The impact of the disclosure of accounting information upon aspects of industrial relations.

This thesis is primarily concerned with epistemological issues in connection with the disclosure of accounting information in industrial relations contexts. As such it largely arose out of a dissatisfaction with the orientation of much of the current academic literature that deals with this area. Essentially,this literature is characterised by both a deterministic policy science approach that ignores the mediation of such processes by recipients' subjectivity and a modernist discourse that perceives accounting information as an artefact that neutrally arbitrates the financial "reality" facing stakeholders, that thereby constrains their pursuit of sectional interest, and hence enables optimal decision making. The lattercharacteristic has resulted in a post modern concern, in this research, to explore aspects of the epistemological basis of present accounting practices - an inquiry grounded in prior consideration of the sociological nature of what is taken to be warranted knowledge/science. From this epistemological analysis this research then proceeds to an ethnographical investigation, entailing analytic induction, of how particular recipients perceive and interpret disclosed accounting information and thereby mediate its effects. This thesis then concludes by conjecturing about the potential for the development of employee derived heterodox modes of engagement and their eventual confrontation with modern accounting orthodoxy in industrial relations contexts.