用交易成本經(jīng)濟學解釋會計外包外文翻譯（可編輯） .doc

用交易成本經(jīng)濟學解釋會計外包外文翻譯 外文翻譯 using transaction cost economics to explain outsourcing of accountingmaterial source:/0. author:patricia, gerrit outsourcing can be defined as the act of subcontracting out all or parts of some function in a firm to an external party. the transaction cost theory of the firm tce, introduced by coase 1937, has become a standard framework to explain why some firms choose to organize a given function internally, while other firms decide to outsource that function to an external party. an extensive part of the empirical research on outsourcing adopts this tce framework boerne and marcher 2002. by considering the relative cost of transactions using its own employees on the one hand and external parties on the other, tce tries to explain how companies are organized. simply stated by klein 2005, transactions differ in the degree to which relationship-specific assets are involved asset specificity, the amount of uncertainty about the future environmental uncertainty, the amount of uncertainty about other parties actions behavior uncertainty, and the frequency with which a given transaction occurs many empirical studies have investigated the outsourcing of production tasks so-called backward integration and found that asset specificity is a significant driver in the outsourcing decision, both when studied within a single industry and in cross-sectional studies e.g., john and weitz 1988; masten et al. 1989; monteverde and teece 1982. anderson and gatignon 2005 discuss several studies wherein the tce framework is used to explain outsourcing of marketing and distribution tasks so-called forward integration. both asset specificity human capital and behavioral uncertainty seemed significant in explaining entry mode independent agent versus sales employees. with respect to the outsourcing of other service functions, such as human resources, it, and accounting, only a few studies are available. for instance, watjatrakul 2005 and barthelemy and geyer 2005 found asset specificity to be an important driver for the outsourcing of it. widener and selto 1999 and spekl et al. 2007 investigated the outsourcing of the internal audit function and found support for both asset specificity and frequency. as far as we know, research on the outsourcing of accounting using a tce framework is missing this limited number of studies on outsourcing of service functions is in contrast with the general trend we notice in practice, wherein companies tend to focus on core activities quinn and hilmer 1994. similarly, vandaele et al. 2007 derive from their review of the tce literature that, despite the service-dominant shift in practice, limited attention has been given to the specific characteristics of service functions and their impact upon the outsourcing decision. they conclude that, to govern the outsourcing decision of business services efficiently, more emphasis should be placed on behavioral uncertainty, human asset specificity, and trust. also, klein 2005 concludes in his review paper that strategic management papers have included alternative theories of the firm, based on capabilities, power, and trust, and that these variables could potentially become important rivals to the transaction cost view. for instance, the impact of trust in service firms has been investigated by brouthers and brouthers 2003, and trust turned out to be significant for entry mode choices in service firms but not in manufacturing firms. similarly, because of the people-intensive nature of the accounting tasks, we might expect that trust in the service provider will influence the outsourcing decision. therefore, trust will be included in this paper furthermore, although small and medium-sized enterprises account for a significant portion of the economic activity, research on outsourcing within small and medium-sized enterprises sme is relatively scarce brouthers and nakos 2004. gilley et al. 2004 have conducted research on the outsourcing of manufacturing tasks by small firms and have called for a more general theory of outsourcing, which would require the consideration of a number of personal and organizational drivers. this trend is in line with the upper echelon theory, which suggests that outsourcing decisions in smes may be influenced significantly by the personal characteristics of the sme executive hambrick and mason 1984; hitt and tyler 1991; wiersema and bantel 1992. therefore, for the purposes of this study, we will include personal characteristics, such as the age and educational background of the ceo overall, the findings of this study demonstrate that the outsourcing of accounting in smes supports two major tce predictions, i.e., for frequency and asset specificity. frequency turns out to be significantly associated with the outsourcing