INTERNATIONAL ACCOUNTING CONFERENCE

ACCOUNTING RENAISSANCE
Lessons from the Crisis and Looking into the Future. Learning from Histories and InstitutionsVenice, 3-5 November 2011

Announcement and Call for Papers

The Conference intends to build on the awareness that the global financial crisis has challenged the accounting and auditing realm from many points of views.

Along with the world stock markets, large financial institutions have collapsed or been bought out, and governments in even the wealthiest nations have had to come up with rescue packages to bail out their financial systems. Accountancy organizations, regulatory bodies and also accounting scholars seem to have their share of responsibility in failing to understand and prevent the advent and the effects of the financial crisis. In many cases, companies and public institutions took advantage of the ambiguity, opacity and incompleteness of accounting regulations in order to disclose amazing but economically unfounded financial results. The world accounting and auditing standards have shown their vulnerability, whilst there emerged the need for a new governance of the standard setting process and the development of effective cures in an international context.

The role of accounting and auditing as a factor affecting the scale and scope of corporate scandals will thus be one of the most vivid subjects for discussion during the Conference. Some see changes in accounting standards as contributing to the financial crisis; others see these changes as an opportunity to recover from a general loss of trust in firms and financial institutions. Most certainly, a central feature of the recent period has been a gradual alteration of the traditional principles of accounting as practised in different national contexts for decades. For instance, the large acceptance of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and their incorporation into a mandatory regime in different countries have meant the abandonment of “local” principles of prudence and their replacement with the “global” measurement method of fair value.

Another issue for consideration in the Conference is the role of financial management tools during the crisis. The downturn of the economy underlined the weaknesses of traditional management accounting approaches when used for the support of recovery efforts, and widened the gap between them and lean (horizontal) accounting and non-accounting tools. It also re-opened the issue of the relationships between accounting and information systems.

A particular aspect of interest for the Conference is that of analyzing these issues using a lens focussing on the relationships between accounting change (principles and tools) at a global scale and local traditions, which in turn depend on the ways in which accounting was shaped by specific historical and economic conditions. This phenomenon is even more acute when we refer to the world of public sector accounting, where the “glocal” tension investing today’s accounting is embedded in the complex political and financial control processes occurring at various levels of public administration.

In this sense, the Venice Conference also intends to provide an opportunity for exploring the ways in which accounting regulation interacts with other elements of the national institutional framework, which could give rise to peculiar or unintended consequences. Therefore, the event aims also at deepening such consequences and connecting them to their institutional, professional, and educational preconditions.

In light of the above considerations, contributions are invited from authors that wish to investigate from a variety of perspectives (including that of policy-making) and with different methodologies, the relationships belween financial crisis and accounting and auditing from the point of view of specific national or local contexts, as well as from a global standpoint, addressing also the ways forward for the accounting domain in a complex world where corporate information of financial and non-financial nature will play a more and more important role.

In this respect, Venice seems to be the most appropriate environment historically for discussing Accounting Renaissance issues, as it was here that the friar Luca Pacioli published the first treaty on double-entry bookkeeping in 1494.

The Conference also marks the official international launch of the new journal “Financial Reporting” which publishes papers in both English and Italian. Papers submitted to the Conference are able to be considered, if the authors wish, for a fast track reviewing process for publication in the journal.

The Conference will be held in the heart of Venice, where it is quite rare for large international scientific accounting events to be hosted, the last being the European Accounting Association Congress in 1994.

Within the aims illustrated above, papers on all aspects of accounting research are welcome. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: