Editorial

Abstract

We would like to present to you a special issue of “Zeszyty Teoretyczne Rachunkowości” – (ZTR, “The Theoretical Journal of Accounting”) in English entitled: Accounting and Behavioral Sciences – a successful marriage or an extravagant crusade? For the first time in the history of our journal, this volume was guest edited by a foreign editor – Dr. Jari Paranko (University of Tampere, Finland). The proposed theme of the eighth special edition of ZTR in English was a kind of challenge. So far, such editions of ZTR have shown a wide range of accounting issues, e.g., its development in Central and Eastern Europe. This issue has a very specialised character, because the behavioural aspects of accounting, to which it is entirely devoted, are dealt with by only a small group of researchers. Nevertheless, this special issue of ZTR received eleven articles and we accepted nine of them for publication. Five of them are written by foreign researchers from Germany, Lithuania, Estonia and Ukraine. We chose to deal with the behavioural aspects of accounting because we share the view that accounting is more than just numbers, accounts, statements, reports, and IT systems; above all, people create and use accounting information. Beliefs, personality traits, and the behaviours of accounting professionals and their interactions with other people (controllers) influence the final dimension of the information. On the other hand, accounting information shapes the behaviour of its recipients and all those to whom it relates, even indirectly. These issues are of interest to behavioural accounting. The articles published in this issue of ZTR concern the behavioural aspects of financial accounting, management accounting, auditing, and management control. The article by Maruszewska and Kołodziej describes the influence of the human factor in the creation of information in the accounting system as a result of verifying the justifications for decisions that relate to the measurement of the value of stocks. In turn, Brauweiler et al. attempted to explain the issue of creative accounting, set limits to its positive use, and separate creative accounting from accounting fraud. The authors point to the need to apply leadership skills to solve the problem of creative accounting. In turn Cygańska et al. emphasize the role of decision making by managers, for example, in profit management. In their opinion, manipulations in the area of accounting are assessed more critically than manipulations in the area of operational decisions. The behaviours of managers were the basis for discourse also in the scientific text of Jaworska and Bucior. Their research aimed to present the use of structural manipulation by company managers.

Keywords

• Editorial