Dr Andrea Mennicken MAR 3.24

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.

Teaching will be delivered in the form of two weekly 90-minute sessions over 10 weeks during the Autumn Term. Each session contains a variety of technical content, practical exercises, and case analyses.

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

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); 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 (2021); Mennicken & Salais (eds), The New Politics of Numbers (Cham, 2022).

Essay (100%, 8000 words) in the ST.