AC424      One Unit
Accounting, Organisations and Institutions

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

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The objective of the course is to provide students with an advanced, social science- based and critical understanding of the changing role and position of accounting practices in organisations, both public and private, and in societies more generally. Students will be exposed to advanced scholarship and case materials which show how accounting practices are more than a collection of routine self-evident techniques but are shaped by their institutional contexts, have behavioural consequences and can represent different values. We will focus on how the fundamental assumptions of internal and external accounting practices are institutional in nature and are shaped by social and political aspirations in different jurisdictions. The role of accountants and other agents involved in the production and consumption of accounting numbers will also be addressed.

The course will equip students to understand the inter-relations between technical, organisational and institutional issues. While some technical accounting knowledge may be helpful, it is not essential, and each lecture will provide the necessary technical foundations.

Indicative topics include:
Foundations: Reporting, Calculation and Transparency; Quantification and Measurement; Accounting and the Notion of "Entity"; Audit and Assurance: The Audit Society; Organisational Boundaries, Structure and Control; Accountability, Incentives and Performance; Accounting for Sustainability; Organisational Failure; Accounting Standardisation and Harmonisation; the Political Economy of Financial Reporting and Standard Setting; the Rise of Concerns with Sustainability Reporting and Standard-setting; Accounting and Development; the Roles of Accounting in Global Financial Governance; Political, Institutional and Economic Influences in Changing National and International Financial Reporting Frameworks; Consequences of International Accounting Harmonization for Financial Statement Users, Business Entities and Wider Local and Global Stakeholders.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn and Winter Term.

Teaching will be delivered in the form of two weekly 90-minute sessions over 11 weeks across both Autumn and Winter Terms. Each session contains a variety of technical content, practical exercises, and case analyses. 

This course has a reading and feedback week in Week 6 of both AT and WT so there is 30 hours of teaching per term.

Students are expected to come to each session prepared having done the assigned readings and having prepared the assigned cases and discussion questions.

• Chapman, Cooper & Miller (eds.), Accounting, Organizations and Institutions (Oxford, 2009);
• Mennicken & Salais (eds.), The New Politics of Numbers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022);
• Power, Theorizing the Economy of Traces: From Audit Society to Surveillance Capitalism, Organization Theory, Vol. 3, No. 3, https://doi.org/10.1177/26317877211052296 (2022);
• Ramanna, Political Standards: Corporate Interest, Ideology and Leadership in the Shaping of Accounting Rules for the Market Economy (University of Chicago Press, 2015);
• Doupnik, Finn, Gotti & Perera, International Accounting (McGraw Hill, 2024);
• Nobes & Parker, Comparative International Accounting (Pearson, 2020).

Exam (70%), duration: 120 Minutes in the Spring exam period

Essay (15%)

Essay (15%)

The assignment is an individual assignment.