The use of made-up users

Renata Stenka and Sylvia Jaworska

Accounting, Organizations and Society, 2019, vol. 78, issue C

Abstract: The existence of fictitious users of financial statements has been confirmed in previous research. Our study investigates how this powerful yet ‘made-up’ construct is deployed within the discourses of the main stakeholders including ‘real’ users themselves, as they shape regulatory debates in the international accounting standard-setting arena. We draw on Bourdieu’s theorization of dominant discourse as a form of implicit power, and develop it further within the phraseological theory of meaning, specifically the linguistic concept of collocation, which focuses on habitual language patterns. Using this framework, we conduct a comparative analysis of the recurrent linguistic choices around the term ‘user’ in comment letters submitted in response to selected IASB’s regulatory proposals. Our study provides empirical evidence for the existence of commonalties and subtle differences in the ways in which made-up users are discursively operationalized by four key accounting constituent groups: the accounting profession, preparers, regulators, and ‘real’ users of financial statements. At the theoretical and methodological level, we demonstrate the explanatory power of the concept of collocation and its role in the identification of implicit patterns of dominant discourse in Bourdieu’s sense. Our research also shows that the close investigation of how the dominant discourse of the made-up users works generates a series of new why questions regarding the ‘real’ users’ role in accounting standard setting.

Keywords: Bourdieu; Corpus-based discourse analysis; Dominant discourse; Regulation; Users; IASB (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036136821930042X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:aosoci:v:78:y:2019:i:c:s036136821930042x

DOI: 10.1016/j.aos.2019.07.001

Access Statistics for this article

Accounting, Organizations and Society is currently edited by Christopher Chapman

More articles in Accounting, Organizations and Society from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().