Purpose The purpose of this paper is to theorize the social role of management systems and their political connections using ANTi-History. In so doing, it engages with academic conversations around the writing of business history. The paper focuses on subjective experience in the context of colonial privateers and the vice-admiralty court in the Napoleonic Wars era. Design/methodology/approach ANTi-History is proposed as a theoretical lens to examine the entrepreneurial work of privateers. ANTi-History destabilizes the idea of history as a dominant account of the past and is interested in controversies as to how history is produced. This paper also brings-in Bourdieu’s notion of officialization because historical knowledge is situated in official practices that conceal translations and political strategies that enable actor-networks to act as one. Findings The controls of the vice-admiralty court not only perpetuated the inherited British class system, but also created versions of reality that came to be accepted as recorded history. This shows that the rules and regulations of the court were not neutral accounting activities. The systems constituted the identity of actors and produced privateer history as a modernist knowledge of the past and officialized by western, white, male, elites. Originality/value The “historic turn” in management and organization studies has not been fully realized more than a decade after its introduction. This paper engages with the historic turn by providing a specific exemplar of history as applied to officialized accounts of colonial privateers. Using ANTi-History as a methodological approach also makes a contribution by promoting it beyond a prolonged descriptive phase.
Culture has important influence on accounting and disclosure practices. This paper furthers this cultural research and accounting classification schemes in general. To examine the relationship between culture and accounting models, hypothesized cultural pairings of countries within Asia are constructed and tested by rank‐wise comparisons of observed accounting and reporting practices with all possible pairs. The analysis provides confirmation of relationships for two of the six hypothesized pairs using three approaches. There appears to be a high correspondence in the accounting practices within certain pairs of Asian countries sharing common cultural origins. Further, through exploratory Q‐factor analysis and cluster analysis, groupings of countries within Asia are identified, on the basis of observed accounting practices. This again provides evidence that the cultural diversity of Asia may contribute to differences in accounting and reporting practices. A limited interpretation of the resultant groupings is provided.
Abstract. This paper examines how earnings benchmarks of firms listed in Mainland China may lead to earnings management through use of discretionary accruals. We compared discretionary accrual levels of small profit firms and small loss firms before and after controlling for the effect of two published benchmarks. We find that firms beating or missing both earnings level benchmark and earnings change benchmark tend to save discretionary accruals, while firms missing either of these benchmarks might employ extra discretionary accruals to meet the other earnings benchmark. Small loss firms reporting a bigger earnings increase might have driven accounting accruals up, and as a result small loss firms as a whole appear to have a high level of discretionary accruals not significantly different from small profit firms. Our findings provide direct evidence for earnings management of listed firms, and also give a reasonable explanation for the "kink" in earnings distribution.
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