Critical Perspectives on Accounting最新文献

Risking it all: Consumer vulnerability and the credit rating panopticon 冒着一切风险：消费者脆弱性和信用评级的监狱

IF 5.7 2区管理学 Q1 BUSINESS, FINANCE

Critical Perspectives on Accounting

Pub Date : 2026-01-31 DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2026.102844

Hussan Aslam , Sally Dibb , Lindsey Appleyard , John Morris

With access to consumer credit normalised in contemporary financial life, lenders use credit ratings to assess the risk of lending to potential borrowers and to determine appropriate rates of interest. Informed by the related themes of financial literacy, financial vulnerability, and financial resilience, this paper explores the dynamics of consumer engagement with opaque credit rating systems. To access affordable credit, consumers need to be disciplined in managing their finances so that they can build a good credit rating. However, the opaqueness of credit rating algorithms and the surveillant aspects of the credit system can lead to panopticism, with consumers required to navigate between controlling their credit ratings, while sometimes lacking the information to do so effectively. Using a Foucauldian lens, ideas from folk theory and drawing on data from 79 in-depth interviews, the implications of this panoptic tension and of governmentality for consumers’ financial wellbeing are revealed. A theoretical contribution is made to understanding how consumers develop the practical knowledge needed to manage their credit rating, leading to implications for policy and practice regarding the need for transparency in the credit rating system and credit decision-making.

随着现代金融生活中消费信贷的正常化，贷款人使用信用评级来评估向潜在借款人放贷的风险，并确定适当的利率。通过金融知识、金融脆弱性和金融弹性的相关主题，本文探讨了消费者参与不透明信用评级系统的动态。为了获得负担得起的信贷，消费者需要严格管理自己的财务，这样他们才能建立良好的信用评级。然而，信用评级算法的不透明性和信用系统的监控方面可能导致全景主义，消费者需要在控制他们的信用评级之间进行导航，而有时缺乏有效做到这一点的信息。使用福柯式的镜头，民间理论的观点和79个深度访谈的数据，揭示了这种全景张力和治理对消费者财务健康的影响。理论贡献是为了理解消费者如何发展管理其信用评级所需的实践知识，从而对有关信用评级系统和信用决策透明度需求的政策和实践产生影响。

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引用次数: 0

Revolt(ing) rituals: Critical accounting and the honesty we owe 反抗仪式：关键会计和我们所欠的诚实

IF 5.7 2区管理学 Q1 BUSINESS, FINANCE

Critical Perspectives on Accounting

Pub Date : 2026-01-27 DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2026.102845

Erin J. Twyford

This paper interrogates the condition of critical accounting scholarship through Albert Camus’s notion of the absurd: the clash between our longing for meaning and the institutional indifference that greets it. I argue that we have become Sisyphean academics, pushing the boulder of emancipatory critique up the mountain of academic legitimacy, only to see it roll back down through metrics, rankings, and performative rituals. This absurdity is structured by impact factors, careerism, and a research economy that both demands critique and disarms it. Drawing on debates within the field, I suggest that critical accounting risks devolving into an ouroboros, endlessly consuming its own critique while retreating into narcissism and ritualised lament. Against this, I propose we engage in ‘lucid revolt’, a posture of honesty grounded in the refusal to look away. In an era where truth has become contested terrain, honesty becomes a form of resistance. This means naming what power seeks to obscure and recognising that even small acts of resistance matter. Revolt here is less about the promise of transformation than about learning to love the boulder. To persist with care and solidarity, to carry its weight together, and to find meaning in the act of pushing even when the summit will never be reached.

本文通过阿尔贝·加缪的荒谬概念来探讨批判性会计学术的状况：我们对意义的渴望与迎接它的制度冷漠之间的冲突。我认为我们已经变成了西西弗斯式的学者，把解放批判的巨石推上学术合法性的大山，只看到它通过指标、排名和表演仪式滚下来。这种荒谬是由影响因素、职业主义和研究经济构成的，它们既需要批评，也需要解除它的武装。根据该领域内的辩论，我认为，批判性会计有可能演变成一条衔尾蛇，在陷入自恋和仪式化的哀叹的同时，无休止地消耗自己的批评。与此相反，我建议我们进行“清醒反抗”，一种以拒绝转移视线为基础的诚实姿态。在一个真理已成为争议之地的时代，诚实成为一种抵抗。这意味着指出权力试图掩盖的东西，并认识到即使是很小的抵抗行为也很重要。这里的反抗与其说是关于改变的承诺，不如说是关于学会爱巨石。要小心谨慎、团结一致地坚持下去，共同承担责任，即使永远达不到顶峰，也要在努力中找到意义。

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引用次数: 0

Affects as the rhythm of governance – An autoethnography of being controlled 影响作为治理的节奏-被控制的自我民族志

IF 5.7 2区管理学 Q1 BUSINESS, FINANCE

Critical Perspectives on Accounting

Pub Date : 2026-01-26 DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2026.102843

Bino Catasús

This paper explores how frustration emerges, accumulates, and lingers in everyday work under contemporary regimes of control. I show how contradictory approaches to governing intersect and clash in subtle and often unnoticed ways. Drawing on reflexive autoethnographic vignettes from a Swedish university, I approach the frustrations of being controlled as an affective condition produced by the layered and paradoxical structure of control. This frustration is not spectacular or rebellious; it is mundane, embodied, and continuous, showing that affects such as frustration are central to understanding what it means to be governed. The paper also shows how frustration is bound up with the impossibility of meeting three simultaneous pressures: professional ambition, performance expectations, and procedural requirements.

