The cost of a telegram: the evolution of the international regulation of the telegraph

The telegraph was the first practical use of electricity. It revolutionized commercial communication and facilitated the globalization of business. As the telegraph developed as a medium of international communication, regulation was needed to overcome administrative and technical issues, and, importantly, to establish accounting procedures for the distribution of the revenue to multiple national partners. This paper traces the evolution of revenue allocation models through three international organizations that ultimately lead to the creation of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in 1932. The shifts in revenue allocation methods are consistent with a shift in focus of regulation from growth to efficiency over the rapid development of the telegraph network. The procedures put in place are still used in the regulation of international telecommunications but with continuing conflict over their effects. The rules developed in the regulation of the telegraph also set the stage for the rise of expertise in the maintenance of international order and the development of accounting as an epistemic community in international relations

Quantitative Research and the Critical Accounting Project

The critical accounting project has largely shunned quantitative methods. While this is partly justified on philosophical grounds, the potential for quantitative methods to contribute to the critical accounting project is significant. This paper reviews the position of quantitative methods within critical theory and attempts to reclaim quantitative methods as a legitimate form of critical accounting research. The paper then identifies some aspects of the untapped potential of quantitative methods for the critical accounting project including exploring the vast unexplained variance in market models, developing alternative dependent variables for analysis, providing descriptive baselines for the assessment of social transformations, and the potential for mixed methods studies

The Relationship between Management and Financial Accounting as Professions and Technologies of Practice

This Chapter explores the suggestion to unify financial and management accounting both as professions and technologies of practice. I argue that drift in professional jurisdictions and cognitive domains encourages consolidation of the profession but there remain distinct social roles for each information technology. The challenge for the profession is to maintain the integrity of management accounting as a technology of practice in the face of renewed professional hegemony of financial accounting

Analytic narratives in accounting history: Combining formal models and small sample research.

Purpose The paper provides an introduction to the “analytic narratives project” in political science that argues for the use of formal models as a basis for narrative history. The approach is illustrated in an accounting context by reinterpreting the timeline of Scottish professionalization presented in Lee’s (2006) innovative counterfactual history. Design/methodology/approach Analytic narratives use formal models to create expectations that can be contrasted with actual events. The use of formal models provides a bridge between theory and small sample research that allows theory to inform case analysis and case analysis to contribute to theory development. Lee’s (2006) timeline is reinterpreted as an analytic narrative based on labour market signaling. Finding The analytic narrative embeds Lee’s (2006) counterfactual history within a structured set of alternative outcomes. These outcomes are evaluated to identify which one would be preferred by all parties (a Nash equilibrium) and then backward induction is used to identify the choices necessary to reach that outcome. The analysis identifies some conditions necessary for actual events to unfold in the way they did. Research limitations/implications The application of analytic narratives to the timeline of development of the Scottish accounting profession suggests alternative research questions and provides an alternative counterfactual outcome to that suggested by Lee (2006). Originality/value The paper advances the debate on the forms and uses of narrative in historical research by introducing and illustrating an important innovation. Key words: historiography, analytic narratives, counterfactual history

“As If”: Equifinality, Institutional work, and accounting in the Eastern Mail Service Arbitrations 1866-1905

I examine the negotiations among the UK and its colonies to allocate the cost of operating the Eastern Mail Service (UK to India, Hong Kong and Australia) among national post offices benefitting from its service. Four key sets of negotiations are identified during the period 1866 – 1905. I consider how negotiations were affected by the changing institutional context of the postal system and relationships between the UK and its colonies during this period; in particular, the negotiations capture the confrontation between the liberal social and economic philosophies that had risen to prominence within the UK and the existence of empire. The results demonstrate that parties to the negotiations had an intuitive sense of the cost allocations that would be consistent with economic liberalism (and modern “as if” economic theories of cost allocation) but varied from this baseline in favour of settler colonies versus non-settler colonies, and an Imperial centric view of the benefits of the mail network. The emergence of cost allocations approximating current theoretical norms occurred within an emerging institutional context that favoured political independence between nations and liberalized international trade

The discovery of cumulative knowledge: Strategies for designing and communicating qualitative research.

