This paper discusses one of the cornerstones of corporate governance, namely the annual general meeting (AGM). The paper builds on field material collected from participating in 36 AGMs during the spring of 2004 as well as on literature on corporate governance. Since the amount of research on...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to investigate how top management is constructed as a good steward of its company at the annual general meeting (AGM) and how accounting is used in the course of this process. Design/methodology/approach – To meet these aims the authors attended 36 AGMs of...

Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to examine how a shareholder association prepares for and later act at the annual general meeting. It focusses on how the association evaluates corporate proposals to pay dividends and how they vote on equity distributions at the annual general meeting....

Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the accounting notion of “human depreciation” helped the defined benefit pension plan emerge as the dominant means of dealing with an aging workforce in the first half of twentieth century USA. Design/methodology/approach -The study...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to shed light on accounting's role in bringing about a pension reform project in Chile under the authoritarian regime of Augusto Pinochet. The paper aims to reveal the specific role that the pension reform played in the regime's broader ideological goals,...

Qualitative characteristics serve to operationalise the objective of financial reporting and aim at shaping accounting discourses of standard-setters and their constituents. In the recent revision of their conceptual frameworks, the IASB and FASB decided to replace “reliability”, arguably...