Board involvement in strategy is a long-standing issue in board research. This study empirically explores board involvement in strategic decision-making within Rwandan cooperatives, focusing on whether and how the democratic governance of these organizations affects how the board involves itself in the strategic decision-making process. Through two in-depth case studies, we demonstrate how the boards assume a different role in strategic decision-making compared to what the prior literature based on investor-owned organizations recognizes. We conceptualize this as a mediating board role, in which the board acts as an embedded go-between for information and proposals between different levels of the cooperative, while simultaneously attempting to reconcile conflicting views. We also show how this role is adapted to the specific characteristics of cooperatives. The study contributes theoretical insight into how ownership form matters for board involvement in strategy and empirical insight into board work in Rwandan cooperatives.

This paper examines the association between commercialization in the auditing profession and auditors' dedication to the profession. The paper further explores the contingent role of environmental uncertainty in this relationship. We hypothesize that these relations are contextually situated and that in a transitional economy like Georgia, commercialization is positively associated with auditors' dedication to the profession. We furthermore hypothesize that under a high perceived level of environmental uncertainty, commercialization instead becomes negatively associated with auditors' dedication to the profession. Our study relies on the responses of 235 certified Georgian auditors. In line with our expectations, our findings indicate that increasing commercialization in the auditing profession is positively associated with increasing dedication to the profession. We further find that increasing environmental uncertainty has a negative moderating effect on the relationship between commercialization in the auditing profession and auditors' dedication to the profession, driven mainly by existential uncertainty regarding the survival of the auditing firm. Exploring these relationships, our study contributes to an emerging discussion on the role of commercialization in professionals' perceptions of and attachment to their profession. Our study further highlights the role of environmental uncertainty in affecting the work performed by auditors in emerging economies.

The recent rise of index-based investors has led to substantially more concentrated share ownership around the world. This paper studies the ascent of the “Big Three” – Vanguard, Blackrock, and State Street – as major shareholders in the UK and Sweden between 2005 and 2019. More specifically, we address the issue of how the rise of these investors affects the corporate strategic propensity to reinvest or distribute cash flow to shareholders and whether this influence is contingent on national differences in corporate governance. We document how the rise of the Big Three is associated with an increasing strategic propensity for distribution at the expense of reinvestment. This effect is significantly greater in Sweden, where corporate governance institutions have historically developed to support active ownership by controlling shareholders, than in the UK, where corporate governance institutions have developed to support a more market-based model. Both the link between increasing strategic propensity for distribution associated with the Big Three and the effect of the institutional context in which the Big Three operate contribute to ongoing discussions on the extent and nature of the influence of passive index funds on firms’ strategies and on the role that corporate governance institutions play as boundary conditions for shareholder influence.

Från inledningen: Den här artikeln bygger på material från ett forskningsprojekt som genomfördes 2020–2022 med syftet att förstå digitaliseringens effekter på redovisning och revision. Nedan redogör vi först för de stora linjerna i utvecklingen av bokföringsprogram sedan 1976 för att sedan diskutera konsekvenserna av de ideologier och utopier som styrt utvecklingen.

This chapter reports the results of a survey among Swedish authorised auditors, exploring the effect of the use of computer-assisted audit techniques (CAAT) on the exercise of professional scepticism of the auditor. The auditing industry is deeply affected by digitalisation and there is an ongoing debate regarding what effect increasing the use of digital tools in auditing will have on audit quality. The results are consistent with the view that the use of CAAT has a positive influence on audit quality by providing the auditor with more room for exercising professional scepticism that can increase the quality of the audit, but that this effect will primarily occur if the auditor is sufficiently sceptical as an individual. The study challenges the widely held theoretical notion that audit structure impairs the exercise of professional judgement in a professionally sceptic manner. From a practical standpoint, the study shows that CAAT can be a valuable tool in audits that, if put in the right hands, may increase audit quality.

Bookkeeping and accounting is a prevalent feature of small organizations, which has changed face quite substantially with the advent of personal computers and, later, the Internet. The emergence of digitalized accounting procedures has taken place in a nexus of different types of actors (e.g., software developers, accountancy firms and the businesses themselves), regulatory frameworks (e.g., bookkeeping laws and accounting standards) and technical frameworks (e.g., standards for software interactions with banks and tax authorities). Altogether, this has made the paths taken in this process to be largely national. In general, this process of digitalization is largely undocumented and untheorized in research despite its profound impact on practice. Against this backdrop, this chapter has a descriptive and forward-looking approach, documenting the case of how Swedish bookkeeping practices of small organizations became digitalized, which can work as a reference case for comparisons with other national contexts.