This paper offers a way of revivifying classical accounting research in the form of a pragmatist neoclassical programme with a sound epistemological underpinning.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper offers a way of revivifying classical accounting research in the form of a pragmatist neoclassical programme with a sound epistemological underpinning.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper draws on a pragmatist perspective on financial accounting and accounting research springing from John Dewey's theory of inquiry.
Findings
Although a pragmatist underpinning does not entail specific methodological prescriptions, it can provide fruitful insights in research design. The paper discusses the structure and content of a research programme drawing on a pragmatist underpinning and sets out proposals for a practical research agenda. Although the agenda is shaped around the topic of identifiable intangibles, much of the paper has substantially wider relevance.
Research limitations/implications
The approach justifies a revival in scholarly research employing classical methods and directed at improving accounting methods and standards.
Practical implications
The approach would promote closer engagement between scholarly accounting and practitioners such as standard-setters, making some contribution to closing the widely acknowledged gap between research and practice.
Originality/value
The paper offers a neoclassical programme of research drawing considerably more extensively on pragmatist philosophy than did theorisation in the classical period.
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Jungkun Park, Jiseon Ahn, Hyowon Hyun and Brian N. Rutherford
In this study, the authors examine the impacts of two facets of retail employees' cognitive support and affective commitment on emotional labor-related outcomes.
Abstract
Purpose
In this study, the authors examine the impacts of two facets of retail employees' cognitive support and affective commitment on emotional labor-related outcomes.
Design/methodology/approach
To test the study hypotheses, 521 retail service employees participated in the survey. By using the structural equation modeling, the results show that employees' perceived organizational support directly and positively employees' affective organizational commitment and emotional exhaustion.
Findings
By using the structural equation modeling, the results show that employees' perceived organizational support directly and positively influence employees' affective organizational commitment and emotional exhaustion. The extent of employees' affective organizational commitment directly and negatively influences emotional labor and exhaustion. Furthermore, employees' emotional exhaustion exerts an influence on retail employees' propensity to leave.
Research limitations/implications
Drawing on social exchange and conservation of resources theories, this study contributes to emotional labor research and practices by examining factors that potentially influences employees' propensity to leave. For future studies, researchers can expand the proposed framework of the current study to other retailing settings.
Practical implications
Findings of the study suggest that retail organizations need to manage employees' support and commitment concerning to understand emotional labor.
Originality/value
The current study found that employees' affective commitment influences key emotional labor constructs including emotional labor and emotional exhaustion. Employees who have a high level of identification, involvement and emotional attachment toward the organization, they are less likely to feel of overload and inefficiency. Given the importance of emotional labor in the retailing setting, the proposed model and findings of this study contribute the existing knowledge of retail employees' behavior.
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Nwamaka A. Anaza, Dana E. Harrison and Brian N. Rutherford
This study aims to advance the organizational buying literature, by examining buyer burnout and its consequences. Specifically, the sequencing of multi-faceted organizational…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to advance the organizational buying literature, by examining buyer burnout and its consequences. Specifically, the sequencing of multi-faceted organizational buyer burnout is established and the impact of each dimension on job satisfaction, job performance, affective organizational commitment and turnover intentions is accessed. The current research is accomplished through the development and examination of competing models and hypothesis testing.
Design/methodology/approach
A sample of 125 business-to-business buyers were surveyed using established scale items. The study examines a series of competing models and outcomes of the facets of burnout through the use of covariance-based structural equation modeling. In addition, indirect, direct and total effects were examined.
Findings
First, this study supports that researchers should examine burnout, as a multi-faceted construct within the organizational buyer context, using the Lewin and Sager model. Second, findings strongly indicate that gaps exist in the current boundary spanner research, given that the majority of this research stream only examines a single aspect, emotional exhaustion, of burnout and fails to account for the impact of both the personal accomplishment and depersonalization facets of burnout. Further, the impact of personal accomplishment is highlighted, given its total effects on examined outcomes.
