Accounting, Management and Information Technologies

Accounting Information Systems may facilitate or impede organizational learning. Critical attributes of accounting systems that have the potential to affect organizational learning include: (1) characteristics of the information environment, whether uniform, dispersed or clustered importance weights; (2) information distribution, whether overlapping or segregated information; and (3) information coordination mechanisms, whether expert teams, majority voting teams or hierarchies. Organizational learning and performance was simulated in the following manner: (i) the organization was faced with a continuous sequence of repetitive but not identical problems; (ii) the organizational task was subdivided between analysts; and (iii) analysts learned by basing their decisions on the relationship found between information available to them and organizational outcomes. Simulation results indicated that learning in flatter (team) organizations is generally more accurate than in hierarchical organizations. Learning is also faster with majority teams than hierarchies, but slower with expert teams. Overlapping accounting information transmission between agents was found to offer only limited benefits. These findings have implications for the design of accounting information systems in organizations.

Aris M. Ouksel

Ken Mihavics

Peter Chalos

Accounting Management and Information Technologies

Accounting information systems and organization learning: A simulation

会计信息系统与组织学习：一种模拟

Business information systems traditionally focus on technical matters. This paper explores the creation and implementation of information systems that integrate organizational business, social, and cultural knowledge. By using an extended case study set in grounded theory, we document how one company used cooperative research to meet these goals. In particular, we show how such research permits the reformulation, modification, or rejection of working hypotheses from a theoretical academic through a practitioner level. The cooperative research systems were grounded in ethnography, participant observation, improvement cycles, and detailed work processes. The information systems were effective in both monocultural and multicultural environments.

Richard H. Reeves-Ellington

Adele Anderson

The ethnology of information: Cultural learning through cooperative action research in a multinational firm

信息民族志：跨国公司中的合作行动研究文化学习

Geoffrey C. Bowker

Lest we remember: Organizational forgetting and the production of knowledge

以免我们遗忘：组织遗忘与知识生产

On three occasions, accounting regulators considered eliminating full cost accounting as an acceptable method and at the same time requiring all oil and gas producing companies to adopt successful efforts accounting. In response, full cost companies appealed to the Securities and Exchange Commission to allow the continued use of full cost accounting arguing that companies using each method are different. They outlined three primary variables along which full cost and successful efforts companies can be differentiated: exploration aggressiveness, political costs, and debt-recontracting costs. Prior studies used these variables to explain the accounting method choice by oil and gas producers. Although these variables were significant from the standpoint of model development, the overall classification error rate for the traditional statistical models used by these studies has ranged from 28% to 57%. We propose that the high classification error is driven by strong non-linearities and high interactions among the posited variables and/or by the inability of binary statistical models to properly model the accounting method choice dynamics. On the other hand, the ability of artificial neural networks to model non-linear dynamics and to deal with noisy data make them potentially useful for this type of application. In this paper, we develop three supervised artificial neural networks (general regression, backpropagation, and probabilistic) to predict the accounting method choice by oil and gas producing companies. We compare the prediction accuracy generated by the artificial neural networks with those generated using logit regressions and multiple discriminant analysis. Consistent with the findings of prior studies, the overall prediction error for logit regressions and multiple discriminant analysis has ranged from 32% to 46%. Threelayer backpropagation and three-layer probabilistic networks performed no better than their equivalent traditional statistical models with the overall prediction error ranging from 24% to 43%. On the other hand, our three-layer general regression network performed much better with the overall prediction error ranging from 8% to 11%. More importantly, our general regression network performed extremely well in predicting both full cost and successful efforts companies.

Nasser A. Spear

Mark Leis

Artificial neural networks and the accounting method choice in the oil and gas industry

人工神经网络与石油和天然气行业的会计方法选择

Social science concepts and techniques have been bound up with computing since its earliest days. This relationship is described in terms of three distinct “frameworks of computing”, historically specific ways of understanding, working with and developing computer systems. Each framework has different understanding of the “real” and desirable relations between people and computers, and a concern that hardware and software shouldre flect these relations. They render some forms of computing thinkable and desirable, whilst ruling out others—to a considerable extent they govern the conduct of computing, in both basic R & D and in commercial and organizational development. The frameworks are not purely internal to the historical development of computing, but nor are they the direct effect of any single external factor. They also overlap with each other in different configurations within computing, and two such sites are described in more detail: human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work. In conclusion, firstly some suggestions are offered for further research, in particular the possibility that new frameworks are being assembled as computing converges with the media industries; and secondly the form of analysis is presented as being complementary to many existing aproaches, through occupying a middle ground between traditional scientific and historical methodologies, and the emergent focus on contextuallity, difference and deconstruction.

