Supervisor feedback is essential for training and socialising early career auditors. One fundamental aspect and choice of a supervisor's feedback practice and style is whether to focus on encouraging good or discouraging poor performance. We acknowledge that early career auditors likely receive feedback on both good and poor performance in ongoing and extended feedback relationships with their closest supervisor. A work–life reality that implies that the effects of supervisors' inclinations towards a specific performance feedback sign must be assessed within a frame in which they coexist to varying degrees. We generate hypotheses on how the feedback sign from the closest supervisor affects early career auditors' underreporting of time and intrinsic work motivation, which are two matters related to audit quality. We found that supervisor feedback on negative performance was associated with increased underreporting of time and decreased intrinsic motivation. Feedback on positive performance lessens underreporting of time and supports the development of intrinsic motivation. In summary, our results support emphasising the type of performance for which supervisors choose to provide feedback.

The recruitment process is central for managing human capital and attracting staff that are motivated to pursue a career within auditing. In this article, we explore a challenge facing audit firms’ human capital management practices related to the recruitment of junior auditors. When focusing on soft skills during recruitment of junior auditors to secure long-term human capital, audit firms risk creating expectations that are not met during the first year(s). These unmet expectations risk creating negative attitudes about retaining within the occupation. Using longitudinal cohort data on university graduates entering audit firms, we show that perceiving soft (hard) skills being in focus during recruitment positively (negatively) affects the intention to leave the audit occupation and firm after having gained one year of work experience. The positive (detrimental) effect relates only to a perceived focus on soft interpersonal skills and not on soft intrapersonal skills. For a perceived focus on soft interpersonal skills, it is also evidenced that a mismatch of perceived employer skill focus over time drives turnover intentions and that a perceived employer focus on hard skills during the first year of work increases the effect of an initial perceived focus on soft interpersonal skills during recruitment.

By collecting and analysing survey data from newly employed audit assistants at the largest accounting firms in Sweden, this chapter aims to analyse key aspects of becoming an auditor. The study investigates the characteristics of these audit assistants and to what extent their opinions coincide with the opinions of other highly educated citizens. It also investigates to what extent four value commitments of the new recruits coincide with these of senior auditors. The results show that the ones recruited today are more diverse than their older peers with respect to educational, socio-economical, and geographical backgrounds. While sharing high confidence in the universities, the legal system, and the police, the audit recruits' opinions (i.e. trust in societal institutions like the media) deviate from other citizens with higher education. The similar opinions related to auditing (e.g. professional and client commitments) indicate that the newly recruited auditors seem to already closely reflect the identity of authorised and approved auditors when being employed. They also believe that the reason for their being hired is more related to ‘soft’ skills than to ‘hard’ accounting and auditing knowledge.

This study explores dairy farmers’ accounts of farm animals in a context heavily influenced by the concept of farm animal welfare (FAW). We illustrate how external demands linked to FAW, performance concerns, and proximity to animals shape farmers’ formal and cognitive accounts of animals. We explain how different accounts underlie farmers’ accountability for animals. Using FAW as an example of a referent concept, we propose that accountability can be limited conceptually by its referent. This limit is not a matter of its (in)ability to account fully for all lived experiences. Rather, it is a matter of what one is or is not accountable for—such as the mortality rate but not culling—as well as assumptions regarding the referent—such as the nature of animal welfare and how it can be assessed and safeguarded. Even when it is conceptually bounded in this way, self-accountability has potential to alter farming practices by reflecting on caring about animals and on what this implies for oneself and the animals.

Purpose - The purpose of this Editorial is to reflect on the potentials and challenges of qualitative research in financial accounting and introduce the four papers included in this Special Issue.

Design/methodology/approach - The authors draw on and discuss extant literature and the papers included in the Special Issue to develop our assessment of the current state of the field of qualitative financial accounting research and possible future paths ahead.

Findings - The authors observe that qualitative research on financial accounting is still an emerging field with substantial further research potential.

Research limitations/implications - The authors outline future potentials for qualitative accounting research.

Originality/value - This Editorial contributes to studies on the state of academic research in (financial) accounting.

