In an impassioned plea for accounting scholarship to advance professional knowledge and practice, Robert Kaplan called on “accounting scholars to devote more resources to obtaining a fundamental understanding of contemporary and future practice and how analytic tools and contemporary advances in accounting and related disciplines can be deployed to improve the professional practice of accounting” (Kaplan, 2011, p. 367). In the domain of risk management, the debate about the role of increasingly sophisticated analytical tools, or what we refer to as risk artefacts, has intensified in tandem and response to increasingly complex and novel risks, associated with everything from AI-enhanced cyber attacks to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) risks. Unfortunately, this debate has focused predominately on the technical aspects of introducing risk artefacts into the organisational setting, and less so on the social and cognitive aspects. All three aspects and the dynamics between them, are fundamental to the understanding of how risk management actually works in practice, especially considering that under conditions of increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA), risk artefacts are found to be increasingly limited in supporting the investigative and cognitive endeavours of risk enquiry (Jabbour and Crawford, forthcoming).

As mentioned, new technologies present new risks that will have to be integrated into existing risk management frameworks. COSO, for example, has already issued practitioner guidance on how organisations should implement AI-specific risk governance, management, and oversight strategies. This is just one such example where external drivers for increased control of advanced digital technologies are emerging. However, rather than merely focussing on the control of advanced digital technologies, some organisations are beginning to explore the potential of these technologies to enhance management control practices, including how risks are managed.

In this project, we take a closer look at why and how organisations implement risk artefacts, focusing specifically on the strategies, challenges, and anticipated outcomes of risk artefact implementation as part of ERM adoption. The insights presented are based on interviews with risk experts from organisations presenting a variety of industries, both in the Sweden and the UK. We find that the organisations implemented risk artefacts for a variety of reasons, and the type of risk artefacts implemented fall into one of more of the following categories: risk governance tools, visualisation and representation tools, calculative tools, and uncertainty envisionment tools. Interestingly, we find that organisational interest in leveraging AI tools in risk management is increasing, and we provide several illustrative examples of how practitioners are engaging with these tools to open up possibilities to incorporate advanced analytics into risk-based decision-making.

Calculative practices resembling conventional accounting and sometimes termed ‘audit culture’ have materialised in higher education to account for learning and related activities. These practices are posited as curricular accounting. I have observed the development and ubiquitous expansion of this accounting function from within several universities in Britain and Aotearoa New Zealand (ANZ), particularly the University of Canterbury. Treating curricular accounting as a form of accounting, I define and configure its aspects and explain its functioning. Framing the study historically and critically, I examine how today’s practices in ANZ reflect the founders of tertiary educational institutions and their successors striving for equivalence with first British and then international standards, while concerned about their country’s political, economic and social development. Three influences have arisen since the mid-20th century. Demand has increased for university-educated labour and wider access to universities has become a social policy imperative, resulting in dramatic student growth. Knowledge has also grown markedly, and so the higher education curriculum has expanded. Accounting in universities has extended following neoliberalism and managerialism taking hold in government, public policy and higher education. Critical questions are: Has curricular accounting served to emancipate society? Or has it enabled the business of higher education to fabricate products which consumers find compelling, resulting in exploitation of students and constraint of academics?

This study investigates the relationship between the management control system of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) development process and the reluctance of emerging economies to engage in this process through feedback mechanisms such as comment letters. Despite the universal adoption of IFRS by 168 countries, emerging economies are significantly underrepresented in the standard-setting process. This research draws on contingency theory, suggesting that the effectiveness of management control systems depends on the organisational context. It highlights how the decentralised approach to collecting comment letters within the IFRS Foundation’s control system contributes to underrepresentation. Through a case study of an emerging economy, the study identifies barriers such as language difficulties, lack of resources, and unclear responsibility for feedback submission. The findings indicate that the IFRS Foundation’s failure to directly request feedback from national standard setters exacerbates these issues, potentially leading to the development of standards that do not adequately reflect the needs of all users. By incorporating contingency theory, this study contributes to the literature on administrative controls in not-for-profit organisations and provides practical recommendations for enhancing emerging economies' participation in the IFRS standard-setting process, ultimately improving the consistency and effectiveness of these global standards.