Knowledge that Transforms

A firm can choose to use nouns (e.g., “our company is a provider of personalized services”) or verbs (e.g., “our company provides personalized services”) in its disclosures without substantially altering the content of disclosures. We present theory and evidence from three experiments related to how noun-verb framing affects investors' judgments. Our first experiment shows that investors' judgments of a firm with stable-trend financial performance are more favorable when the firm's disclosures are framed using nouns rather than verbs; the reverse is found for a firm with growing-trend financial performance. We conduct two supplementary experiments to test the associated causal chain. The findings inform managers, investors, and regulators on how word choices made by firms impact investors.

The situations in which accounting is practiced raise moral concerns about customer and employee safety, community welfare, environmental sustainability, and human rights. Traditional accounting practices, such as budgets and performance measurement systems, have been widely regarded as ‘crowding out morality’ by objectifying the people affected by a firm's actions. In two North American utilities, we observed a stepwise structured process of moral reflection (which we identify as an instance of Rawls's reflective equilibrium approach), in which accounting, in the form of the risk appetite radar, helped guide executive decision making informed by moral principles. We develop two dimensions of accounting's role as ‘moral interlocutor’: enabling organizational value consensus and organizational value coherence. We identify three features of the observed accounting practice that enable it to act as moral interlocutor: subjectification rather than objectification of potential victims of the firm's actions; de-monetization, that is, considering trade-offs in terms of multiple organizational values, not only in terms of cost; and visualization of the organizations' moral principles on value priorities and how they are shaped by organizational decision making and action. The accounting visualizations did not only enable executives' reflection on rights and wrongs, but also triggered a fuller and richer moral vocabulary that was used for complex decision making involving, for instance, automation and the risk of suicides.

In the most recent revision of the conceptual framework underlying accounting standards the concept of prudence became the focus of an extraordinary public political dispute. This dispute is explored here by taking an actor-network theory perspective on politics, a ‘dingpolitik’ (Latour, 2005a) or ‘material politics’ (Barry, 2013a), that revolves around things and matters of concern, rather than just interests and ideologies. The analysis unveils how a multiplicity of human actors, including regulators, preparers, auditors, and users of accounts, academics, lawyers, politicians, and journalists, but also material actors such as IASB due process documents and responses, parliamentary debates, official statements, speeches, legal opinions, and financial press articles, come together and raise concerns that are unpredictable and evolving. These concerns ultimately expose the political qualities of prudence that are connected to other controversies relating to other financial reporting issues. At the peak of the political drama that unfolds we see a group of long-term investors commissioning a legal opinion challenging the legality of IFRSs on the grounds that the removal of prudence violates the legal requirement for accounts to show a true and fair view. Both the politics and anti-politics that take place around the concept of prudence lead us to reflect on conceptions of an unrelenting financialisation of accounting standards through fair value accounting and of their (potential) functions in organisations and society.

Drawing on interviews with accountants working at professional services firms (PSFs) in the UK, we explore how reflexivity enables accountants to recognise and negotiate class-based barriers to progression and inclusion. We identify a range of reflexive practices (including conversations with colleagues and clients, observations, mentoring, mulling over, and imagining) and show how these interact with habitus to structure the individual (mis)recognition of class-based barriers in the workplace. We find that reflexivity can engender an awareness of ‘difference’ and sense of inferiority relative to others, primarily for those from less privileged backgrounds. We provide evidence of the enabling role of reflexive practices which lead to purposive action for negotiating class-based barriers. However, we also find that reflexivity can lead to idiosyncratic strategies which support assimilation to (rather than challenging) existing practices in the accounting field. We find contradictory accounts of the effects of class, where class is recognised as a barrier, yet individuals are thought to progress through merit. We explain this tension through the limitations of reflexivity, restricted opportunities for reflexivity, and misrecognition of the effects of class in a seemingly meritocratic system. We provide examples of enduring and unrecognised class-based inequalities in accounting PSFs, including team composition and work allocation, class-segmented service lines, and the long-term consequences for those from less privileged backgrounds of having to work harder to ‘reach the same level’. Our findings suggest that PSFs must facilitate ‘difficult’ conversations aimed at breaking the culture of silence around class.

In this study, we examine how personality attributes and a coordinated compensation design jointly contribute to complementarity in the CEO–CFO dyad. Drawing on regulatory focus theory, we propose that the combination of a CEO with a promotion focus and a CFO with a prevention focus benefits firms. In such a dyad, promotion-focused CEOs bring creativity, speed, and eagerness to advancement, whereas prevention-focused CFOs attend to vigilance, helping to keep promotion-focused CEOs grounded. We further argue that the effectiveness of this CEO–CFO dyad depends on promotion-focused CEOs being open to critical advice from prevention-focused CFOs. To make CEOs more amenable to CFOs' advice, we suggest similar compensation plans that foreground common objectives. We empirically test our arguments by focusing on the CEO–CFO dyad's influence on investment spending and firm performance in a longitudinal sample covering more than 10,000 firm years. Our results indicate a positive association between CEO promotion focus and investment spending, as well as firm performance. We further find that CFO prevention focus weakens the association between CEO promotion focus and investment spending, but strengthens the association with firm performance. These moderating influences of CFO prevention focus are more pronounced for higher compensation similarity in the CEO–CFO dyad. In sum, our findings exemplify that deliberately considering CEO and CFO personality attributes and their compensation design jointly strengthens the functioning of the CEO–CFO dyad.

We incorporate conceptualisations around the accountable self into the NGO accountability literature to consider how NGO human rights activists make sense of their accountability in relation to their postcolonial identity. We conducted 21 semi-structured interviews with Palestinian activists working in Palestinian and Israeli NGOs defending human rights in Gaza. Our findings provide four original insights. First, the construction of their identity as “postcolonial” considerably motivates our interviewees' work as human rights activists, but also creates conflicts with NGOs' humanitarian missions. Activists respond by stressing their postcolonial identity over their professional one. Second, due to Palestinian activists' own lived experiences, they construct accountability relations and collective identities defined by victimhood. The sense of victimhood results in blurring boundaries between activists and their “beneficiaries”, which influences their sense of accountability and motivates their practices. Third, the accountable self mobilises different accountability practices to deal with both the self's needs for narrativity and authenticity (e.g., through storytelling and remembrance) and external demands for “objective” accounts, thereby balancing their postcolonial and professional identities and responsibilities. Fourth, our interviewees sense that their accountability has limitations, as the accounts of human rights violations they produce receive insufficient recognition from others. Overall, the study indicates the importance of considering how a postcolonial identity of human rights activists creates various sources and motivations for the accountable self's relationships, practices and limitations distinguishable from, but linked, to those practised by NGOs.