Knowledge that Transforms

Professional audit firms increasingly engage in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities. This paper examines the effect of audit firms' CSR activities on auditors’ reputation. We find that audit firms that engage in CSR experience an increase in the size of their client base compared to audit firms that do not engage in CSR. The effect is stronger for audit firms without existing reputation from a Big 4 brand name or industry specialization. We also find that clients that value CSR are more likely to hire audit firms that engage in CSR. Overall, our results suggest that CSR is an effective tool for audit firms to build their reputation in the marketplace.

Firms increasingly respond to stakeholder demands by making public claims about their stances on polarizing issues, but at the same time their political activities may contradict their claims. We analyze the extent to which firms' sociopolitical claims and their political action committee contributions align. We develop a dictionary of claims related to diversity and environmental protection based on word combinations in firm communications and link firms' political contributions to candidate approval ratings provided by third-party advocacy groups. While firms generally donate mostly to lower-rated politicians (i.e., those with lower environmental and human rights ratings), firms making more sociopolitical claims donate relatively more to higher-rated politicians. The latter is consistent with political alignment but also has further limit: While firms with more claims donate more to higher-rated politicians, they donate no less to lower-rated politicians. Moreover, government subsidies, politicians’ power, and community pressure for diversity and environmental disclosures reduce political alignment.

This study examines how buyers and sellers react to CSR disclosures in competitive experimental markets. We examine the impact of two important policy interventions: whether assurance of CSR disclosures is present or not and whether sellers receive incentives to invest in CSR. Sellers, as preparers of the disclosures, reveal their levels of CSR investments (proxied by corporate giving), in addition to setting selling prices. These disclosures can be inaccurate. Buyers, as users of the disclosures, choose to do business with a seller and might do so for reasons beyond established prices (e.g., buy from sellers that invest more in CSR). The results of our market experiment show that assurance leads sellers to more accurately disclose their CSR investments. We further predict and find that the assurance of CSR disclosures affects economic outcomes (i.e., CSR investments and prices paid) in particular when sellers receive incentives to invest in CSR compared to when incentives are absent, because incentives can raise expectations among market participants that CSR is important. Results of an additional M-Turk experiment provide corroborating evidence that the use of sustainability incentives does raise social expectations among market participants with regard to CSR investments. We add new insights to the literature on economic effects of CSR reporting and the partner selection literature by showing when and how policy interventions can increase the impact of CSR disclosures.

Accounting's sense of place and purpose is informed by social imaginaries. The imaginaries of the sphere of the economic, the public, and the planet help accountants make sense of their surroundings and the world at large, help them coordinate and form alliances with other forms of expertise, and frame their understanding of what matters. Recent disputes over materiality and declarations by the profession to serve the “people and the planet” suggest that accounting's sense of place and position is variable, yet its long-standing imaginaries indicate that it is also regular and steady. By discussing how imaginaries of the economic, the public and the planet prefigure how accounting connects us with the world from our “bubbles” (Sloterdijk), the paper makes a case for paying more attention to how these imaginaries shape our understanding of what accounting is about and can become, how they might lock accounting into position, and us with it.

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Mobilising the work of Alfred Schutz, this paper argues that action is inherently projection, and seeks to understand how calculation becomes entangled in action as projection and projects. We pursue this aim through an empirical study of the birth of an in-vitro carbon market in Australia. We demonstrate how, prior to its birth, the market was projected by means of two complementary activities – (1) the anticipatory visualization of a completed market through multiple means including texts, numbers, and economic models, and (2) operational infrastructuring through boundary-work, standardization, and the public design of devices to help manage the politics of projection. Calculation penetrates both processes, although different calculations were made. Through theorising action as projection, we highlight the temporal hybridity of action - how past, present, and future are encapsulated in calculative action, and why futures are not terra nova but familiar spaces, made with relatable knowledge of the past and present.

In this paper, we seek to understand the ethics of accounting technology design. We commence by working with the concept of technological mediation, which is theorizing how technologies steer actions by evoking given behaviours and by contributing to perceptions and interpretations of reality that form the basis for choices and decisions to act. As such, this relation between people and technologies has important ethical consequences since it implies that technologies contribute actively to how humans do ethics. In this paper, we draw upon a postphenomenological approach (Ihde; Verbeek) to study and to theorise the moral mediations brought about by accounting technology, by examining how, in its design , technology can actively mediate the moral choices and guide the moral actions human beings make. Our central research question is ‘how is morality mediated in the design of accounting technologies?‘. This question is explored through an ethnographic study of the design of a new Performance Measurement and Compensation System in the Italian division of a multi-national pharmaceutical company. We offer two main contributions towards answering this question. First, by working within the theory of technological mediation, we develop the concept of a ‘moral imaginary’ as an approach to understanding designing the morality of things. Second, we elaborate a process model to theorise how moral mediations unfold in the design of accounting technology. From our conceptual motivation and the theoretical elaboration it inspired, we illuminate how the design of accounting technologies, in this case a PMS system, is a form of ‘engineering ethics’ through techno-moral mediation.