intensity of both routine and non-routine accounting tasks. consistent with the tce model, the lower the frequency of the accounting tasks, the more intensely they are outsourced. smes seem to be able to create economies of scale for the routine accounting tasks that are recurrent and sizeable, so that they are inclined to maintain such accounting tasks internally. furthermore, we found evidence for the important role of asset specificity, in particular for the non-routine tasks. non-routine accounting tasks require more expertise and judgment from the accountant. when knowledge regarding the specific context of the company is important in making those judgments, it becomes costly to transfer them to an external accountant; hence, companies organize these accounting tasks internally. this result is consistent with previous research on the outsourcing of other service functions where human asset specificity is involved, such as for internal audit widener and selto 1999; spekl et al. 2007, distribution brouthers and brouters 2003, it watjatrakul 2005; barthelemy and geyer 2005, and r&d monteverde and teece 1982. conversely, performing routine accounting tasks requires less judgment, since these tasks are more standardized across firms. for such tasks, frequency turns out to be a more important factor than asset specificity when making a decision on outsourcing we found no support for a role of environmental or behavioral uncertainty.outsourcing intensity of accounting tasks, whether routine or non-routine, is neither associated with the uncertainty of the workload of these accounting tasks nor with the extent to which it can be determined that the accountant has performed his/her job accurately. similar to the outsourcing of internal audit activities widener and selto 1999, environmental uncertainty does not explain the outsourcing of accounting. whether or not there is considerable variation in the workload, if the accounting services are not specific to the firm, they may be readily available from accounting firms, with little difference between spot and negotiated prices. if they are specific to the firm, tasks need to be done internally, irrespective of the fact that their scheduling is uncertain or not. even though vandaele et al. 2007 expect that behavioral uncertainty is an important factor in the outsourcing decision of service functions, the hypothesis regarding behavioral uncertainty was not supported by the data. the data show a rather low mean both for routine and non-routine tasks, suggesting that it is not difficult to determine whether the accountant accurately performed the accounting tasks. many software tools are available to check the accuracy of routine accounting tasks input of data. in addition, legal offices e.g., the national bank, collector of financial statements will alert management if the accountant has made a calculation error tce has been criticized for being focused solely on opportunism as the basis for behavior, ignoring how relationships are more often based on cooperation and the personal relationships that exist between actors than on actual or perceived self-serving muthusamy and white 2005; ring and van de ven 1992; zaheer and venkatraman 1995. therefore, this study also has incorporated the issue of trust. considering the crucial role of the ceo as described by the upper echelon perspective, trust in the service provider may be a unique characteristic of smes compared to larger firms hambrick and mason 1984. this study clearly shows that the smes decision to outsource accounting tasks is not only based on the characteristics of the transaction, but also is influenced by the interpersonal trust of the executive in the service provider bachmann 2001 in addition, the crucial role of the personal characteristics of the ceo was further confirmed by the significant association between the educational background of the ceo and outsourcing park and krishnan 2001. it was found that smes in which the ceo does not have an economic-oriented background tend to outsource their routine accounting tasks more intensely. similarly, smes in which the ceo does not have a university degree are likely to outsource their non-routine accounting tasks more intensely. since performing accounting tasks requires a minimum of accounting expertise, such ceos may lack these relevant skills and knowledge, so that they choose to outsource one may wish to extend this studys findings to other service functions, such as human resources, it, and legal support, wherein there are also both routine e.g., recruitment, help desk, warranties and non-routine tasks e.g., remuneration policy, patent, court case. frequently performed routine activities are candidates for internalizing. similarly, non-routine tasks, requiring knowledge regarding firm-specific assets, particularly