دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی حامل ایده ها در تنظیم حسابداری و مالی سازی حسابداری: جوامع معرفت شناختی - الزویر 2018

ABSTRACT

We investigate one episode of the “financialization” of accounting: the debate over the “correct” method to discount defined benefit (DB) pension plan liabilities for US public sector financial reporting. We outline this issue from the pre-agenda, agenda-setting and alternatives selection phases of the standard setting process, through to the policy decision made by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) in 2012. We find that one group of 15 individuals, which we propose acted as an epistemic community (EC) that was focused on financial economic theory, was disproportionally influential in all phases of the standard setting process, despite its small size. Ideas do not spontaneously travel from one jurisdiction (e.g., financial economics) to another (e.g., accounting) without agency. We thus add a focus on the carriers of ideas to the literature on accounting standard setting, which has so far predominantly examined this process from the standpoint of interests and institutions. We argue that framing theory helps to both empirically identify the hierarchies of the EC, but further helps to make visible the values and assumptions made by agents of financialization who push towards the adoption of financial computation techniques presented as axiologically neutral.

7. Conclusion

Our primary motivation in this study was to improve our understanding of the role of epistemic communities during accounting standard-setting processes. It is all the more important to understand these dynamics as bodies of professional knowledge are continuously transforming, becoming permeable to adjacent fields of expertise (Whitley, 1986) and institutionalizing not only their theories and methods but also calculative tools. Such tools are more important than they may appear. They reside at some of the most micro levels of professional work, and it is tempting to believe they are too insignificant to drive meaningful change. But significantly, they also reside at the margins of their own fields (Miller, 1998), thus making them open to change in ways that the field's core body of knowledge may not be.

We have focused on the policy-making process initiated in 1989, and coordinated by the GASB between 2009 and 2012, examining the discount rate that should be used to discount defined-benefit pension liabilities in government financial reporting. This debate was not only technical but also political: supporters of the risk-free rate believed that the use of any other rate would severely understate (by nearly $100 billion each year) what they claimed to be the true cost of providing pension benefits to teachers, police, firefighters, and other public sector workers. In contrast, supporters of the status quo argued that changing to a risk-free rate could increase liabilities on governmental books to the tune of 1/7th of the United States’ GDP, and double the related annual expense.