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Prof Michael Power KSW 3.12 and Dr Andrea Mennicken KSW 3.09

This course is compulsory on the MRes/PhD in Accounting (AOI) (Accounting, Organisations and Institutions Track). This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course is also offered for students from other MPhil/PhD or MRes/PhD programmes, with the approval and written permission of the PhD in Accounting Programme Director (Accounting, Organisations and Institutions Track).

The object of the course is to provide students with exposure to advanced analyses of the accounting process within and between organisations, both public and private, and across societies more generally. Students will be required to engage with studies of accounting practices to understand how they are shaped by their institutional contexts, have behavioural consequences and can represent different values. The course will focus on how efforts to design internal and external accounting practices are both a function of specific economic and political interests, but are also shaped by social and political aspirations. The role of accountants and other agents of accounting processes will be addressed.

Overall, the course is intended to cultivate an understanding of the inter-relations between technical, organisational and institutional issues. While some technical accounting knowledge will be helpful, it is not essential and each seminar will provide the necessary technical foundations.

Indicative topics include:

Foundations of Reporting, Calculation and Disclosure; Transnational Regulation and Standardisation; Accounting and the Notion of "Entity"; Audit and Assurance: The Audit Society; Organisational Boundaries, Structure and Control; Performance, Accountability Incentives; Accounting for Sustainability; Organisational Failure as a Process.

10, 3-hour seminars in weeks 1-10 of MT and a 2-hour essay workshop in week 11 of MT.

This year, some or all of this teaching may be delivered using virtual classes as an alternative to face-to-face teaching.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of MT.

Students will be required to produce two pieces of written work. This may take the form of either an essay, or the analysis of a case, and may also include in-class presentations and team-based work. This work will be assessed, but the grades will not count towards the overall course assessment.

Chapman, Cooper & Miller (eds), Accounting, Organizations and Institutions (Oxford, 2009); Hopwood & Miller (eds), Accounting as Social and Institutional Practice, Cambridge, 1994; Power, The Audit Society, Oxford, 1999;  Mennicken & Espeland, “What’s new with numbers” Annual Review of Sociology (2019); Power, Modelling the microfoundations of the audit society: Organizations and the logic of the audit trail. Academy of Management Review (2019).

Essay (100%, 6000 words) in the ST.

MRes/PhD in Accounting students must pass the course assessment, normally with high Merit (at least 65%) or Distinction marks, to proceed to the next year of the programme.