| This dissertation explores the efforts of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) to produce a common set of accounting standards accepted for worldwide market regulation. In doing so, it examines how a process of accounting (institutional) change---referred to as a convergence process---has evolved within the transnational accounting standard-setting space. This research investigates the role that institutions and politics play in the FASB-IASB convergence process, more broadly, as well as their role in the processes by which standard setters go about collective policy-making on one highly contested standard. With the accounting policy-making literature serving as a foundation tying together the works within this dissertation, I mobilize institutional and political perspectives to systematically explore the convergence of accounting standards through three empirical papers. Each of these studies focuses on standard-setting activities occurring between 2002 and 2011 and utilizes case study methods drawing on multiple data sources including archival documents, indirect observation and interviews with key informants. The first paper focuses on understanding the phenomenon of accounting convergence and its relationship to broader political and institutional trends through a variety of diffusionist mechanisms from neo-institutional theory. This dissertation then turns to the standard-setters themselves as focal actors and links these actors to the meaning systems they employ in the shaping of accounting convergence. The second paper focuses on competing meaning systems that standard setters adhere to and the factors that affect collective policy decisions. More specifically, it is interested in the negotiated order (Strauss et al. 1963) which takes shape on the basis of these factors. Finally, the third paper studies the process by which accounting standard setters persuade their public audience (and themselves) of the merits of their policy decisions by mobilizing orders of worth (Boltanski & Thevenot, ([1991], 2006) in their discourse. The primary contribution of this dissertation is to shed light, at multiple levels of analysis, on how transnational convergence activities, in particular those aimed at producing a common set of accounting standards, evolve in consideration of actors, institutions, and context. |
