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Lifting the lid on the use of content analysis to investigate intellectual capital disclosures

Accounting narratives are an increasingly important medium of financial communication. In particular, they play a crucial role in the corporate annual report, allowing company management to present annual performance to users in a readily accessible manner. Research suggests that such narratives are widely used and considered important in the investment decisions of private and institutional investors. However, accounting narratives are unaudited and thus may be subject to impression management. This paper focuses on the chairman's narratives of the top 50 and bottom 50 listed UK companies ranked by percentage change in profit before taxation. The research examines whether companies with improving and declining performance report good and bad news in different ways. The findings suggest that both groups of companies prefer to emphasise the positive aspects of their performance. In addition, both groups prefer to take credit for good news themselves, while blaming the external environment for bad ...

Financial reporting of good news and bad news: evidence from accounting narratives

With the unprecedented rise in the use of visuals, and its undeniable omnipresence in organizational contexts, as well as in the individual's everyday life, organization and management science has recently started to pay closer attention to the to date under-theorized “visual mode” of discourse and meaning construction. Building primarily on insights from the phenomenological tradition in organization theory and from social semiotics, this article sets out to consolidate previous scholarly efforts and to sketch a fertile future research agenda. After briefly exploring the workings of visuals, we introduce the methodological and theoretical “roots” of visual studies in a number of disciplines that have a long-standing tradition of incorporating the visual. We then continue by extensively reviewing work in the field of organization and management studies: More specifically, we present five distinct approaches to feature visuals in research designs and to include the visual dimension in scholarly inquiry. Su...

The Visual Dimension in Organizing, Organization, and Organization Research: Core Ideas, Current Developments, and Promising Avenues

The theory of narcissism can be employed usefully to analyze the dynamics of group and organizational behavior. Just as individuals seek to regulate their self-esteem through such ego-defense mechanisms as denial, rationalization, attributional egotism, sense of entitlement, and ego aggrandizement, which ameliorate anxiety, so too do groups and organizations. An understanding of the behaviors by which groups and organizations regulate self-esteem is important, because it sheds light on the dynamics underlying the legitimacy attributions made by organizational participants. In this article I enlarge and illustrate these arguments.

Narcissism, Identity, And Legitimacy

Over the past three decades, a desire to understand the processes of change within accounting, and the contribution made by accounting to broader societal and organizational change, has stimulated a substantial body of historical research in accounting. Labelled as the “new accounting history”, this diverse collection of methodological approaches addressing a wide range of problems has made possible the posing of new questions about accounting’s past. The understanding of what counts as accounting has broadened, a greater awareness of how accounting is intertwined in the social has emerged, voices from below have been allowed to speak, while accounting has been seen to be implicated in wider arenas, with networks of practices, principles and people constituting varieties of “accounting constellations”. The paper reviews the central contribution of Accounting, Organizations and Society to the emergence of the new accounting history, and suggests some directions in which this may develop in the future.

Accounts of change: 30 years of historical accounting research

In this analysis, we argue that the striking visual design that has characterized U.S. annual reports since the 1960s, including brilliant color pictures, gloss, and novelty formats, is a manifestation of the television epistemology that informs wide ranges of contemporary public discourse in America. Correspondingly, we contend that visual design in U.S. annual reports constitutes a form of rhetoric asserting the “truth claims” of the reports. Such truth claims relate not only to the values expounded in the text or projected in the pictures, but to those residing in the accounts themselves.

Pictures and the bottom line: The television epistemology of U.S. annual reports☆

Accounting student characteristics: Results of the 1993 and 1994 Federation of Schools of Accountancy (FSA) surveys

Accounting student characteristics: A survey of accounting majors at federation of schools of accountancy (FSA) schools☆

In his book Stabilized Accounting of 1936, Henry Sweeney differentiated his indexation model for accounting for inflation from the French and German inflation-accounting models of the 1920s by describing the European methods as “usually quite content to stabilize the paper-money book figures on the basis of merely some gold money.” Sweeney's composite characterization of the European thought, however, generalizes broadly and proves technically inexact when applied to the Germans. This study offers an account of the German gold-mark model of accounting for inflation as contained in the works of Walter Mahlberg and Eugen Schmalenbach.

Accounting for inflation: henry sweeney and the german gold-mark model

Walter Mahlberg's inflation-accounting treatise of 1921, Bilanztechnik und Bewertung bei schwankender Wahrung, contains the first book-length price-level-adjustment model in the literature. As the title of the book indicates, Mahlberg treated the matter of restatement technique and the matter of asset valuation during inflation as distinct topics. Mahlberg's restatement technique was not without immediate influence in Germany and has been addressed previously in English-language publications. His valuation theory, on the other hand, had little effect on contemporary developments and remains an anomaly in the literature today. In particular, Mahlberg saw the effect of certain specific price-level changes—those whose rate of change exceeded general inflation—as giving rise to unavoidable future losses; losses, he maintained, that should be recognized currently. Since Mahlberg's theory is generally unknown outside Germany, the present paper first provides English-speaking audiences with an explication of the logic that led Mahlberg to his unique conclusion. It then argues that although Mahlberg's valuation theory represents a cul-de-sac in the development of inflation accounting itself, it ironically may have contributed to Henry Sweeney's 1936 concept of ‘unrealized appreciation’, which is an early conceptualization of a holding gain, net of inflation.

O. Finley Graves

Papers

Pictures and the bottom line: The television epistemology of U.S. annual reports☆

Accounting student characteristics: Results of the 1993 and 1994 Federation of Schools of Accountancy (FSA) surveys

Accounting student characteristics: A survey of accounting majors at federation of schools of accountancy (FSA) schools☆

Accounting for inflation: henry sweeney and the german gold-mark model

Walter Mahlberg's Valuation Theory: An Anomaly in the Development of Inflation Accounting