Suchergebnisse

This study compares organized labor's reactions to changing management rhetorics as these rhetorics surrounded accounting- based incentive plans, including profit sharing. Results suggest that labor's perceptions of profit sharing changed dramatically from the 1900–1930 period to post-World War II. The shift, in turn, prompts an exploration of two research questions: (1) how and why did the national labor discourse around the management rhetoric and its emphasis on accounting information change, and (2) how did this change render unions more governable in their support for accounting-based incentive plans?

Using an environmental contingency approach, Johnson and Kaplan [1987] argued that virtually all management accounting practices used at the time of their study had been developed by 1925 in response to increased uncertainty caused by geographical expansion and large-scale operations. During the 1821 to 1860 subperiod, the Hudson's Bay Company had significant uncertainty which was largely a result of the dynamic environment of its fur-trade operation. Consequently, it should have developed management accounting practices in response to uncertainty. Moreover, the management accounting practices should have been less extensive in the subperiods before and after 1821 to 1860, as these subperiods had less uncertainty. The Company's accounting and related records were examined for 1670 to 1914, and provided evidence to support the contention of Johnson and Kaplan that management accounting practices evolved positively with uncertainty.

Institutional efforts in the U.S. to develop a conceptual framework for business enterprises can be traced to the Paton and Littleton monograph in 1940 and later to the two Accounting Research Studies by Moonitz and Sprouse in 1962–1963. A committee of the American Accounting Association issued an influential report in which it advocated a "decision usefulness" approach in 1966, which was carried forward in 1973 by the report of the American Institute of CPAs' Trueblood Committee. All of this laid the groundwork for the conceptual framework project of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), which published six concepts statements between 1978 and 1985. A seventh concepts statement is likely to be published in 2000. It is still not clear how the FASB's conceptual framework has influenced the setting of accounting standards, and some academic commentators are skeptical of the usefulness of all normative conceptual framework projects.