Business and Management

Accounting is the language of business, increasingly standardized across the world through global banks and corporations: a technical tool used to reach the correct, unquestionable answer. Nonetheless, as recent corporate scandals have shown, a whole range of financial professionals (accountants, auditors, bankers, finance directors) can collectively fail to question dubious actions. How is this possible? To understand such failures, this book explores how accountants construct the technical knowledge they deem relevant to decision-making. In doing so, it not only offers a new way to understand deviance and scandals, but also suggests a reappraisal of accounting knowledge which has important implications for everyday commercial life. The book's findings are based on interviews with chartered accountants working in the largest accountancy practices in London. The interviews reveal that although accounting decisions seem clear after they have been made, the process of making them is contested and opaque. Yet accountants nonetheless tend to describe their work as if it were straightforward and technical. This book delves beneath the surface to explore how accountants actually construct knowledge, and draws out the implications of that process with respect to issues such as professionalism, performance, transparency, and ethics. This thought-provoking book concludes that accountants' technical discourse undermines their ethical reasoning by obscuring the ways in which accounting decisions must be thought through in practice. Accountants with particular ethical perspectives more readily understand and construct particular types of knowledge, so the two issues of knowledge and of ethics are inseparable. Increasingly technical accounting rules can therefore be counterproductive. Instead, this book shows how reinvigorating the ethical discourse within the financial world could be a more effective means of averting future scandals.

Accounting has an ever-increasing significance in contemporary society. Indeed, some argue that its practices are fundamental to the development and functioning of modern capitalist societies. We can see accounting everywhere: in organizations where budgeting, investing, costing, and performance appraisal rely on accounting practices; in financial and other audits; in corporate scandals and financial reporting and regulation; in corporate governance, risk management, and accountability, and in the corresponding growth and influence of the accounting profession. Accounting, too, is an important part of the curriculum and research of business and management schools, the fastest growing sector in higher education. This growth is largely a phenomenon of the last fifty years or so. Prior to that, accounting was seen mainly as a mundane, technical, bookkeeping exercise (and some still share that naive view). The growth in accounting has demanded a corresponding engagement by scholars to examine and highlight the important behavioural, organizational, institutional, and social dimensions of accounting. Pioneering work by accounting researchers and social scientists more generally has persuasively demonstrated to a wider social science, professional, management, and policy audience how many aspects of life are indeed constituted, to an important extent, through the calculative practices of accounting. Anthony Hopwood, to whom this books is dedicated, has been a leading figure in this endeavour, which has effectively defined accounting as a distinctive field of research in the social sciences. The book brings together the work of leading international accounting academics and social scientists, and demonstrates the scope, vitality, and insights of contemporary scholarship in and on accounting and auditing.

This book addresses two important questions: first, why did financial innovation lead to the crisis in the banking sector that developed in 2007–8; and, second, why the political reform of finance has apparently proved so difficult across a variety of political jurisdictions? This ambitious book draws on a team of researchers from different disciplines to develop an innovation and distinctive argument in response to these two critical issues. In the first half of this book our question is about how crisis was generated. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 develop our answer, which is that innovation in and around the financial markets took the form of bricolage which did not consider the risks, uncertainty, and unintended consequences of volume-based business models and complex circuits. The direct implication is that finance needs to be simplified, rather than regulation made more sophisticated. In the second half of the book, our question is about why democratic political control both before and after the crisis has proved so difficult? Chapters 5, 6, and 7 develop our answer, which is that self-serving financial elites are not easily controlled by technocratic elites who are themselves recovering from knowledge failure, or by the rest of the governing classes concerned with political positioning for electoral advantage on issues which are technical, opaque, and illegible to the electorate at large. In Chapter 8, we discuss some of the implications of this analysis for how reform of both banking regulation and democracy is required.

Since the early 1980s there has been an explosion of auditing activity in the United Kingdom and North America. In addition to financial audits there are now medical audits, technology audits, value for money audits, environmental audits, quality audits, teaching audits, and many others. Why has this happened? What does it mean when a society invests so heavily in an industry of checking and when more and more individuals find themselves subject to formal scrutiny? This book argues that the rise of auditing has its roots in political demands for accountability and control. At the heart of a new administrative style, internal control systems have begun to play an important public role and individual and organizational performance has been increasingly formalized and made auditable. The author argues that the new demands and expectations of audits live uneasily with their operational capabilities. Not only is the manner in which they produce assurance and accountability open to question but also, by imposing their own values, audits often have unintended and dysfunctional consequences for the audited organization.

