The EAA DEI Committee hosted a session on how culture and diversity shape accounting, auditing, and governance. The discussion started from a simple but often neglected point: culture is not peripheral to accounting practice. It influences how accountability is understood, how rules are interpreted, whose judgments are treated as credible, and which practices come to be seen as normal.
Chaired by Timur Uman (Jönköping International Business School, Sweden), the session brought together three complementary perspectives. Christopher Nobes (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK) examined how international accounting rules encounter different legal traditions, institutional settings, and professional practices across countries. Barbee Myers Oakes (Workplace Communication Strategist, USA) discussed DEI work in academic and professional accounting settings, with a focus on intercultural communication, inclusion, and trust. Timur Umanmapped how research in accounting, auditing, governance, and management control has addressed culture, ethnicity, diversity, and intersectionality, and identified key gaps for future work.
A central theme was that “culture” is a broad and sometimes slippery concept. The session showed that, in accounting research, culture has been approached in several ways: through national value systems, cultural distance, language and translation, ethnicity and group membership, and subjective identity and belonging. The panel emphasized that these are not interchangeable. Different approaches capture different mechanisms, ranging from interpretation and communication to legitimacy, exclusion, and unequal scrutiny.
The presentations also highlighted that prior research has established an important point: harmonized or international rules do not automatically produce uniform practice. Even under common standards such as IFRS, differences persist in interpretation, judgment, disclosure, and implementation. The speakers argued that these differences cannot be explained by vague references to “culture” alone. More precise attention must be paid to legal systems, colonial legacies, professional traditions, stock market structures, institutional incentives, and organizational routines.
Another major strand of the discussion concerned diversity, equity, and inclusion in the accounting profession and academia. The session moved beyond representation alone and asked how to shift from simply counting diverse participants to ensuring that diverse voices actually shape decisions. This led to a focus on inclusion, influence, and trust. Questions of who speaks, who is heard, whose concerns survive into final decisions, and how fairness is experienced were treated as essential to understanding governance and control in practice.
Barbee Myers Oakes stressed that inclusion requires more than formal access. It depends on cultural intelligence, psychological safety, common language, and organizational trust. She argued that leaders and institutions must pay attention not only to visible dimensions of diversity, but also to the many less visible differences that shape communication, conflict resolution, authority, and belonging. Trust emerged as a key concept linking DEI to organizational effectiveness: trust in systems, trust in leaders’ judgments, and trust that people are valued and treated fairly.
The session also identified several promising directions for future research. Rather than treating culture as a fixed country-level variable, the panel encouraged researchers to trace how meaning is produced in practice: how standards are translated into policies, templates, discussions, negotiations, and ultimately reported outcomes. Participants were also encouraged to study inclusion and influence directly in boards, audit committees, and management processes, and to examine how credibility, scrutiny, and evidence thresholds may shift across culturally diverse settings.
The interactive discussion and Q&A reinforced that these issues matter not only for scholarship, but also for teaching, standard-setting, and professional life. Across the presentations, one conclusion was clear: accounting is never culturally neutral. International rules always meet local meanings, and understanding that interaction is essential for both rigorous research and more inclusive professional practice.
The Slides with presentations including future research directions can be found in the Diversity Equity nd Inclusion webspace under Learning on DEI and Accounting by following this link: https://eaa-online.org/arc/learning-on-dei-and-accounting/
