毕业论文外文翻译-实证调查披露使用和有用的会计信息.docx

毕 业 设 计（论 文）外 文 参 考 资 料 及 译 文译文题目： 实证调查披露,使用和有用的会计信息 学生姓名： 学号： 专业： 会 计 学 所在学院： 龙 蟠 学 院 指导教师： 职称： 2011年 12 月 09 日Title:An Empirical Investigation of Disclosure, Usage and Usefulness of Corporate Accounting Information by Michael Sherer, Alan Southworth and Stuart Turley from © Emerald Backfiles 2007 This paper reports the findings of an empirical investiga-tion into the disclosure of corporate accounting informa-tion to trade union decision makers. These findings are evaluated against earlier normative and descriptive litera-ture on corporate disclosure to trade unions and an attempt is made to derive some implications for the design of accounting reports for use in the context of collective bargaining. The research methodology used was a case study of decision making in one trade union, the Amalga-mated Textile Workers' Union (ATWU) which represents most of the manual workers in the Lancashire cotton industry. The paper is divided into six sections. The first section presents some background material on the ATWU, and the industry in which it operates. The second section describes the research design and the manner in which the investigation was conducted. The next three sections report the research findings, namely: the extent of information disclosure by companies in the Lancashire cotton industry; the actual use of corporate accounting information in the collective bargaining decisions of the ATWU; and the assessment by the ATWU decision makers of the usefulness of that information. The final section offers some suggestions, based on the evidence reported, for improvements in the quantity and type of accounting information which corporate management should be willing to disclose if they want trade union decision makers to take into consideration corporate financial performance in their collective bargaining deci-sions. The Amalgamated Textile Workers' Union (ATWU) was formed as recently as 1974 but its origins go back into the nineteenth century. The ATWU is essentially a loose federation of semi-independent unions representing spin-ners, weavers and cardroom operatives concentrated in one geographical area - Lancashire. The ATWU is managed by the Central Executive Committee, headed by the General Secretary, and there is a 'national' negotiat-ing committee which annually concludes agreements with the employers' federation, the British Textile Employers' Association (BTEA) over basic wage rates in the industry. However, the majority of collective bargaining decisions are not made by the negotiating committee at 'national' level but by trade union officials at the local or District level. The decisions at the District level include basic pay agreements with non-BTEA firms, productivity agree-ments at individual mills, and issues of working condi-tions, health and safety, and redundancies and closures. The individual Districts within the ATWU are each managed by a full-time paid union official known as the District Secretary and since the vast majority of collective bargaining decisions are made by District Secretaries, these were chosen as the subject for our empirical investigation. In 1979 there were seventeen Districts within the ATWU. Most of the Districts represented all the ATWU members working in one geographical area, although in some cases there were separate Districts for spinning and weaving and in other cases one Secretary had responsibil-ity for more than one District. At the time of the study the total number of District Secretaries was eighteen. The membership of the ATWU at that time was 42,000 (it has since fallen to 30,000) while the size of individual Districts ranged from 500 to 5,000. Membership of the ATWU, and consequently of the individual Districts, has been declining dramatically in the last twenty years reflecting the continuing contraction of the Lancashire cotton industry. The contraction of the industry has caused earnings to decline relative to the average for manufactur-ing industry as a whole and has resulted in the closure of many mills and entire companies. In addition, the production process is still quite labour-intensive with the result that productivity as measured by net output per employee compares unfavourably with other industries. In short, both the industry and the union are in a state of severe decline and it is this decline which provides the backcloth to our study of information disclosure in a collective bargaining context. Structured interviews using a pre-coded questionnaire were conducted with sixteen out of the eighteen District Secretaries in post during August and September 1979. The content of the questionnaire was initially determined from the normative models of trade union decision making found in Cooper and Essex and Foley and Maunders Subsequently, a pilot survey of three District Secretaries was carried out to identify the most common decision areas and information sources for inclusion in the main questionnaire. The pilot survey also ensured that no major decision areas or information sources which may have been specific to trade union officials in the Lan-cashire cotton industry were accidentally omitted. The final questionnaire used in the structured inter-views identified seven sources of information which were available for use by the District Secretaries and these sources are presented very few companies in the Lancashire cotton industry publish employee reports and consequently only five District Secretaries could recall ever receiving copies directly from any of the companies in their District. Once again, it was the large or publicly quoted companies which produced and sent out employee reports to the District Secretaries and, just as for the published annual reports, the information was presented only for the group as a whole. All the District Secretaries who received a company's employee report also received its published accounts and most of them considered that there was very little information in the former. Although both published accounts and employee re-ports suffer from a high level of aggregation, the same is not true for the other sources of information in Table 2. Internal accounting reports and order books contain information about individual companies or mills, while work study reports provide details relevant to a single shed within a mill or even a group of machines. The pattern of disclosure for internal accounting reports and order books was remarkably similar. All the District Secretaries reported that most companies allowed them access to internal accounting information and to informa-tion about the quantity and value of future orders. However, only one District Secretary said that he received this information without having to make a specific request and there were a few companies, again small, privately-owned ones, who consistently refused to disclose this information. Under the provisions of the Employment Protection Act, 1975 and the related ACAS Code of Practice No. 2, 1977,companies are required to disclose all information requested by trade union representatives which would not cause substantial injury to the company. It appears that some of the small companies were taking advantage of this exclusion clause on the grounds that the information was confidential and could, if made publicly available, reduce the competitiveness