Translating a good buy to a good sell: programming shareholding through the privatisation of Telia.

This study examines the under-researched equity sales function and analyses how equity brokers use accounting to generate individualized, contrarian investment recommendations to serve fund manager clients in a highly competitive market for investment advice. This study reports on the brokers’ practices using an ethnographically inspired study of an equity sales desk and follows the lifecycle of a brokers’ investment case referred to herein as “Indumine” (pseudonym). The analysis shows how the brokers used accounting to develop the case together with fund manager clients and against the analyst consensus – a practice the brokers referred to as “reverse brokering”. Unlike previous analyses of how accounting influences investment decisions by being stable and objective, the brokers in our analysis continually added and abandoned accounting items in order to maintain a distance from consensus, remain subjective and interesting to clients, and achieve recognition. To make theoretical sense of such a use of accounting, this paper puts forth a consumption perspective of accounting. The argument is that the relevance of the accounting used for the brokers’ investment recommendations is consumed when the information becomes factual and impersonal, and no longer sustains the brokers’ contrarian view of the share; the challenge for the brokers is to sustain the economic potential of the case despite the temporary facticity of the accounting information. The paper proposes that this form of accounting consumption constitutes an elementary form of accounting use, operating in the shadow of more formal information infrastructure.

This paper examines how auditors prepare for the annual general meeting ( AGM ) and how they report their work to the shareholders there. Prior literature has suggested—but not explicitly studied—that the endpoint of an audit is a state of comfort between the auditor and the management and audit committee members, but also is potentially fragile. The fragility can arise from a failure to relay trust to the investor community, which may initiate or increase doubts about the financial report and/or the auditor's independence. We build the case that an AGM is an event to study how the endpoint of an audit engagement is both a state of collective comfort and a fragile state. The analysis is based on ten interviews and three workshops with auditors as well as observations at 67 AGM s. To analyze the field material, the paper draws on Goffman's idea of face‐work, which requires backstage preparations, notably with management, and a front stage performance as an independent auditor to relay trust to the shareholders. The paper details how auditors at the AGM perform as independent verifiers of the management's financial report. Although we recorded that auditors were typically successful in preventing the backstage activities from becoming visible to the shareholders, we found incidents that challenged both the auditors' and the managements' face. In analyzing these incidents, we found that auditors reinforced their image as independent to regain both their own face and the management's face. The management did not take a similar collective responsibility for the auditor's face, which implies that auditors were asymmetrically committed to the management. As a take‐away, the paper discusses how governance mechanisms backstage are linked and can surface front stage at the AGM .

Based on an analysis of questionnaire data from a large sample of certified auditors, we examine how the main type of client being served influences auditor conformity to the core values of their profession. We contrast auditors of (primarily) listed companies with auditors of (primarily) single member companies, that is, limited liability companies with a single owner who typically is also the only employee of the company. We show that these two groups of auditors differ in the extent to which they hold certain values important (i.e., show compliance) and in the closeness with which these values are held within each group of auditors (i.e., show convergence). Our results also demonstrate that the type of client predominantly served by an auditor is relevant for explaining variation in professional values both within and between organizational contexts. In addition, we offer a new theoretical approach to classifying auditors and analyzing their commitment to core values of the profession. We analyze commitment to values via both compliance and convergence, two often overlooked aspects of conformity to value commitments in professions.