Not So Fast—Let’s Debate! Applying Management Theory to Explore Stakeholder Perspectives on Corporate Reporting Policy

Abstract

This article presents a debate-based experiential exercise in which students adopt stakeholder roles (investors, executives, the public, and regulators) to analyze financial reporting frequency through agency and stakeholder lenses. The activity surfaces a paradox—short-term accountability via quarterly reporting versus long-term value—and uses a structured debrief aligned with Kolb’s model of experiential learning. After the exercise, students can apply agency and stakeholder theories to a concrete governance decision, analyze trade-offs from multiple stakeholder positions, and articulate policy and managerial implications. Materials include role briefs, student instructions, a theory primer, example student preparation materials, instructor notes and debrief prompts. An online variant is provided. The approach advances debate pedagogy by integrating an accounting regulation topic with a paradox scaffold and a theory-mapping debrief script, enabling transferable insight across the curriculum.

Introduction

Business students benefit from understanding paradoxes underlying managerial and regulatory decisions (Smith & Lewis, 2011). These tensions are managed rather than solved, requiring maturity of thought and respect for multiple perspectives. Reporting frequency has been studied for decades and offers a rich context to explore these kinds of tensions. Scholars highlight trade-offs: more frequent reporting enhances corporate accountability but can encourage short-term executive thinking, whereas less frequent reporting reduces preparation costs but can increase information asymmetry. Investors may focus on quarterly earnings at the expense of long-term financial performance, demonstrating a trade-off between current and future shareholders, and other stakeholders.

This article focuses on structuring the debate, not on making a case for debates or quarterly reporting. Because classroom debates rarely integrate accounting topics with management theory and regulatory policymaking, this exercise offers a novel and valuable learning opportunity. Because the exercise is designed to be implemented with minimal preparation, it is easily adaptable across accounting, finance, and management courses at the introductory and graduate levels. Kennedy (2007) found that in-class debate fosters oral communication skills, empathy, content mastery, and critical thinking, all of which are essential competencies for future managers. The activity was originally used in a 200-level course called Financial Accounting I.

While reporting frequency may seem like a technical accounting topic, it can also be understood through the planning, organizing, staffing, leading, and controlling framework of management functions (Koontz & Weihrich, 2015). Reporting frequency acts as part of the controlling function, setting the cadence for how performance is monitored and evaluated. Reporting shows if progress is being made toward both short-term and long-term targets. As a policy decision, it illustrates how regulation shapes governance and executive behavior. As a result, the topic travels well across management curricula. Stakeholder role briefs make competing logics come to the forefront. Working with this topic, students practice applying agency and stakeholder lenses to sustainability trade-offs, executive decision-making, and managerial control. Thus, it contributes to management teaching broadly, not just accounting pedagogy.

In an Organizational Behavior course, the activity can be used to support discussions of how incentive systems and performance measures shape behavior, including the use of earnings-linked financial incentives as mechanisms of reinforcement. The exercise can also be framed through a political lens, illustrating how organizing involves the negotiation of competing logics and stakeholder voices. In a Business Ethics course, the activity can be used as an exploration of instruments of public accountability, highlighting the role of corporate reporting in enabling stakeholder assessment of organizational conduct. Alternatively, in a Corporate Social Responsibility course, instructors can emphasize the importance of transparent and timely reporting of reliable information, allowing stakeholders to assess a firm’s economic, environmental, and social impacts.

The topic is timely given current U.S. policy debates, including recent calls to reduce reporting frequency (Cherian et al., 2025; Stuart, 2025). Some argue it would allow managers to focus more on operations and less on administration. Yet the issue is nuanced and multidimensional, not one-sided. An in-class debate is ideal for creating an engaged, interactive environment where differing views are shared respectfully. Many students argue positions contrary to their own views, creating productive tension that broadens mindsets and deepens learning (Donovan & Townsend, 2016). Keiser (2023) illustrates the value of mini-debates in business and society courses, reinforcing that this teaching method supports perspective-taking and student engagement across management domains. Unlike Keiser’s (2023) mini-debates, this exercise is a full-class debate that integrates an accounting regulation topic with explicit paradox scaffolding and a debrief script mapped to Kolb’s (2015) model of experiential learning.