A new era of global banking and insurance is emerging, with leading banks eager to serve international markets. This book explores the issues that arise for banks in their strategic choices as they move into these new international markets. This book challenges conventional assumptions from the international management literature on topics such as the limits of globalization, the importance of cultural and institutional distance, the nature of economies of scale and scope, the existence of first mover advantages, the logic behind the global value chain configuration, the speed and timing of market entry, as well as organizational architecture. It focuses on fundamental strategic decisions such as when, where, and how to enter foreign markets and how to design the organizational architecture of the multinational financial services firm. Using simple theoretical frameworks illustrated by case examples, this book provides a guide to the challenges of the international market for financial services firms.

This book integrates both the changing structure of the commercial banking industry in Europe and the strategic implications of these changes. It begins by concentrating on the economics of banking, presenting an analysis of the principal environment forces affecting the financial sector: deregulation, internationalization, economic instability, technical change, and financial innovation. The second part offers valuable information on current trends in the five main EC countries. The analysis of each country includes a study of the recent evolution of its financial sector, in turn; each sector's inherent economic outlook in terms of profitability, costs, productivity, and competition; as well as the changes in the regulatory environment. The third part of the book is dedicated to an analysis of some of the strategic choices of European banks, such as scale, diversification, and internationalization. Finally, the pace of change within the European banking industry is evaluated, as well as how some of the banks are adapting to the new environment.

The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) is the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression. Many books have explored its causes, but this book systematically explores its consequences. The focus is primarily on the policy and political consequences of the GFC. This book asks how governments responded to the challenge and what the political consequences of the combination of the GFC itself and policy responses to it have been. Based on workshops held in the United States and the United Kingdom, it brings together leading academics to consider the divergent ways in which particular countries have responded in different ways to the crisis, including China, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Part of what is happening is a structural shift in economic power from east to west, but China has its fragilities while Germany offers an example of a largely successful Western model. The book also assesses attempts to develop global economic governance and to reform financial regulation and looks critically at the role of credit rating agencies. Unlike earlier crises, no new paradigm has emerged to challenge existing ways of thinking, meaning that neoliberalism has emerged relatively unscathed. The crisis has lacked a coherent and innovative intellectual response and has been characterized by remarkable policy stability.

As the world's political and economic leaders struggle with the aftermath of the Financial Debacle of 2008, this book asks the question: have financial crises presented opportunities to rebuild the financial system? Examining eight global financial crises since the late 19th century, this historical study offers insights into how the financial landscape — banks, governance, regulation, international cooperation, and balance of power — has been (or failed to be) reshaped after a systemic shock. It includes careful consideration of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the only experience of comparable moment to the recession of the early 21st century, yet also marked in its differences. Taking into account not only the economic and business aspects of financial crises, but also their political and socio-cultural dimensions, the book highlights both their idiosyncrasies and common features, and assesses their impact in the broader context of long-term historical development.

The focus of this book is the development and application of a middle-range theory of culture, self-identity, and work behaviour. According to the authors' self-representative theory, three components are relevant to an individual's work behaviour: cultural and situational characteristics, cognitive representation of the self, and managerial practices and techniques used in an organisation. Culture is viewed as a shared knowledge structure that results in decreased variability in individual interpretation of stimuli. The self is viewed as a dynamic interpretive structure that shapes an individual's interpretation of social milieu. Managerial practices influence work behaviour, and in this book the focus is on how these practices relate to the components of culture and the self. A final chapter provides a number of specific recommendations for how organisations might consider structuring their environment and managerial practices in order to match culture–self interaction.

As financial markets become increasingly complex and integrated, individuals and their families are increasingly faced with making highly sophisticated and all-too-often irreversible economic decisions. Nowhere is this more evident than with regard to retirement decision-making: a half-century ago, traditional defined benefit pension schemes were the norm in the United States, Japan, Australia and much of Europe, but these have now been largely replaced with defined contribution pensions. In the process, employer and government judgment regarding how much to save and where to invest has been replaced by individuals having to make these choices on their own (perhaps assisted by advisers they also select on their own). Additionally, participants in defined contribution plans must also decide how to spend down their pension assets and determine whether to annuitize or take their benefits in a single lump sum. The trend toward increased individual responsibility and greater financial complexity extends into other realms of life as well, for example regarding decisions over credit cards, adjustable rate mortgages, and when to claim retirement benefits. This volume focuses on key lessons for financial decision-making in the wake of that crisis, exploring how financial literacy can enhance peoples' skills and abilities to make more informed economic choices. Moreover, given the demographic forces at work and the structure of the labor markets, where workers change jobs and employers many times before retiring, the increase in individual responsibility with regard to financial security after retirement will continue to be a feature of many economies around the world.