Economic activity and stewardship in a new cultural context - no "glasnost" for accounting

This paper focuses on how accounting is functioning in a Russian comp any established as a result of perestroika. When the perestroika bega n in the of the 1980s, a process of restructuring and reforming the R ussian society started - plan economy should be changed to a more mar ket oriented economy. Many western companies that entered the Russian marked to benefit from this restructuring of the society expecting b oth low production costs and an expanding market, experienced that re ality does not change as fast as the rhetoric of the politicians. The company that we focus on in this paper, was established in St.Peters burg in 1992 as a joint venture between Norwegian and Russian investo rs. The paper includes descriptions of the intentions of this establi shment, the process of establishing the company, and how the company handled the many unexpected and serious problems that it faced in the period 1992-1996. As part of these descriptions we discuss how accou nting was applied both in the process of establishing the company and when handling problems that occured. The paper ends with a discussio n of how to understand that accounting information was not used as an instrument for improvement