Theoretical Foundations

Agency theory explains the relationship between shareholders (principals) and executives (agents; Jensen & Meckling, 1976). While shareholders collectively own the firm, they delegate day-to-day decision-making about managing resources and operations to executives. Executives are responsible for operating the business in its owners’ interests. Shareholders use corporate financial reporting to monitor their investment and assess whether managers’ decisions align with shareholder goals. More frequent external reporting can make this monitoring easier. As a result, agency theory is a relevant lens through which to examine corporate reporting and helps students explain why greater reporting frequency may support the monitoring of managerial behavior.

Stakeholder theory holds that firms are accountable not only to shareholders but also to all parties affected by their operations (Freeman, 1984). For example, stakeholders include employees, suppliers, customers, investors, regulators, the environment, and the broader public. Firms that manage these relationships better are more likely to achieve legitimacy, resilience, and long-term performance goals. Stakeholder theory emphasizes the sustainability of a firm’s operations. However, more frequent quarterly reporting pressures executives to make decisions that maximize current earnings to the detriment of long-term performance and resilience. In this way, stakeholder theory challenges the sometimes shareholder-centric orientation associated with agency theory, demonstrating to students how management theory provides a structure for informed debate by highlighting alternative ways of interpreting organizational phenomena, while stopping short of determining outcomes.

Together, agency and stakeholder theories illustrate tensions between short-term accountability and long-term sustainability, consistent with a paradox perspective (Smith & Lewis, 2011). We focus on these two theories because they are widely taught across curricula and provide complementary but conflicting views, making them ideal for creating constructive tension in debate. Through perspective-taking in the debate exercise and actively engaging in the role-based views of their peers, students experience ongoing tensions between different stakeholder perspectives. The debate is intentionally designed not to have a “right answer,” because siding with a particular stakeholder group leads to trade-offs for other stakeholders. To address this, students are prompted to hold multiple viewpoints at once in the debrief. Students leave the exercise with a clearer understanding that empathizing with contesting viewpoints is important to arrive at sound managerial decision-making.

Learning Objectives

After completing the exercise, students will be able to:

• LO1: apply agency and stakeholder theory to support arguments in a structured debate.

• LO2: analyze reporting frequency from multiple stakeholder perspectives.

• LO3: evaluate trade-offs between quarterly and semiannual reporting for business and society.

• LO4: reflect on their own learning and perspective shifts through discussion and journaling.

Instructions

Overview: The instructor gives students their respective role brief (Appendix A) based on their assigned role. When preparing for the debate, students take notes and synthesize those notes into a briefing or supporting document to remind them of their main points during the class exercise. They can also use this document to cross-reference their points with others in their group to identify overlap or divergence. The briefing document can be handed in to the instructor as evidence of participation. Requiring this ensures that participation in the exercise is not contingent on public speaking. The instructor may choose to have a whiteboard or shared document/projection they can use to track arguments made in real time. Students present their opening arguments then move into an open “town hall” format—an in-class role-play approach aligned with Green and Cassani’s (2020) model. This intentional use of conflicting lenses aligns with paradox-focused teaching strategies that complicate case understanding to spur paradoxical thinking (Lewis & Dehler, 2000).

The exercise concludes with a structured debrief, ensuring students consolidate insights and connect arguments to theoretical perspectives. Students complete a learning journal after class, noting things that they learned, things they would like to know more about, and things that surprised them. This reflective practice leads to higher-order learning and integration. Critical thinking and integrative analysis are essential outcomes in management education. Instructors may choose to extend the journaling practice throughout the remainder of the term, allowing students to revisit tensions encountered during the debate as they engage with subsequent course content.