if performed on a frequent basis, will be retained within the firm. furthermore, for accounting tasks, many firms use a combination of outsourcing and internalizing, even for individual tasks such as period end accounting. one might wonder whether this can be exclusively explained by transaction characteristics. the specific knowledge that is lacking in smes might be an alternative explanation conner and prahalad 1996. we hesitate to make predictions, but it seems that service functions that require specific knowledge are more heavily outsourced when the ceo does not possess the relevant knowledge from previous education. this conclusion is similar to the results obtained by arnett and jones 1994, where the it knowledge of the ceo was related to it outsourcing. furthermore, this study treats accounting just as one support function that smes might outsource, such as other staff functions, like human resources, it, and legal support. future research could investigate whether smes are outsourcing a bundle of services. from our data, we only know that half of the companies also outsource it, but no relationship was found between the outsourcing of it and accounting second, we were not able to analyze data for each accounting task separately. although our variables allowed us to compare routine and non-routine tasks, further research could disaggregate these further and collect data for tce variables at the level of individual accounting tasks future research efforts also might focus on additional interesting issues. first, the constructs we used were adapted to fit the accounting context of the study. in particular, for frequency, we added a volume element to our operation aviation. preliminary interviews revealed that the size of the accounting task length of the task as well as its periodicity the number of times an accounting task recurs during a year both are important components of the frequency of recurrent services. we suggest that future research should investigate both interpretations of frequency in order to develop a better understanding of the frequency of service functions alternatively, the role of trust may be rather unique for the accounting function. before they outsource accounting tasks, smes must be certain that the external accountant is trustworthy and capable given the confidentiality of accounting data. future research on smes could investigate whether trust is an important factor when outsourcing other functional areas, where confidentiality is of importance finally, we support the call of gilley and rasheed 2000 to do more research on outsourcing intensity, because it better captures the nuances of intermediate forms of outsourcing, such as partial outsourcing, whereby companies both outsource and internalize for the same function or even the same task. again the specific knowledge of the service provider might be one explanation for such hybrid ways of organizing a service function. this also might explain why international comparisons, such as the study by kakabadse 2002, come up with lower degrees of outsourcing, since these studies limit outsourcing to the situation in which all tasks within a specific service function are 100% outsourced譯文用交易成本經(jīng)濟學解釋會計外包 資料來源:斯普林官網(wǎng) 作者:帕特里夏,格里特 外包可以被定義為一家公司分包給外部組織部分或全部功能的一種行為。由科斯(1937)提出的公司交易成本理論(tce),已成為一個標準的框架來解釋為什么有些企業(yè)選擇由組織內(nèi)部執(zhí)行特定的職能,而其他公司決定將這一職能外包給其他公司。一個關于外包的實證研究證明絕大多數(shù)企業(yè)在外包時采用此tce框架。一方面考慮企業(yè)采用自己員工生產(chǎn),另一方面考慮交給外部組織完成,tce試圖解釋公司是怎樣處理所產(chǎn)生的相關交易成本的?？巳R因(2005年)簡單地闡明,交易程度的不同涉及特殊資產(chǎn)(資產(chǎn)特異性),對未來(環(huán)境的不確定性)的不確定性,其他外部組織活動的頻率不確定(行為的不確定性),以及特定交易發(fā)生的頻率。 許多實證研究已經(jīng)調查了生產(chǎn)業(yè)務外包(所謂的后向整合),并發(fā)現(xiàn)無論是單一行業(yè)研究還是縱向研究,資產(chǎn)的特殊性都是外包決策的重要推動力。anderson和gatignon(2005年)眾多思索之后提出,tce是用來解釋營銷和銷售方面的外包。資產(chǎn)的特殊性和行為的不確定性似乎在解釋模式(相對于銷售人員獨立代理人)中具有重要意義。關于外包等服務功能,如人力資源,it和會計,只有少數(shù)的研究可供參考。例如,圣巴泰勒米和格耶(2005年)發(fā)現(xiàn)資產(chǎn)的特殊性是it外包的一個重要推動力。widener和selto(1999年)研究了內(nèi)部審計職能的外包,發(fā)現(xiàn)它得到資產(chǎn)專用性和頻率的雙面支撐。據(jù)我們所知,對會計使用tce框架進行外包研究較少。 對服務職能有限的研究,與我們注意到在實踐中發(fā)現(xiàn)企業(yè)往往把重點放在核心活動是相反的。盡管在實踐中存在服務為主的轉變,有限的關注給予了那些有具體特點的服務職能的和它們對外包決策的影響,vandaele等人的結論是,企業(yè)服務外包決策效率的管轄,應該更多地強調行為的不確定性。此外,克萊因(2005年)的結論是戰(zhàn)略管理中的交易成本應包括公司,在能力,權力,和信任度的這些變數(shù),因為它們是潛在可能成為的競爭對手的因素。例如,對信托服務公司的影響進行研究,原來是在服務企業(yè)(但不是在制造企業(yè))信任度是關鍵因素。同樣,由于財務外包人流密集的性質,我們所期望的外包服務提供者的信任度占到重要比例。 此外,雖然小型和中小型企業(yè)是經(jīng)濟活動的重要部分,但是針對小型和中小型企業(yè)的外包進行的研究并不多。gilley在2004年已對制造業(yè)務外包的小企業(yè)進行了一般的理論研究,需要建立在大量的個人和組織考慮之上。這一趨勢是高層的理論,這表明中小企業(yè)外包決策可能會影響到中小企業(yè)行政部門(漢姆布瑞克和梅森1984;伊特和泰勒1991;威爾斯瑪1992)的個人特征,例如總裁的年齡和教育背景。 總體而言,本研究的結果表明,中小企業(yè)會計外包tce的預測中,相關因素即:交易的頻率和資產(chǎn)的專用性。在常規(guī)和非常規(guī)的會計任務外包中,交易的頻率與交易的程度十分相關。根據(jù)tce的模型,會計的工作頻率降低了,外包的輕度就會增加。中小型企業(yè)由于日常會計任務的經(jīng)常性似乎能夠產(chǎn)生相當大的規(guī)模經(jīng)濟,使他們傾向于維持內(nèi)部的會計任務。此外,我們發(fā)現(xiàn),資產(chǎn)專用的重要作用,特別是對非例行的工作。非例行會計