Knowledge that Transforms

Tacit coordination is a pervasive aspect of accounting practice. This paper teases out insights on tacit coordination from existing scholarship, starting with studies of everyday life accounting, then turning to professional practice. It develops an understanding that, in the application of rules and accounting standards, in producing, framing, auditing and using statements, records, apologies or excuses, accounting practitioners tacitly coordinate towards the passing of accounts. This passing can be articulated in terms of structures, agencies and processes of tacit coordination involved in making accounting happen. The implications of this understanding of accounting practice and the importance of the wider domain of enquiry it is indicating are discussed with respect to the stewardship position of accounting professionals and the further development of accounting theory. The passing of accounts charges accounting practitioners with the stewardship of silence and indicates a broader case for accounting theory to address the full continuum of accounting practices. One vital role of such theory is to offer antidotes against the idea that any account, any slice of information, or any amount of ‘big data’, could speak for itself – or that it should.

This study investigates how accountability type (process or outcome) and causal chain framing influence information search processes and decision-making quality. Drawing on the accountability literature and causal reasoning theory, we predict that process accountability stimulates information search effort and enhances decision quality. Additionally, we posit that causal chain usage enhances focus on relevant cues, and increases search effort and decision quality under outcome accountability. In contrast, we argue that employing a causal chain under process accountability decreases search efforts and does not spur a similar increase in decision quality. We conduct an eye-tracking experiment in which participants decide on the amount of funding for a value-creating project after observing prior balanced scorecard performance data. Our results are consistent with our expectations and reveal that accountability type and causal chain framing interact. Under outcome accountability, providing a causal chain is paramount to achieve high decision quality. When process accountability is employed, however, providing a causal chain reduces information search effort and does not improve decision-making. We discuss important implications of our findings for management accounting research and practice.

This paper mobilises a governmentality framing drawing on Miller and Rose (1990) and Rose and Miller (1992) to examine how fluctuating rationalities and programmes of government shaped the construction of accountability over several decades in the relationship between Dutch development NGOs and their governmental funder. It unveils a dynamic, mutually constitutive interrelationship between an assortment of NGO accountability technologies and the shifting rationalities and programmes that underpinned their emergence and adoption. We show how a rationale idealising improved NGO accountability through quality improvement underwent constant modification in a context where programmes seeking to facilitate this ideal were congenitally failing and continually altered. Within these efforts to shape the conduct of NGOs we call attention to the constitutive role of NGO ‘counter-conduct’ – conduct by NGOs motivated by a desire to be governed differently (Foucault, 2007). We uncover what Foucault (2007) refers to as the “correlation between conduct and counter-conduct” (p. 196) in the process through which accountability technologies were mutually moulded in the interactions between NGOs and their governmental funder; a correlation frequently overlooked in analyses of governmentality. We unearth five interrelated forms of NGO counter-conduct - associating self-governance with good governance; concentrating engagement at the programmatic level; pre-emption; ‘working around’ core programmatic aims; and aligning the ‘rules of competition’ with existing expertise. We illustrate how this counter-conduct was initially, albeit not ultimately, constitutive of governmentality as it stimulated shifts towards programmatic aims of cost consciousness, increased professionalisation, and enhanced NGO cooperation. Within this process, the creation of competition for funding among NGOs emerged as an objective of accountability thereby offering a counterpoint to prior research which frequently perceives competition for funding as an explanation for increased attention to NGO accountability.

Based on a micro-level study of microfinance, this paper explores how basic accounting technologies and interpersonal accountability are used to make lending to poor village women profitable and low risk. We argue that “microaccountability,” our term for the structuring and formalization of convivial relationships into a capillary system of accountability, must be recognized as a central tool of social governance under neoliberalism. Our field research in Sri Lanka allows us to analyse how microaccountability is employed by for-profit banks to create from poor villagers a legion of bankable individual entrepreneurs, trained to invigilate each other's savings and credit behaviours. Using the theoretical lens of biopolitics, we show how microaccountability enables the extension of the finance industry into untapped sectors of the global population.

We directly test the reliability and relevance of investee fair values reported by listed private equity funds (LPEs). In our setting, disaggregated fair value measurements are observable for funds’ investees; and investee accounting fundamentals are also publicly disclosed. We find that LPE fair value measurements reflect equity book value and net income in a manner consistent with stock market pricing of listed companies. However, LPE fair value measurements appear to distinguish between Level 1 and Level 3 inputs – they reflect investee net income to a lesser extent for Level 3 inputs. Further evidence based on the stock market pricing of LPE funds indicates that the discretion exercised by LPE fund managers when determining investee valuations is perceived as reliable.