Towards a Contingency Theory of Corporate Financial Reporting Systems

Contingency theories have become prominent in both organisation theory and management accounting. It has also been suggested that the contingency approach is implicit in accounting policy making. The contingency framework is extended to corporate reporting and it is argued that this may provide a means of explaining and predicting such systems. The contingent variables are conceptualised as falling into four classes which consist of: (1) societal variables; (2) the environment of the enterprise; (3) organisational attributes; and (4) user characteristics and other sources of information. These are shown to be associated with particular attributes of corporate reporting systems.