3. Difficulties of PAT
This section discusses two difficulties of PAT. First, there is a long-running debate on whether the methodology of the natural sciences is appropriate for social sciences. There are some (e.g., Malinowski, 1960; Durkheim, 1964) who believe that the methodology of natural sciences can be used to study social phenomena. Durkheim (1964), for example, treated social phenomena as things and argued that they be treated as things. Thus, they can be studied objectively as external things. There are others (e.g., Lessnoff, 1974: 32) who believe that the model of physical sciences is not appropriate for social sciences in several aspects. To see an event as a human action, it is necessary to interpret empirically observable behavior in terms of mental categories. It is the subjective aspect of behavior, not its physical aspect, which provides meaning to an action. Weber (1964) argued that action is social insofar as, by virtue of the subjective meaning attached to it by the agent, it is conditioned by the agent’s awareness of the behavior of others. Both Whitley (1988) and Mouck (1990) argue against the reliance of accounting researchers on the philosophy of natural science.
As the brief review in Section 2 shows, one major question that PAT researchers seek to answer is: why do managers make accounting choices as they do? According to Intentionalism, the explanation must be couched in terms of mental processes of the agent (i.e., the manager) (Fay, 1996: 136- 139). The explanation must be couched in terms of beliefs and reasons that weighed in the mind of the manager at the time of making accounting choices. The validity of explanation does not depend on the regularity of the particular accounting choice behavior in the same situations by the agent himself/herself and others (Lessnoff, 1974). This is because human being does not always resort to the same action in the same situation. Two persons can take two different actions in the same situation and the same action in different situations.
PAT researchers subscribe to the behaviorist position. The idea is that mental processes can be defined in terms of observable behavior. If it is observed that managers tend to shift income from future period to the current period when the conditions in the debt covenant reach their limit, it is assumed that the tightness of the conditions caused the current period income-increasing 本文来自辣^文~论-文.网原文请找腾讯324-9114 their natural science counterparts. There is no theory that specifies the exact magnitude of earnings management in response to the incentives stated in the hypotheses (i.e., bonus plan hypothesis, debt-equity hypothesis and the political cost hypothesis). The magnitudes depend on the particular sample chosen for investigation. Furthermore, social science laws are less general and less universal than their natural science counterparts. For example, the three widely tested hypotheses of earnings management (i.e., the bonus plan hypothesis, debt-equity hypothesis, and the political cost hypothesis) have particular institutional environmental background. These hypotheses are applicable to cultures in which accounting numbers are used to write, implement and enforce contracts comprising the firm. Anglo-American societies are such examples. But there are societies (e.g., Japan) where the structure of industrial organizations and the contracting relationships between the bank and the borrowing firm is different from those observed in the U. S. A. and the U. K. (Sunder, 1999). There are societies (e.g., Japan) where debt contracts are not as detailed as those observed in Anglo- American societies and the extent of use of accounting numbers in such societies may not be as great as that in Anglo-American societies. Trust plays a major role in the debtor-creditor relationships in such societies (Sawabe and Yamaji, 1999). Thus, it is natural that the accounting and control system needed to implement and enforce such relationships will be different from that appropriate to Anglo-American countries (Sunder, 1999). And, the debt-equity hypothesis may have only limited application in such societies. Even in the same society, the extent of use of accounting numbers in debt contracts may vary over time. For example, Begley and Freedman (2004) find that the role of accounting numbers in public debt contracts changed during the 1975-2000 period. The frequency of accounting-based restrictions on dividends and borrowings declined significantly from the 1975-1979 sample to 1999-2000. Thus, the generalizability of PAT is limited by institutional environments and time.
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