Please see the attachment 1 for assignment instructions.

and the attachment 2 contains the article, on which a critique needs to be prepared.

2000 words max.

Thanks

HI6025 Accounting Theory and Current Issue TRIMESTER 1, 2017 INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNMENT Assessment Value: 20% Instructions: 1. This assignment is to be submitted in accordance with assessment policy stated in the Subject Outline and Student Handbook. 2. It is the responsibility of the student who is submitting the work, to ensure that the work is in fact her/his own work. Incorporating another's work or ideas into one's own work without appropriate acknowledgement is an academic offence. Students can submit all assignments for plagiarism checking (selfcheck) on Blackboard before final submission in the subject. For further details, please refer to the Subject Outline and Student Handbook. 3. Maximum marks available: 20 marks. 4. Due date of submission: Friday Week 6 5. Assignment should be of 2,000 words. Please use \"word count\" and include in report. Important Note: Please submit Assignment through SafeAssign Guidelines for Literature Critiques Students are required to read and understand assigned article. Students must submit a critique of assigned academic article. Please follow the format to complete your assignment. Details about the format, structure and assessment criteria for the critique are presented below. Remember that the critique is due in end of week 6. FORMAT: 2000 words (maximum) The critique submission should be typed. Work should be double-spaced with a 2.4cm margin on all sides. STRUCTURE: While there is room for being innovative, most critiques should include the following: Cover Page Introduction: Introducing the topic, stating the aims of the critique, outlining the main argument to be presented and an overview of the paper and the structure of the paper to follow. Summary of the Article: Focusing on its main argument, including its aims, its overall findings and its theoretical arguments and contribution. Research Question: Identifying the article's research question(s) or hypotheses and discussing its value, explaining whether and how it flowed from the literature review. Theoretical Framework: Identifying and discussing the theoretical framework or theoretical substance of the paper leading to the research element. The Significance and Limitations of the Article : Use the literature to discuss the limitations of the theory and methodology used. Does the author acknowledge these limitations? Does the author draw theoretical conclusions from the research that are justified by the methodology? How do these limitations affect the significance of the article and the contribution it makes to the discipline, particularly the findings set against the research method? Conclusions: Summarising the main points and drawing implications of your critique. Marking Guidelines for the Literature Review Critique Assessment Criteria Identification and discussion of the theory and concepts relevant to the selected article Value 5 Analysis and demonstrated level of understanding of key issues and theory presented in the article 5 Identification and analysis of strengths and weaknesses of the article leading to conclusive identification of the article's contribution to research area 5 Logical sequence of the development and quality of the presentation of the critique and Referencing TOTAL 2+3 = 5 20 marks Note: For your own protection and peace of mind, ensure that you keep a copy of any assessment items that you submit. Also be very mindful that plagiarism is regarded very seriously and students who plagiarise risk failure. Plagiarism is the act of taking and using another's work as one's own. Half a Defence of Positive Accounting ResearchI Paul V Dunmore Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand Abstract Watts and Zimmerman staked a claim to the term \"Positive Accounting Theory\" for their particular theory. This paper considers positive accounting in the broader sense of a research program which aims at developing causal explanations of human behaviour in accounting settings; other examples than PAT exist in accounting. The ontology and epistemology of such a program is examined. The logic of statistical hypothesis testing, while superficially analogous to Popper's falsification criterion, is much weaker. Although the broad positivist research program is potentially very powerful, it is being let down by deficiencies in practice. Common problems are casual construction of theoretical models to be tested, undue reliance on the logic of hypothesis testing, a lack of interest in the numerical values of parameters, insufficient replication to warrant confidence in accepted findings, and the use of theories as lenses to examine qualitative data rather than as explanations to be tested. Illustrations from good papers are considered. As positive research is currently practiced in accounting, it seems largely incapable of achieving the scientific objectives. However, Kuhn's description of \"normal\" science fits positive accounting research quite well. The prospects are briefly discussed for a Kuhnian crisis and revolution, which might liberate positive accounting to achieve its potential. Keywords: positive accounting, research methods, normal science 1. Introduction In this paper I examine the positive approach to accounting research. Positive accounting research is part of the wider intellectual project of scientific research, which is intended to understand the cause-and-effect relationships I This draft has benefited from comments by Jenny Alves, Amy Choy, David Cooper, James C. Gaa, Thomas Scott and Dan Simunic, and seminar participants at the University of British