Accounting and its standards contribute to the stable functioning of socioeconomic life. Due to the importance of accounting as a social knowledge creation and communication mechanism, and due to the role of accounting standards in mediating the relations between different economic agents, they should be analyzed with reference to the concept of institution, which permits understanding their characteristic aspects. In this text, an institutionalist approach is used to understand the social role of accounting and the standards regulating its social practice, with a view to using it to understand the conceptual structures of financial information as an accounting regulation instrument.
Accounting; New institutional economics; Old institutional economics