of the company. The District Secretaries who had been refused informa-tion on these grounds never took the issue further, for example to the Central Arbitration Committee of ACAS, because they were usually able to estimate the informa-tion they required from other sources, often from direct observation of the production in the mill. Although most District Secretaries had access to in-formation from the internal accounting reports and order books of companies in their District, the type of access given, in effect the nature of the disclosure, differed between companies. Most companies were willing to give verbal summaries of the information requested, for example profits for the month, but very few companies allowed the District Secretaries directly to inspect the documents themselves. The provision of only verbal summaries of these reports prevented the District Secre-taries from undertaking any detailed analysis of their contents, perhaps with the aid of an independent expert, and consequently may have reduced the extent to which these information sources were used in their decision making. Secretary who often calls in the ATWU's own work study officer to verify management's figures. It is, therefore, in management's interest that the District Secretaries reg-uarly receive the work study reports which monitor the actual performance of the operatives. To summarise, the quality of information disclosure in the Lancashire cotton industry, as measured by the responses of the District Secretaries, does not appear to be uniform either across information sources or across companies. Where the provision of information is essen-tial for the smooth operation of the productive process, namely the work study reports, or where the provision of information is virtually costless, as is the case for the published accounts and employee reports of large or quoted companies, the quality of disclosure is generally very high. In contrast, there is less disclosure about information which is considered by management to be sensitive or confidential, namely internal accounting reports and order books, particularly by small, privately owned companies. Nevertheless, the deficiencies in the amount of disclosure by companies may not be a serious limitation to the District Secretaries in their decision making, since much of the information contained in these reports can be derived from other sources, for example, direct observation, communications from members or other District Secretaries, and informal discussions with management. The relative importance of these informa-tion sources compared to formal accounting reports is discussed in the next section. In this section, we discuss the relative importance of different information sources in the collective bargaining decisions of the District Secretaries. Cooper and Essex have also addressed this issue in their study of the information used by engineering shop stewards when bargaining over pay. They concluded that the trade union and other shop stewards were more important sources of information than published accounts. Our findings provide confirmatory evidence of the relative lack of importance of formal accounting reports in collective bargaining decisions. A crude measure of relative import-ance is the total number of references to each information source as shown in Table 3. Information source F, ATWU members, is used much more frequently than any other source, while the three formal accounting reports, internal accounts, published accounts and employee reports, register the lowest three sources. The very low level of usage of employee reports is probably related to our earlier finding that these reports are produced by only a few companies in the industry. it is misleading to place too much emphasis on the total number of references made to each source. This is because some information sources are obviously directly related to particular decision areas but not to others. For example, the high score registered by source E, work study reports, is largely a consequence of its direct relevance to productivity decisions. Therefore, it is more appropriate to evaluate information usage separately for each decision. Table 4, which ranks the use of information by decision area, clearly reveals a different usage pattern between decisions. Although the formal accounting re-ports are used for only four decisions (disregarding the one reference for health and safety decisions), their importance relative to other information sources is not the same for each decision. Published annual accounts and internal accounting reports are ranked higher for redundancies and long-term prospects than for basic pay and productivity. It is also noteworthy that source D achieves the highest ranking for both redundan-cies and long-term prospects since this source, order books, may also contain accounting information. The explanation for these differences in the ranking of accounting information probably lies in the nature and content of the decisions themselves. While basic pay and productivity are concerned with pay bargaining, redun-dancies and long-term prospects are concerned with security of employment. Because of the continuing contraction of the Lancashire cotton industry, there are very few opportunities for increases in pay without a corresponding increase in labour productivity. Therefore, for both basic pay claims and new incentive schemes, one of the main types of information required by the District Secretaries concerns current levels of productivity and this information is provided directly either by the work study reports or by the members themselves. In addition, District Secretaries will be interested in the results of similar pay negotiations in other Districts and this accounts for the relative importance given to source G. Accounting information, especially formal reports for a whole company or group of companies, does not contain sufficiently detailed or up-to-date information about productivity levels. The nature of the two security-of-employment decision areas is somewhat different. As part of their response to management's plans for redundancies or closures, the District Secretaries would seek evidence on the necessity of the management's action. The company's order books and internal accounting reports are obvious starting points for discovering the reasons for laying off workers and closing mills. Similarly, in assessing the long-term pros-pects of individual companies, District Secretaries would tend to rely on company produced information, in particular the order books and accounting reports, rather than other sources of information. In addition, the 9 obvious importance of these decisions both to the mem-bers and the ATWU itself, would tend to encourage the District Secretaries to use more sources of information than they would do for other decisions and this factor may contribute to the higher usage of accounting information. Our research, therefore, supports the findings of Cooper and Essex concerning the relative unimportance of accounting information for pay bargaining. However, our research also shows that accounting information is used to a greater extent for decisions about security of employment and that, if the definition of accounting information sources is widened beyond the three formal accounting reports