Columbia and Victoria University of Wellington. Draft - please do not cite December 2, 2009 in the world under study. (As I will explain below, some streams of critical accounting research fall within this definition and are subject to the argument devloped in this paper.) The setting of accounting is one in which causes of human behaviour may be explored in large and complex organizations where face-to-face interaction is largely replaced by less-personal or completely impersonal systems of information for decision-making. To understand both the importance and the deficiencies of positive accounting research, I briefly review the wider intellectual project, with its ontological and epistemological assumptions. This review exposes serious deficiencies in the way that positive accounting research is actually performed, which prevents it from making a meaningful contribution to the wider project. These deficiencies are illustrated by examining some good recent papers. The illustrative papers could have been chosen from any area of accounting, but to focus the discussion they will be selected predominantly from the auditing literature. If positive accounting research is a well-established social system which is not well-designed for contributing to the scientific research project, its real purpose may be different. The concept of the disciplinary matrix used by Kuhn (1970) suggests instead that positive research may be a paradigm which is optimal for solving accepted puzzles, within a social group which accepts and rewards such puzzle-solving regardless of the social or intellectual contribution to be derived from the solutions. This suggestion gains weight from data presented by Lee (1997) on the dominance of the key accounting journals by a self-replicating elite. If that is so, there seems little hope that the elite could be persuaded to adopt a more effective paradigm. However, the data of Fogarty and Markarian (2007) hint that the relative position of the elite may be declining. Possibly, therefore, we may anticipate a future crisis and an opportunity for adopting a more useful paradigm. In the meantime, I offer suggestions for actions by referees and editors to nudge the present system towards liberating positive accounting research to achieve its potential. In papers such as this, one is expected to disclose one's background and biases. I was trained as a theoretical physicist, and my accounting research has been positivist, concerned either with building or testing models. Thus, my criticisms are from the perspective of one who thinks that the research project is important, and is disappointed by the ineffective versions that are now practiced in accounting. However, my father is an historian, and I am by no means dismissive of non-positive approaches to understanding the world. 2 2. The Scientific Research Project Imagine a stream of intellectual enquiry built around the following working hypotheses: 1. There exists a world which is independent of our imagination. That is, we did not make it up; and events in that world are not subject to the control of our wishes. 2. Events in that world have causes which are themselves part of the world. That is, events are neither completely random nor the results of interventions from outside the world. 3. It is possible for normal people to obtain fairly reliable information about events in the world, by careful observation. This does not imply that we will never be mistaken in our observations, only that the observations are not completely unconnected to the world. 4. The purpose of the intellectual enquiry is to use observations to gain an understanding of the world, and in particular of causation. That is, we seek mental models which correctly map the causal processes that occur in the world. I should immediately make it clear that I am not asserting the truth of these hypotheses, merely asking for a 'willing suspension of disbelief' to permit their discussion. Indeed, I advance them fairly tentatively, conscious that for most of human existence they would have been thought preposterous or impious, and that perhaps the majority of humanity would still find them so.1 The generally agreed explanation has been that events in the world are caused by the intervention of non-worldly beings: gods, demons, spirits, and the like. The only major point of disagreement has been over which beings are responsible. When the idea that the world might be understood by rational enquiry was first invented2 in Greece, in a remarkably short period about 2,500 years ago, it had to contend not only with conventional Greek mythology but also with other views of what the world is like and what may be understood about 1 After the devastating Kashmir earthquake of 2005, Pakistani physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy was explaining to his graduate students the plate-tectonic forces that caused the earthquake. \"When I finished, hands shot up all over the room,\" he recalls.\"'Professor, you are wrong,' my students said. 'That earthquake was the wrath of God.'\" (Belt, 2007, p. 59). 2 It would be unfair, of course, to attribute the idea to a single person, and many of the writings of the time are fragmentary and known largely from later references to them. However, Anaximander of Miletus (ca 610-546BC) seems to have been the first to argue that the world was driven by physical rather than supernatural causes. 3 it. The sophists, for example, seem to have had a distinctly postmodernist view: the sophist Gorgias argued (1) that nothing exists; (2) that if something existed, one could have no knowledge of it, and (3) that if nevertheless somebody knew something existed, he could not communicate his knowledge to others. (\"On Nature or the Non-Existent\