This study examines the under-researched equity sales function and analyses how equity brokers use accounting to generate individualized, contrarian investment recommendations to serve fund manager clients in a highly competitive market for investment advice. This study reports on the brokers’ practices using an ethnographically inspired study of an equity sales desk and follows the lifecycle of a brokers’ investment case referred to herein as “Indumine” (pseudonym). The analysis shows how the brokers used accounting to develop the case together with fund manager clients and against the analyst consensus – a practice the brokers referred to as “reverse brokering”. Unlike previous analyses of how accounting influences investment decisions by being stable and objective, the brokers in our analysis continually added and abandoned accounting items in order to maintain a distance from consensus, remain subjective and interesting to clients, and achieve recognition. To make theoretical sense of such a use of accounting, this paper puts forth a consumption perspective of accounting. The argument is that the relevance of the accounting used for the brokers’ investment recommendations is consumed when the information becomes factual and impersonal, and no longer sustains the brokers’ contrarian view of the share; the challenge for the brokers is to sustain the economic potential of the case despite the temporary facticity of the accounting information. The paper proposes that this form of accounting consumption constitutes an elementary form of accounting use, operating in the shadow of more formal information infrastructure.

This paper examines how auditors prepare for the annual general meeting (AGM) and how they report their work to the shareholders there. Prior literature has suggested—but not explicitly studied—that the endpoint of an audit is a state of comfort between the auditor and the management and audit committee members, but also is potentially fragile. The fragility can arise from a failure to relay trust to the investor community, which may initiate or increase doubts about the financial report and/or the auditor's independence. We build the case that an AGM is an event to study how the endpoint of an audit engagement is both a state of collective comfort and a fragile state. The analysis is based on ten interviews and three workshops with auditors as well as observations at 67 AGMs. To analyze the field material, the paper draws on Goffman's idea of face‐work, which requires backstage preparations, notably with management, and a front stage performance as an independent auditor to relay trust to the shareholders. The paper details how auditors at the AGM perform as independent verifiers of the management's financial report. Although we recorded that auditors were typically successful in preventing the backstage activities from becoming visible to the shareholders, we found incidents that challenged both the auditors' and the managements' face. In analyzing these incidents, we found that auditors reinforced their image as independent to regain both their own face and the management's face. The management did not take a similar collective responsibility for the auditor's face, which implies that auditors were asymmetrically committed to the management. As a take‐away, the paper discusses how governance mechanisms backstage are linked and can surface front stage at the AGM.

I Sverige har införandet av obligatorisk IFRS för noterade företag varit omdiskuterat. I boken IFRS – Dilemman och utmaningar diskuteras skälen till detta, med användning av såväl författarnas egen som andras forskning. En aspekt av IFRS är att det är principbaserat och kräver bedömningar vid upprättande av finansiella rapporter. Detta kan leda till brist på harmonisering och skapa svårigheter för exempelvis revisorer. Å andra sidan skulle det sannolikt vara svårt att införa strikta redovisningsregler globalt. En annan aspekt av IFRS är att det baseras på en syn på ägande och företagsstyrning som skiljer sig från den som utgör grunden för svenskt näringsliv. Detta avspeglar sig exempelvis i användning av verkligt värde inom IFRS, och i den traditionellt svaga tillsynen i Sverige.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine how a shareholder association prepares for and later act at the annual general meeting. It focusses on how the association evaluates corporate proposals to pay dividends and how they vote on equity distributions at the annual general meeting. Design/methodology/approach - This paper relies on observation of the shareholder association before the annual general meeting as well as at the meeting. The analysis is informed by institutional analysis as a way to make sense of how the association experience tension in the setting of the stock market and how it activates responses to these tensions. Findings - The shareholder association failed to target companies that comply with an institutionalized view of good ownership despite those companies distributing more equity than the association deems to be in line with sound governance. This the authors understand to result from institutional tensions between a traditional stewardship model of governance and the more recent financial investor logic that emphasizes equity distributions as mean to create shareholder wealth. As good ownership is often equated with long-term committed owners, which makes the association fail to target non-traditional companies that are similar to companies with traditional ownership in terms of dividend ratios. Research limitations/implications - The paper demonstrates how institutional logics influence micro-level action in offering guidance to individual members. There are two relevant aspects to this. First, it offers guidance in terms of how to identify whether a corporate proposal is in line with the associations' policy. Second, institutional logics influence micro-level action because deviations from it require explanations. Originality/value - There are so far little qualitative research on how participants in governance mechanism use accounting to take decisions. In this way, the paper adds insight to both investor communities as well as behind the doors of the AGM.