| 1. |
- Hartmann, Berit
(författare)
-
Bridging the GAAP? : IFRS in accounting practice
- 2013
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis investigates how International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) come to act within an organizational context. In particular, the thesis explores how the requirements for goodwill accounting and leasing influence organizational calculative practices, transforming and shaping operations management. Drawing on actor-network theory, this study moves away from a priori distinctions, following the construction and mobilization of accounting numbers across institutionalized boundaries within and around the organization.The empirical investigation took place in a large, worldwide active media group that is listed on a European stock exchange. The group is a particular interesting setting because of its diverse business structure and its German code-law accounting roots. Business combinations are a major growth factor within the industry and a high degree of decentralization in the organization placed responsibility for investment decisions at low hierarchical levels. Goodwill accounting and impairment testing were therefore highly significant calculative practices in the group.The study finds that the constitutive role of the financial reporting standards in the organization both solves tensions and dilemmas around the number and creates new ones when crucial interests are lost in translation. These tensions and dilemmas arise between the aim of standardization and closure for the construction of a legitimate value of the future, and the aim to mobilize numbers in order to motivate and create value for a future.Originally intended for the financial representation of organizational substance and performance, the standards become associated with operations management activities, helping to create the faithful records that sum up the organization. This interrelation helps to close concern around the representation of the future in a ‘fair’ value by distributing the calculative practices over a wide network of actors spanning inside and outside the organization. However, the relationship also forces a connection between calculations and ambitions that otherwise would have preferred to stay separate.This thesis offers a new perspective on IFRS implementation by emphasizing organizational activities. Through a focus on integration and the link between financial and management accounting, the ‘implementation problems’ highlighted in previous literature gain a refined theorization. When taking organizational practice seriously, integration becomes a process that may find temporal stability but will never be final. In the process, conflicts might be solved but new dilemmas will arise. In turn, concepts like decision usefulness, comparability and earnings management cannot exist in a stable form but are rather constructed in networks that disregard commonly assumed boundaries inside and around the organization.
|
|
| 2. |
- Hartmann, Berit, et al.
(författare)
-
Inscribing the future : goodwill accounting at the nexus of financial and management accounting
- 2013
-
Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper examines how a particular part of IFRS, the requirements for goodwill accounting, influences organisational calculative practices, transforming and shaping operations management. Stepping away from a-priori boundaries between different accounting disciplines, this research contributes to existing financial and management accounting literature with an in depth case study on the consequences of standard setting in the organisational realm. Whilst financial accounting standards have shown to be intervening with other fields of societal activities, this study places emphasis on the organisational realm and the interrelation between financial accounting standardisation and operations management. Drawing on an actor-network lens, the study shows how the calculative practices introduced by IFRS associated with many parts of the organisation. Although different interests and ambitions in accounting remained, the standards intervened by both fostering and forcing communication between actors. The standardisation of accounting practice in the group granted procedural legitimacy to the reported numbers in a network of dispersed calculation. At the same time, however, these links required a new form of expertise, a shared expertise between parts of the firm that otherwise would have been preferred to stay independent. Dilemma and conflicts arise in a tension between standardisation and flexibility of business decisions, in the aim to define a value of the future for financial reporting that also becomes relevant in the creation of value for a future.
|
|
| 3. |
- Hartmann, Berit, et al.
(författare)
-
Rethinking the boundaries between financial accounting and management accounting
- 2011
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Theoretical as well as practical movements push the frontier of accounting research towards a more integrated view on accounting and reporting practice. The traditional boundaries we tend to draw between management accounting and financial accounting are hindering accounting research to follow these movements and in this study we propose the concept of practice networks. The analysis of practice networks is presented as one way to disregard the dualisms in which we move and to investigate the complex interplay and movements of values.The purpose of this study is to investigate how internal and external notions of value come to life together to form accounting practice. For our investigation we conducted a field study in a worldwide active group listed on a European stock exchange. The paper is part of a larger research project were we investigate different practice networks and their relation to each other. Here, we present impairment testing as one example of a practice network. We show how practice networks bind allies across organisational boundaries, linking different hierarchies and different organisational disciplines in order to produce commonly accepted values. The practice network analysis reveals how external notions of value, like impairments and fair values, travel into the organisation by means of their practice network and how internal notions travel out.Our findings suggest that through practice networks, practices become temporarily stable and their outcomes become legitimate and accepted artefacts or knowledge through their attachments.
|
|
