contexts of tight financial control, which supports our theoretical argument that such contexts provide a greater potential for enhancing the meaningfulness attached to business partnering. Overall, our study highlights that business partnering among management accountants is not inherently linked to their formal job descriptions. Rather, it may emerge as a consequence of self-initiated changes to the job undertaken by individuals possessing appropriate personality traits.

This study investigates the joint effects of the extent of superior discretion in bonus allocations and the degree of mutual monitoring within teams on team output and unproductive influence activities of employees. Increasing discretion granted to superiors allows them to use their private information to motivate effort. Prior literature, however, also stresses that increasing discretion induces employees to engage in unproductive activities to influence bonus allocations. Drawing on behavioral theory, I argue and show that when superiors only have narrow discretion over bonus allocations and, hence, employees have few pecuniary incentives to engage in influence activities, team output increases with higher degrees of mutual monitoring in teams. In this case, employees are better able to effectively coordinate their efforts. This positive effect of mutual monitoring, however, diminishes as superior discretion over bonus allocations increases. In this case, employees’ greater engagement in influence activities undercuts their ability to coordinate on high team output with higher degrees of monitoring. This study contributes to the literature on discretionary bonus pools by providing evidence on the joint effects of superior discretion and mutual monitoring on team outcomes and by identifying conditions under which limiting superior discretion becomes more beneficial.

In this article, we draw on the writings of Nigerian-born sociologist Peter P. Ekeh and, using extensive and hard-to-reach fieldwork data, we seek to understand how members of the Civic Public—the political and business elite—managed to obscure and obfuscate their corruption via accounting tools and strategies at the expense of the communities they serve, i.e., the Primordial Public. We find that members of the Civic Public engaged in a series of accounting schemes—some simple, others complex—to divert vast sums of much-needed funds away from the intended beneficiaries of a major charitable initiative established to provide aid for the un(der)-employed youth of Ghana. We make important contributions to the study of accounting, corruption, and morality. First, we disaggregate amorality from morality, situating these terms both theoretically and contextually, before discussing how members of the primordial public are systemically and culturally socialized to the elite's amorality. We build on and extend Ekeh's arguments in two ways. First, we discuss the emergence of a third public, which we call the “In-between”. Second, we argue that members of this third public are increasingly at risk of being dragged into morally dubious actions by and on behalf of their elite peers as they are persuaded toward morally dubious actions and behaviours.

We study how a rankings network, comprised of people and things, crafted and recrafted a counter-competitive soft ranking: the Swedish Municipality Quality Public Ranking, between 2007 and 2020. Using actor-network theory as a sensitising framework, we focus on two key interrelated dimensions of rankings work: (1) actor enrolment and (2) calculative design. We highlight that these two dimensions could conflict, documenting three key inflexion points, when actor efforts to manage tensions transformed the operation of the ranking. We also show that a counter-competitive ranking can be built and used for decades; rankings need not be engines of competition. Rankings, as composite indices, have been further criticised as oversimplified, non-rigorous tools. We show that multiplicity may not be more efficacious. Here, ensuring multiplicity in enrolment (rapid increase in municipalities enrolled) and calculative design (no composite index, multiple rankings, secondary indicators, peer selection for comparison) created a ranking that was too complex and too ‘soft’. Over time, while quality controllers were engaged, other key stakeholder groups (politicians and functional managers) lost interest. We also note how the development of a soft ranking may enable the professionalisation of a new learning-oriented occupational group of quality controllers.

This paper proposes that individuals with higher intolerance of uncertainty are more prone to misreporting their performance in internal reporting settings when there is high performance evaluation uncertainty. In contrast, under low performance evaluation uncertainty, intolerance of uncertainty does not affect performance misreporting. We test this prediction across six studies. Studies 1–4 operationalize performance evaluation uncertainty through supervisor's word-deed inconsistency and examine the effect in real-world (Studies 1–2) and controlled experimental settings (Studies 3–4). To assess generalizability, Study 5 manipulates leadership and organizational change and Study 6 manipulates market change to create different levels of performance evaluation uncertainty. Across all six studies, we find consistent support for our hypothesis. Individuals with higher intolerance of uncertainty experience stronger uneasy, negative feelings (e.g., discomfort and anxiety) when performance evaluation uncertainty is high, and the desire to reduce these negative feelings leads them to impulsively misreport their performance. This paper highlights the emotion-driven aspect of performance misreporting and demonstrates that misreporting is shaped not only by individual traits but also by supervisor's behavior and broader organizational and environmental factors that contribute to performance evaluation uncertainty.

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.