On the 18th October 2021, Prof Philip Linsay from the University of York was invited to give insights at the Public Lecture Series of the Accounting Department. Prof. Philip Linsay presented lectures regarding Qualitative Research Design and Method in Accounting, it was the Public Lecture of the Public Lecture Series. One of the professors of Accounting at the Accounting Department, Sir Basuki, Ph.D, was the moderator for the session. Prof Philip Linsay first explained about Accounting and Culture, which was his research area, he mentioned how culture tells about people's behavior and how they think about things. Prof. Philip Linsay also explained that culture affects how people manage risk and strategy. The dimensions that he explored in Accounting and Culture are audit failure, financialization, the 2007-8 financial crisis, accounting regulation, risk disclosure, and risk management practices in banking. Prof Philip Linsay showed a framework that he used in understanding culture, which was adopted from Douglas (1978) and explained how it categorizes people based on world views, which are fatalist, individualist, hierarchist and egalitarian. These categories also differentiate people in how they manage risk and strategy.
Prof Philip Linsay elaborated about the research he did, starting with the research in the accounting regulation which as he mentioned, is included as document analysis type of research. He did the research in 2016 because he was interested in accounting regulation and it is important for an accountant to understand how regulation works. He also explained how recently the financial reporting council in the UK has been under a lot of criticism yet when he was doing his research back in 2016, it was the regulator that people assume will do a good job on ensuring that accounting and auditing is taken place appropriately. He stated that as the world continues to change, the standards, the corporate governance codes need to change as well as to stay up-to-date and reflect what happens. Because of that, the financial reporting council always makes a public consultation in making a standard to listen to all views and ensure regulations are reformed appropriately. He made two researches about this, and he observed the response then differentiated with different concepts, such as individualist, hierarchist, enclave and isolate, each of them has different characteristics and found that FRC has an individualistic worldview, and only listened to responses which were individual.
After explaining his research in the accounting regulation dimension, Prof. Philip Linsay proceeded to elaborate his research in interpretation of history, one of them is audit failure which is a research with a purpose to understand why Enron audit failure occurred in 2001 and argued that auditor changed from hierarchy to individualistic during the 1980s, and explained it by reference to neo-Durkheimian Institutional Theory. Aside from audit failure, he also made a research in financialization, with the research aim to understand why financialization occurred differently in the UK and Germany. In the research, he argued that the UK changed from hierarchy to individualism over the period Germany changed from hierarchy to hybrid hierarchy-individualistic-egalitarian, and this was then used to explain the differences in financialization by reference to neo-Durkheimian Institutional Theory. Prof. Philip Linsay also made a research in the archival research dimension, which is risk disclosure, he worked with colleagues who are accounting history researchers in this research. The purpose of his research was to identify the risk disclosure in Burmah Oil Company (1971-1976). He visited the company archives to review historical documents and located the annual reports that were made. He found that there was an identified pattern of social relations for the company over the period 1971-76, changing from hierarchical to fatalist using the different historical documents. He also identified the risk management approaches and assessed if they were consistent with the change occurring.
Prof. Philip Linsay elaborated on all the researchers he did and taught how to make a good research and how culture can differentiate how companies make decisions. Lastly, before ending the public lecture session, he mentioned that the researches that could be done in understanding accounting and culture are focus groups, linguistic analysis and ethnographic studies.
Watch again the public lecture in our official YouTube channel
(BLQ)
