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The current financial reporting environment, with its increasing use of accounting estimates, including fair value estimates, suggests that unethical accounting estimates may be a growing concern. This paper provides explanations and empirical evidence for why some types of accounting estimates in financial reporting may promote a form of ethical blindness. These types of ethical blindness can have an escalating effect that corrupts not only an individual or organization but also the accounting profession and the public interest it serves. Ethical blindness in the standards of professional accountants may be a factor in the extent of misreporting, and may have taken on new urgency as a result of the proposals to change the conceptual framework for financial reporting using international standards. The social consequences for users of financial statements can be huge. The acquittal of former Nortel executives on fraud charges related to accounting manipulations is viewed by many as legitimizing accounting gamesmanship. This decision illustrates that the courts may not be the best place to deal with ethical reporting issues. The courts may be relied on for only the most egregious unethical conduct and, even then, the accounting profession is ill equipped to assist the legal system in prosecuting accounting fraud unless the standards have been clarified. We argue that the problem of unethical reporting should be addressed by the accounting profession itself, preferably as a key part of the conceptual framework that supports accounting and auditing standards, and the codes of ethical conduct that underpin the professionalism of accountants.
Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence regarding the selection procedures for and characteristics of senior officials in supreme audit institutions (SIAs). Design/methodology/approach - This study follows a quantitative approach using original data collected for presidential elections of SIAs in the 16 federal states in Germany. A fractional logit model is calculated to test different theoretical assumptions in relation to structural, political and individual factors. Findings - The descriptive results confirm the findings of prior research that presidential candidates are elected with very high approval rates. The main determinants are the vote share of the ruling coalition and the executive experience of the presidential candidate. Research limitations/implications - This study focuses on 16 federal states in Germany, but an international comparative perspective covering subnational levels would further augment analysis through the variance of selection procedures and electoral outcomes. Social implications - Independence of auditors is a fundamental issue for the control of the executive, but it seems that there are inevitable trade-offs therein, such as between knowledge of the auditing objects or the politicization of the election process and the independence of the auditor. Originality/value - This study provides novel empirical insights into the election and selection procedures for senior SIA officials at the subnational level, and shows that the executive exerts strong, but functionally reasonable, influence on candidate selection.
Predicting Paris: Multi-Method Approaches to Forecast the Outcomes of Global Climate Negotiations
(2016)
We examine the negotiations held under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change in Paris, December 2015. Prior to these negotiations, there was considerable uncertainty about whether an agreement would be reached, particularly given that the world’s leaders failed to do so in the 2009 negotiations held in Copenhagen. Amid this uncertainty, we applied three different methods to predict the outcomes: an expert survey and two negotiation simulation models, namely the Exchange Model and the Predictioneer’s Game. After the event, these predictions were assessed against the coded texts that were agreed in Paris. The evidence suggests that combining experts’ predictions to reach a collective expert prediction makes for significantly more accurate predictions than individual experts’ predictions. The differences in the performance between the two different negotiation simulation models were not statistically significant.
New forms of communication and greater accessibility of Islamic texts on-line allow Muslims to shape their own religiosity, to become less dependent on established sources of authority, and thereby to become more aware of their own cultural diversity as a community. New practices of transnational Islam, and the growth of new concepts of Muslim identities currently emerging in the on-line community, are relatively free from immediate constraints. This article provides the result of a sociological analysis of three Internet sites in Sydney which deliver on-line fatwas. Even if cyberspace has allowed the Muslim world to be de-territorialised and provides a way for people to distance themselves from traditional communities if they wish, this research points out a variety of approaches, including one case which is aiming at re-localising an Australian Muslim system of values. This case highlights ways in which first generation Muslims are re-territorialising Shari'a in a specific western country.
