Building Trust in Crisis Management: A Study of Insolvency Practitioners and the Role of Accounting Information and Processes

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Joyce, Yvonne
• 署名单位: University of Glasgow
• 刊物名称: CONTEMPORARY ACCOUNTING RESEARCH
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0823-9150
• DOI: 10.1111/1911-3846.12577
• 发表日期: 2020
• 页码: 1622-1657
• 关键词: Contract; field; CONSTRUCTION; ORGANIZATION; sector

摘要

This paper seeks to understand how insolvency practitioners attempt to build trust with a heterogeneous creditor body during the crisis of formal insolvency and the role accounting information and processes play. Accounting information is mobilized in different ways according to how insolvency practitioners believe the information will be interpreted and valued. This paper suggests specific qualitative characteristics, accounting principles, and processes which appear to enhance trust building in a crisis context. These include perceived objectivity, comparability, cash flow accounting, matching of secured liabilities with secured assets, and crisis audit. The value ascribed by insolvency practitioners to maintaining specific creditor relationships also appears relevant to trust-building activities. A tit-for-tat strategy emerges with secured creditors, whereby insolvency practitioners engage in demonstrable fee write-offs, but on the implicit understanding that future, lucrative work will come their way. This study points to the importance for researchers and policymakers of understanding the desirable properties of accounting through informed understandings of how and why that information is mobilized and received in specific relationships between people.