Purpose: this paper provides guidance for designing and generating cumulative knowledge based on qualitative research. Design/methodology/approach: the paper draws on the philosophy of science and specific examples of qualitative studies in accounting that have claimed a cumulative contribution to knowledge to develop a taxonomy of theoretically-justified approaches to generating cumulative knowledge from qualitative research. Findings: the paper argues for a definition of cumulative knowledge that is inclusive of anti-realist research, i.e. knowledge is cumulative if it increases the extent and density of intertextual linkages in a field. It identifies the possibility of cumulative qualitative research based on extensions to the scope of our knowledge and the depth of our knowledge. Extensions to the scope of our knowledge may include expanding the time periods, context, and/or theoretical perspective used to explore a phenomenon. Extensions to the depth of our knowledge may include new empirical knowledge, methodological pluralism, theory elaboration or analytic generalization. Individual studies can demonstrate their contribution to cumulative knowledge by locating their research within a typology/taxonomy that makes explicit the relationship of current research to past, and potential, research. Research limitations/implications: the taxonomy may be useful to qualitative researchers designing and reporting research that will have impact on the literature. Social implications: the increased use of research impact as an evaluation metric has the potential to handicap the development of qualitative research which has been characterized as generating non-cumulative knowledge. The taxonomy and the strategies for establishing cumulative impact may provide a means for this approach to research to establish its importance as a contribution to knowledge. Originality/value: The concept of cumulative knowledge has not been systematically applied to research based on qualitative methods in accounting

Professionalization and the Accounting Profession

This Chapter reviews the critical literature on the emergence, development and demise of the professional model in accounting and auditing. While the critical accounting literature is broad and amorphous, in this Chapter the focus is on those studies that present an “immanent critique” of professionalization (i.e. an analysis of the contradictions of this institutional form) or which place the accounting profession within a political economy framework that examines its position at the nexus of the economy, civil society and the state. The Chapter is structured as a stylized history of the accounting profession beginning with the emergence of professional associations, the closure of the profession through the use of ascriptive criteria for membership, the profession’s engagement with the power of the state and the embedding of accounting expertise in regulation, the globalization of the profession and the rise of a commercial model of accounting practice. The Chapter ends by identifying pressing research issues that arise from the emergence of accounting as a “post-professional” occupation. This perspective assumes that the commercial model of accounting does not simply replace the professional model but rather generates diverse hybrid institutions with emergent features that will require empirical and theoretical work to fully appreciate

University Sustainability Reporting: A review of the literature and development of a model.

Many universities have made a commitment to improving the sustainability of their campuses however only a small number report to stakeholders on their sustainability performance to allow accountability and the quality of the reports issued varies widely. This Chapter reviews studies of sustainability reporting by universities and identifies the factors that have been associated with the decision to report on sustainability and the quality of those reports. Most of the existing empirical work on sustainability reporting by universities is case-based. We critique this literature and identify areas in need of conceptual and empirical clarification. We provide a model, hypotheses, constructs and proxies to support large sample research on sustainability reporting by Universities

IDA: An implicit, parallelizable method for calculating drainage area

Models of landscape evolution or hydrological processes typically depend on the accurate determination of upslope drainage area from digital elevation data, but such calculations can be very computationally demanding when applied to high-resolution topographic data. To overcome this limitation, we propose calculating drainage area in an implicit, iterative manner using linear solvers. The basis of this method is a recasting of the flow routing problem as a sparse system of linear equations, which can be solved using established computational techniques. This approach is highly parallelizable, enabling data to be spread over multiple computer processors. Good scalability is exhibited, rendering it suitable for contemporary high-performance computing architectures with many processors, such as graphics processing units (GPUs). In addition, the iterative nature of the computational algorithms we use to solve the linear system creates the possibility of accelerating the solution by providing an initial guess, making the method well suited to iterative calculations such as numerical landscape evolution models. We compare this method with a previously proposed parallel drainage area algorithm and present several examples illustrating its advantages, including a continent-scale flow routing calculation at 3 arc sec resolution, improvements to models of fluvial sediment yield, and acceleration of drainage area calculations in a landscape evolution model. We additionally describe a modification that allows the method to be used for parallel basin delineation.National Science Foundation (U.S.). Geomorphology and Land-Use Dynamics Program (Award EAR-0951672

Resting-State Functional Connectivity in Late-Life Depression: Higher Global Connectivity and More Long Distance Connections

Functional magnetic resonance imaging recordings in the resting-state (RS) from the human brain are characterized by spontaneous low-frequency fluctuations in the blood oxygenation level dependent signal that reveal functional connectivity (FC) via their spatial synchronicity. This RS study applied network analysis to compare FC between late-life depression (LLD) patients and control subjects. Raw cross-correlation matrices (CM) for LLD were characterized by higher FC. We analyzed the small-world (SW) and modular organization of these networks consisting of 110 nodes each as well as the connectivity patterns of individual nodes of the basal ganglia. Topological network measures showed no significant differences between groups. The composition of top hubs was similar between LLD and control subjects, however in the LLD group posterior medial-parietal regions were more highly connected compared to controls. In LLD, a number of brain regions showed connections with more distant neighbors leading to an increase of the average Euclidean distance between connected regions compared to controls. In addition, right caudate nucleus connectivity was more diffuse in LLD. In summary, LLD was associated with overall increased FC strength and changes in the average distance between connected nodes, but did not lead to global changes in SW or modular organization