This article explores the practice and political significance of politicians’ journeys to conflict zones. It focuses on the German example, looking at field trips to theatres of international intervention as a way of first-hand knowledge in policymaking. Paying tribute to Lisa Smirl and her work on humanitarian spaces, objects and imaginaries and on liminality in aid worker biographies, two connected arguments are developed. First, through the exploration of the routinized practices of politicians’ field trips the article shows how these journeys not only remain confined to the ‘auxiliary space’ of aid/intervention, but that it is furthermore a staged reality of this auxiliary space that most politicians experience on their journeys. The question is then asked, second, what politicians actually experience on their journeys and how their experiences relate to their policy knowledge about conflict and intervention. It is shown that political field trips enable sensory/affectual, liminoid and liminal experiences, which have functions such as authority accumulation, agenda setting, community building, and civilizing domestic politics, while at the same time reinforcing, in most cases, pre-existing conflict and intervention imaginaries.
Through an analysis of climate policy-making in the European Commission (EU), this article argues that co-ordination in the Commission displays the same characteristics as the co-ordination across ministries in central governments, i.e., the properties of negative co-ordination. The article is based on a survey among Commission officials. Overall, the article reveals that a public administration perspective on the Commission proves invaluable to gain insights on how decisions are made at the European Union level. The article contributes to the emerging literature viewing the Commission as an ordinary bureaucracy - as opposed to a unique supranational organization.
In 2002 Germany adopted an ambitious national sustainability strategy, covering all three sustainability spheres and circling around 21 key indicators. The strategy stands out because of its relative stability over five consecutive government constellations, its high status and increasingly coercive nature. This article analyses the strategy's role in the policy process, focusing on the use and influence of indicators as a central steering tool. Contrasting rationalist and constructivist perspectives on the role of knowledge in policy, two factors, namely the level of consensus about policy goals and the institutional setting of the indicators, are found to explain differences in use and influence both across indicators and over time. Moreover, the study argues that the indicators have been part of a continuous process of ‘structuring’ in which conceptual and instrumental use together help structure the sustainability challenge in such a way that it becomes more manageable for government policy.
The literature on international regulatory regimes has highlighted how rival standards can create different points of convergence. Scholarly attention has also focused on how the European Union (EU) and the United States (USA) attempt to ‘export’ their environmental standards internationally. Here, we explore the effectiveness of these attempts by means of third states' decisions to ratify the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the Convention on Biological Diversity, a multilateral environmental agreement regulating genetically modified organisms that is promoted by the EU but opposed by the USA. Our findings confirm that both rivals are able to influence the ratification decision of states, but they also suggest that these effects may have different origins. Countries relying more heavily on US markets for food exports tend to be less likely to ratify the Cartagena Protocol, while countries that have applied for EU membership are more likely to ratify the protocol.
An egalitarian approach to the fair representation of voters specifies three main institutional requirements: proportional representation, legislative majority rule and a parliamentary system of government. This approach faces two challenges: the under-determination of the resulting democratic process and the idea of a trade-off between equal voter representation and government accountability. Linking conceptual with comparative analysis, the article argues that we can distinguish three ideal-typical varieties of the egalitarian vision of democracy, based on the stages at which majorities are formed. These varieties do not put different relative normative weight onto equality and accountability, but have different conceptions of both values and their reconciliation. The view that accountability is necessarily linked to ‘clarity of responsibility’, widespread in the comparative literature, is questioned – as is the idea of a general trade-off between representation and accountability. Depending on the vision of democracy, the two values need not be in conflict.
The sociology of violence still struggles with two critical questions: What motivates people to act violently on behalf of groups and how do they come to identify with the groups for which they act? Methodologically the article addresses these puzzling problems in favor of a relational sociology that argues against both micro- and macro-reductionist accounts, while theoretically it proposes a twofold reorientation: first, it makes a plea for the so called cognitive turn in social theory; second, it proposes following praxeological accounts of social action that focus on the dynamic interpenetration of cognition and socio-cultural practices. The argument is that symbolic boundaries constitute the “missing link” that allows for overcoming the micro-macro gap in violence research: Symbolic boundaries can cause people's participation in collective violence by providing the essential relational resources for violent action and by triggering the cognitive/affective mechanisms necessary for social actors to become drawn into mobilization processes that can cause their engaging in coordinated attacks on sites across the boundary. The article offers a new theoretical argument by drawing on knowledge from violence research, social action theory and cognitive science allowing for a non-reductionist theory of action that explains how and why people engage in collective violence.