Accounting Information and the Outcome of Collective Bargaining: Some Exploratory Evidence

Joel Amernic and Nissim Aranya
Accounting information has recently been shown to have strategic and tactical roles in industrial relations (Ogden and Bougen, 1985; Amernic, 1985), in addition to being a calculative device (Granof, 1973). This paper explores the potential impact, in a not-for-profit (NFP) environment, that accounting information may have on an important outcome of labor negotiations: bargaining productivity. The NFP experimental setting chosen was a hypothetical community service agency. Given the relatively unique industrial relations characteristics of NFPs, the results suggest that disclosure of accounting information may have a significant impact on bargaining productivity, depending in part upon the nature of the particular bargaining relationship.

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