In order to collect the information that is necessary in order to explore the aforementioned research question, interviewing was used as the primary data collection method. An interview as such can be understood as a qualitative data
collection method that is conducted to “gain insights into social and organizational realities... through discovering the views, perceptions and opinions of both individuals and groups through the language they use” (Easterby-Smith et. al, 2012:126). Deployment of such a method gives a number of advantages, including the opportunity to clarify obtained information. In addition to that, it gives the ability to observe reactions and emotions of interviewees while providing accurate information.
It was decided by the authors to conduct in-depth semi-structured interviews with the producers of accounting (accountants and managers) and accounting users within the company (please, find the Interview Guide in Appendix A). It was supposed that such a choice of the interviewees would help to shed some light into how the perception of producers of the accounting information regarding the usage of accounting corresponds to the real deployment of accounting. Initially, it was planned to conduct 2-3 interviews in with the operational headquarters, legal headquarters, and representative office of the Miratech as well as one interview with 2-3 clients in order to receive sufficient data, in order to make the findings reliable.
However, a number of challenges appeared during the data collection process. The initial contact was established with the manager of the representative office of Miratech in Norway. It became impossible to arrange the interviews with the legal headquarters due to the long-term travel of the preparers of accounting information.
Later, it was agreed to make interview with the operational headquarters in Kyiv.
However, at the last minute the later have canceled the arrangement without any explanation of the reasons. Nevertheless, through some informal conversations it became clear that the potential interviewees were afraid of giving answers to some of the questions.
Such a situation can be possibly explained by the cultural differences. Ukrainians are known to be the nation with the high power distance and uncertainty avoidance indexes by the Hofstede taxonomy. In turn, the high power distance index indicates that the distance between managers and regular employees is extensive, the relations have very formal character, the decisions are done mostly by the higher levels of the organizational hierarchy, as well as most of the actions should be conformed by the boss. In Ukraine this index is 92, when in Norway it is only 31. Uncertainty
avoidance index (95 in Ukraine, 50 in Norway) relates to how people deal with the unpredicted situations. The high index of uncertainty avoidance of Ukrainians tells about their distance and formality when it comes to the relations with strangers, as well as their wish to stay away from unusual for them circumstances (The Hofstede Center, 2015).
However, the manager of the Norwegian representative office kindly agreed to be our interviewee. His deep knowledge of the company’s activities and operations gave us a possibility to receive the answers for the questions that were planned to be asked for both representative office and headquarters. Thus, three in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted in March and April. That way, the manager had more opportunities to talk freely about his experiences on the preparation or usage of accounting information. Moreover, it has the advantage that aspects can be covered that the authors did not think of beforehand. However, Easterby-Smith (2012) give the advice that the standardization of the interviews is lower than in highly structured interviews, resulting in potential difficulties during the analysis.
Due to the time and cost constraints, the interviews were conducted via telephone. All three interviews were conducted in English. According to Easterby-Smith (2012), telephone interviews have several advantages, including the fact that the interviews can be more easily rescheduled and that the managers feel less committed to host the researcher. In addition to interviews, it was also sensible to collect data from secondary sources, such as documents. Documents included the brief annual reports of the company presented on the official web-cite. Besides, the information about the company from the media resources was also taken into consideration.
However, it was obvious that the research based on three interviews will have a very limited degree of validity and reliability. That is why it was made a decision to make an extended literature review on the topic of roles/functions of accounting in the academia literature in order to enhance the support of the facts presented in the analysis. Thus, while conducting the findings, two databases have been searched, namely Elsevier Science Direct and Proquest. Due to the fact that the topic of the roles of accounting is a relatively new aspect within the accounting literature, the amount of published articles is limited and it was therefore decided not to limit the
search by publication year. Moreover, the initial search for articles that discussed the roles of accounting in an inter-organizational setting returned almost no results and it was therefore decided that it would make more sense to include articles that discuss the roles of accounting in any setting. It was however obvious that the publications must include the phrase “functions of accounting” or “role of accounting” in the title.
Within the database Elsevier Science Direct, which offers a larger possibility for advanced search, the articles could include these phrases also in the abstract or in the keywords. The search for “the role of accounting” resulted in a total of 153 published articles in the database Proquest and 152 in the database Science Direct. The second search for the functions of accounting resulted in just 4 articles in the database Proquest and 13 articles in Science Direct. Unfortunately, not every article was freely available and it was necessary to apply judgment on the relevance of certain articles for the actual topic. This was especially true for the database Science Direct, where many of the articles were not in topic. After sorting out the relevance of the articles for the research topic, a total of 65 articles remained as findings (Please, find information about the articles in the Appendix C).
Once the data from the interviews was received, it was transcribed and written down.
Afterwards, it was sent to the interviewee for verification. Thereupon, it was structured regarding to the roles of accounting in the inter-organizational relations (within the company and with the customers) in accordance with the Caglio & Ditillo (2012) framework described in the second chapter of the current master thesis.
However, in order to clarify some of the data gathered within the first and second interviews (from the point of view of headquarters and representative office), the necessity of conduction of one more interview appeared. The data received from the analysis of the literature was divided in accordance to the different roles detected.
Finally, the data received from the case was compared to the one received from the literature.