Logistics: The in-class debate runs across two class sessions. The exercise can be run as a two-class version with approximately 10 to 15 minutes in Class 1 and 45 to 70 minutes in Class 2. First-time instructors may find that the upper end of the time range is more realistic during initial implementation. Alternatively, it can be run in a single-class version for 70 to 105 minutes, including approximately 15 to 20 minutes for in-class research before students convene into groups. If run in a single class, instructors may consider handing out additional student preparation materials referenced in Appendix E. In Class 1 (or at the start of a single-class version), the instructor distributes role briefs and introduces the Student Instructions (Appendix B). An optional Theory Primer (Appendix C) is included as a student-facing resource that instructors can share to ensure participants anchor their arguments in agency and stakeholder theory rather than general opinion.

Variations of this exercise include adding additional stakeholder groups such as lenders, sustainability professionals, competitors, owners of family firms, or regulators from multiple jurisdictions (e.g., European Union vs. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission [U.S. SEC]). Particularly pedagogically useful variations include incorporating sustainability professionals as an explicit stakeholder group, which allows instructors to foreground a long-term value creation logic in the discussion. Furthermore, by considering the perspective of family firms, students may explore topics such as legacy, intergenerational coordination, and founder influence. Alternatively, rather than stakeholder groups, the debate groups could be organized by theory. For example, one stakeholder group takes the perspective of agency theory, and another takes the perspective of stakeholder theory. Additional theories could be applied like institutional theory or legitimacy theory. The exercise can be done in a virtual setting as an alternative to a physical setting (see Appendix D). Common implementation challenges and suggested teaching tips based on prior classroom use are provided in Appendix F.

Debrief: The debrief consolidates insights, integrates the activity, and ensures students leave with personal takeaways. The goal is for students to appreciate that different roles and theoretical lenses yield different arguments and conclusions. Debrief questions are grouped by stage in the learning process: concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation (Kolb, 2015), and are included in Appendix D (Dennehy et al., 1998). Instructors may choose to award participation credit, but summative assessment of students’ knowledge can be more effectively captured through later assignments (e.g., reflections, essays, or exams). This exercise is designed as formative. Instructors may choose to use the learning journal or debrief reflections to gauge evidence of perspective-taking, theory application, and integrative thinking. No rubric is required, as questions from the debrief script can be re-used as journal prompts to create an assessment opportunity.

Conclusion

I have implemented debate-based exercises in undergraduate and graduate courses over the past 7 years. Course experience surveys consistently indicate that these debates are a highlight of the course for many students. Based on classroom experience and informal observations, students often report finding value in bringing engaging, interactive discussions into the accounting classroom. Exercises like this help make an abstract or technical topic more accessible and relevant to students. I have used this debate mid-way through an undergraduate course as a reset, which students report as being energizing and momentum-building for the second half of the term. In my experience, students engage very well with this exercise and appreciate the intellectual, emotional, and active elements. After class, students often stay speaking with their teammates about the debate topic. I have observed students’ conversations continuing in the hallways outside the classroom, demonstrating ongoing engagement and reflection. Through this debate, students not only practice communication skills but also experience the trade-offs predicted by agency and stakeholder theories, reinforcing theory-to-practice integration. I have observed “lightbulb” moments when paradoxical thinking and managing tensions is surfaced during the debrief. Debates foster teamwork, respect, curiosity, and confidence, all of which are important competencies for future business leaders, regardless of their individual disciplines. These competencies are reinforced and evidenced in reflective journals. Debates require substantial class time, which can be challenging in packed undergraduate accounting courses. Nevertheless, experiential exercises are memorable and cultivate integrative, reflective learning that traditional accounting instruction may not emphasize.

N.B. Appendices A and B are designed as handouts for students. Appendix C is an optional supplement instructors may distribute to structure and support the exercise.