Originality/value
This study extends the Lewin and Sager model beyond a sales context and finds that each facet of burnout impacts the outcome variables to varying degrees. The total impact of personal accomplishment is highlighted, given that researchers often omit this facet from their investigations.
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Brian N. Rutherford, Nathaniel Hartmann, Nwamaka Anaza and Scott C. Ambrose
This paper aims to analyse the character and strength of the claims made in an emerging literature offering a sociology of financial reporting principles.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to analyse the character and strength of the claims made in an emerging literature offering a sociology of financial reporting principles.
Design/methodology/approach
The analysis evaluates exemplary works in the literature against the characteristics of the paranoid style first identified by Richard Hofstadter: overheated claims of a far-reaching, malign and collusive machinery of influence; a reductive, rationalistic and dualistic reading of events; weak empirics; and weak theorisation.
Findings
A significant stream within the literature is coming to be constructed in the paranoid style. Paranoid stylistics, used as a diagnostic tool, alerts us here to distorted judgement.
Research limitations/implications
Alternative ways of avoiding the dangers of paranoid-style readings are suggested, ranging from resisting the temptations towards such readings to a radical re-working of the epistemics of “socio-accounting”.
Practical implications
The danger of allowing the conclusions advanced in the literature to go unchallenged is that they may influence society’s attitude to accounting, public policy-making and scholars’ willingness to contribute to the crafting of reporting principles and standards.
Originality/value
Although paranoid style analysis has been widely used to examine narratives in other academic fields, to the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to apply it to scholarly accounting.
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Nwamaka A. Anaza, Brian N. Rutherford, Gavin Jiayun Wu and Ashok Bhattarai
Drawing on the organizational buying decision-making framework, the purpose of this study is to investigate how sales orientation (SOCO) affects buyers’ conflict…
Abstract
Purpose
Drawing on the organizational buying decision-making framework, the purpose of this study is to investigate how sales orientation (SOCO) affects buyers’ conflict, salesperson-owned loyalty and buyers’ propensity to end a supply relationship when selling firms use a single versus multiple salesforce go-to-market strategy.
Design/methodology/approach
Survey data was analyzed with a sample of organizational buyers. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were used to analyze the data.
Findings
Findings reveal that a selling firm’s go-to-market salesforce strategy moderates certain relational aspects of the buyer–salesperson relationship, consequently influencing a buyer’s decision to end a supply relationship.
Research limitations/implications
Empirically, these findings indicate that the effects of selling orientation on conflict, salesperson-owned loyalty and exit intentions are not only based on the salesperson’s efforts but are conditional on the selling firm’s go-to-market strategy, particularly with the implementation of multiple salespeople selling to a particular industrial buyer.
Practical implications
These results suggest that a salesforce go-to-market strategy conveys serious consequences on buying decisions. Given that a go-to-market strategy involving multiple salespeople impacts the buyer’s relationship with the selling firm to a greater degree, managerial oversight must remain present when selling firms decide to pursue such a go-to-market strategy.
Originality/value
The empirical investigation of a salesforce go-to-market strategy is an original pursuit. Specifically, this study shows that while it is critical that buying and selling firms monitor buyer–salesperson relationships as the basis for supply partnerships, these exchanges are largely contingent on the selling firm’s go-to-market strategy.
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This paper aims to advance the case for accounting scholars possessing substantial professional accounting expertise to use judgement drawing on that expertise…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to advance the case for accounting scholars possessing substantial professional accounting expertise to use judgement drawing on that expertise (target-disciplinary judgement) as a major component of their research methodology.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper addresses methodological issues drawing on the criteriological debate within the methodological literature, a review of the ironies of contemporary narrative accounting research, including professional firm research, and an analysis of epistemological congruence seeking analogous cases in mainstream social scientific research.
Findings
The paper shows that, within a vocationally related subject like accounting, appropriately trained and qualified scholarly researchers have the opportunity to deploy their professional expertise to make expansive target-disciplinary judgements in ways that satisfy accepted social scientific methodological criteria and offer epistemological convergence comparable to that of mainstream approaches like insider anthropology and autoethnography.