Richard Hull

Governing the conduct of computing: computer science, the social sciences and framework of computing

计算机行为的治理：计算机科学、社会科学与计算框架

Jaakko Virkkunen

Kari Kuutti

Understanding organizational learning by focusing on “activity systems”

理解组织学习：聚焦“活动系统”

This paper focuses on IT-enabled credit risk modernisation in commercial retail banking. The empirical material is based upon a longitudinal case study conducted during 1993–1996 using an interpretive approach. It documents the introduction of a leading-edge computer-based decision support system into middle market corporate lending processes in a major UK retail bank. An analysis is constructed against the backcloth of contemporary social theory with the aim of stimulating debate regarding the ethics and politics of corporate risk positions. It is suggested that changes to the definition, assessment and management of credit risk in a major financial services institution, implemented through the introduction of a new technology and enacted in everyday acts of normal consumption, need debating. The paper concludes by asserting that if we turn aside from our responsibility to challenge the epistemological basis of contemporary risk assessment and management we may find that our social, political and economic landscape has changed without our consent.

Susan V Scott

IT-enabled credit risk modernisation: a revolution under the cloak of normality

IT驱动的信用风险现代化：在常态掩盖下的革命

Information technology has the capacity to change time–space configurations making new organizational forms possible. Two principal time–space configurations known as space and place are used to characterize some of the broad transformations occurring in social and organizational structures associated with the intensified use of information technology. The time–space configuration of place with its sense of boundedness, localness and particularity, is contrasted with that of space and its sense of the universal, the generalizable and the abstract. Today's evolving organizational forms reflect an increased reliance on space as a guiding image for organization design and technology deployment. Space as a guiding image brings the hope of making an organization more flexible by freeing it from the constraints of place. This is reflected in the emergence of market-based forms of organizing with their emphasis on outsourcing and inter-organizational alliances. We present an ethnographic account of outsourced computer system administrators in a company that is seeking to be a lean, knowledge-intensive, learning organization. Drawing on Bourdieu's theory of practice we explore the tensions between place and space in the firm as well as in the system administrators' work lives. We argue that place and space are always operating simultaneously in an organization, and that they provide an ongoing source of dialectic tension for the individual worker. In keeping with Bourdieu's generative structuralism, we further argue that the computer contractors' work practices, especially their practice of writing, serve to reproduce the conditions under which those tensions emerge.

Ulrike Schultze

Richard J Boland

Place, space and knowledge work: a study of outsourced computer systems administrators

地点、空间与知识工作：外包计算机系统管理员研究

This study investigates how information systems affect the temporality of business processes in organizations. It is first described how the dimensions of temporality were developed. Among the many dimensions based on other studies, eleven dimensions were selected for our purposes in investigating the external temporality in the first instance and tracing changes in temporality. We then identified six dimensions (duration, sequence, temporal location, deadline, cycle and rhythm) which could effectively assess the temporal effects of information systems. We used them to describe and analyse temporal changes which resulted from the implementation of Korea Trade Network in two case companies. Through the case study, this paper aims to provide a deeper understanding of information systems and temporality in organizational contexts. Differential cycles, polychronicity and changes in inter-personal or inter-departmental relations mediated by temporal shifts are presented for their implications on time, work and information systems.

Heejin Lee

Jonathan Liebenau

Temporal effects of information systems on business processes: focusing on the dimensions of temporality

信息系统对业务流程的时间效应：聚焦于时间性的维度

This paper introduces an alternative perspective on organizational learning that counters various assumptions within most of the writings on organizational learning. By posing who, how, when and why questions while reviewing the literature, four biases within the literature on organizational learning are identified. These biases concern respectively an individual learning bias, an active agency bias, a purposeful learning bias and an improvement bias. These hidden assumptions ensure that most literature tends to lean unnecessarily in certain directions, while overlooking others. The paper proposes several ways to counter these biases. A case story concerning the learning of old and new routines used by information systems designers is presented to illustrate the proposed alternative approaches to analyze organizational learning.

Marleen Huysman

Rethinking organizational learning: analyzing learning processes of information system designers

重新思考组织学习：分析信息系统设计者的学习过程

Publication Information	Publisher: Pergamon Press Ltd.，Publishing cycle: ，Journal Type: journal，Open Access Journals: No
Basic data	Year of publication: 1991，Proportion of original research papers: ，Self Citation Rate:， Gold OA Rate:

Accounting, Management and Information Technologies

Journal Citation Format

A journal article with 1 author

A journal article with 2 authors

A journal article with 3 authors

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Books Citation Format

Thesis Citation Format

Web sites Citation Format

Patent Citation Format

Staying up late manually editing references? ivySCI automatically matches journals and helps you generate references with a single click.

Share Submission Experience