Research limitations/implications
Using target-disciplinary expertise to make expansive judgements provides scholars with a way of expanding the range of research questions they address, including resuming evaluative-descriptive surveys that can, among other things, examine the quality of disclosures holistically rather than in the highly atomistic way often adopted by academics at the moment.
Social implications
The approach defended in this paper offers accounting scholars the opportunity to apply their particular skills to investigate questions likely to be of interest to preparers and users of financial statements, to explore issues of wider interest, such as the adequacy of environmental or social responsibility disclosures, and to test and augment professional firm findings. In so doing, scholars can go some way to remedying the gap between academic research and practice.
Originality/value
Little attention has been given to the use of expansive, expert target-disciplinary judgement in the methodological literature.
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To respond to the comment by Stone and Parker on my paper “The struggle to fabricate accounting narrative obfuscation: An actor-network-theoretic analysis of a failing project”.
Abstract
Purpose
To respond to the comment by Stone and Parker on my paper “The struggle to fabricate accounting narrative obfuscation: An actor-network-theoretic analysis of a failing project”.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper responds to issues highlighted by Stone and Parker.
Findings
This response argues that there is at least one alternative to the augmentation of Flesch: that we bring our skills and experience as accountants directly to bear on narratives, to analyse and report on how accessible and informative they are – and even to what extent they obfuscate – in ways that will, at least according to some definitions, be subjective but perhaps no more subjective than asserting that some simple statistic represents a reliable proxy for a complex notion such as accessibility.
Originality/value
This comment adds to the necessary debate about how we should tackle research on accounting narratives.
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Duleep Delpechitre, Brian Nicholas Rutherford and Lucette B. Comer
The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of salesperson empathy, both cognitive and affective, on business-to-business buyer-salesperson relational outcomes…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of salesperson empathy, both cognitive and affective, on business-to-business buyer-salesperson relational outcomes. Specifically, the direct impact of empathy is examined in relation to both the salesperson’s communication ability and customer-oriented behavior. The impact of empathy is then examined as a direct and indirect influencer of satisfaction with the salesperson and commitment to the salesperson.
Design/methodology/approach
To attain the objective of this research, an empirical study was conducted using 248 business-to-business purchasing agents.
Findings
The study found that cognitive empathy and affective empathy had a positive relationship with customer-oriented behaviors, information communication ability and commitment to the salesperson. However, only cognitive empathy was found to have a positive relationship with customer’s satisfaction with the salesperson.
Originality/value
Although empathy has found to have a positive effect on sales, sales research has yet to provide conclusive evidence on whether cognitive empathy and affective empathy would have a similar effect on a salesperson-customer relationship. This study provides evidence that not all facets of empathy influence relational outcomes the same way and differ in magnitude. This provides strong support for the importance of studying the impact of empathy from a faceted viewpoint rather than a uni-dimensional perspective when examining the influence on buyer-seller relational outcomes.
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The purpose of this paper is to analyse the accounting research project concerned with accounting narrative obfuscation, focusing on the translation of the concept of readability…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to analyse the accounting research project concerned with accounting narrative obfuscation, focusing on the translation of the concept of readability from educational psychology via an earlier literature concerned with the readability of accounting narratives per se.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper uses actor-network theory and examines, in particular, the need for a network to accommodate the interests of its actors and the consequent risk of failure.
Findings
The analysis shows that the project is failing because the network seeking to support it is failing, and failing because of its inability to adapt sufficiently to accommodate the interests of its constituents. This failure is contrasted with the earlier concern with readability per se, which did see a successful reconfiguration of actors’ interests.
Research limitations/implications
The puzzle of the maladjustment of the network concerned with obfuscation is examined and it is suggested that it is a consequence of interests prevailing in the wider academic research network within which the relevant human actors are embedded.
Social implications
The reasons for the failure of the project are bound up in the wider circumstances of the contemporary accounting research community and may affect scholars’ capacity to pursue knowledge effectively.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to a modest stream of actor–network analysis directed at accounting research itself.