The paper contributes to the literature in three ways. First, it conceptualizes governance as a socio-technical and affective practice. Multiple and contradictory ambitions embedded in control systems create a recurring rhythm through which governance is felt, with frustration forming its affective pulse. Second, it shows how frustration builds through the structural incompatibility of ambition, performance, and procedure, generating a steady, low-intensity sense of falling short even when work is carried out with care and commitment. Third, the paper reframes frustration as inwardly directed work rather than a precursor to resistance. Instead of mobilizing opposition, frustration produces self-adjustment, workaround practices, and affective depletion, becoming an internal mode through which governance operates. Frustration is not a reaction to failed control but a recurring rhythm of governance – a repeated pulse through which governance endures.

本文探讨了在当代控制制度下，挫折是如何在日常工作中出现、积累和逗留的。我展示了相互矛盾的治理方法是如何以微妙的、通常不被注意的方式相交和冲突的。在瑞典一所大学的自省性民族志小插图中，我将被控制的挫败感视为一种由控制的分层和矛盾结构产生的情感状态。这种挫败感既不引人注目，也不叛逆；它是平凡的、具体化的、连续的，表明挫折等影响对于理解什么是被治理的意义是至关重要的。这篇论文还显示了沮丧是如何与无法同时满足三种压力联系在一起的：职业抱负、绩效期望和程序要求。本文对文献的贡献有三个方面。首先，它将治理概念化为一种社会技术和情感实践。控制系统中嵌入的多重和矛盾的野心创造了一种反复出现的节奏，通过这种节奏，人们可以感受到治理，挫折感形成了其情感脉搏。其次，它显示了挫败感是如何通过雄心、绩效和程序的结构性不相容而形成的，即使在认真和承诺地开展工作时，也会产生一种稳定的、低强度的失败感。第三，论文将挫折重新定义为内在导向的工作，而不是抵抗的前兆。而不是动员反对，挫折产生自我调整，变通做法，和情感消耗，成为治理运作的内部模式。挫折不是对控制失败的一种反应，而是治理的一种反复出现的节奏——通过这种节奏，治理得以持续。

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引用次数: 0

Accounting education and neocolonialism in Pakistan: A Gramscian perspective 巴基斯坦的会计教育与新殖民主义：葛兰西的视角

IF 5.7 2区管理学 Q1 BUSINESS, FINANCE

Critical Perspectives on Accounting

Pub Date : 2026-01-10 DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2026.102842

Waksh Awais , Michele Bigoni

Research has shown how accounting is an important tool in the weaponry of colonial and neocolonial powers. However, less is known on how accounting education can be a means to ensure the silent reproduction of Western values and priorities. This study explores the relationship between current arrangements in university accounting education in Pakistan and neocolonialism. The paper is based on interviews with the three main categories of actors who have an impact on higher education, namely accounting policymakers, educators and students, and adopts Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony and the role of intellectuals in society. Policymakers, who enjoy strong ties with large multinational corporations, through accreditation mechanisms influence the meanings and content of accounting education, which educators then transmit to students, thereby altering their ‘common sense’. Consistently, many students are influenced by beliefs such as the primacy of the West and its ‘neutral’ practices and the need to embrace internationalisation. Nevertheless, others refuse such taken for granted assumptions and act as potential ‘organic intellectuals’, who may fuel the creation of new understandings around the role and content of accounting education in developing countries.

研究表明，会计是殖民主义和新殖民主义列强武器中的重要工具。然而，对于会计教育如何成为一种确保西方价值观和优先事项的无声再生产的手段，人们知之甚少。本研究探讨当前巴基斯坦大学会计教育安排与新殖民主义之间的关系。本文基于对影响高等教育的三大类行为者的访谈，即会计政策制定者、教育者和学生，并采用葛兰西对霸权和知识分子在社会中的作用的理解。与大型跨国公司关系密切的政策制定者通过认证机制影响会计教育的意义和内容，然后教育工作者将其传递给学生，从而改变他们的“常识”。一直以来，许多学生受到诸如西方至上及其“中立”做法和接受国际化的必要性等信念的影响。然而，其他人拒绝这种想当然的假设，并作为潜在的“有机知识分子”，他们可能会推动围绕发展中国家会计教育的作用和内容创造新的理解。

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引用次数: 0

Coping with cognitive dissonance in critical environmental accounting research and education 应对关键环境会计研究和教育中的认知失调

IF 5.7 2区管理学 Q1 BUSINESS, FINANCE

Critical Perspectives on Accounting

Pub Date : 2025-12-25 DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102840

Hannele Mäkelä , Oana Apostol , Eija Vinnari

As academics actively involved in teaching and researching accounting for the natural environment and nonhuman animals in our home institutions, we often experience mixed feelings on the meaningfulness and usefulness of our educational and scholarly activities. We take this Special Issue as an opportunity to reflect on the feelings of cognitive dissonance we experience when trying to respond to the urgency posed by multiple ecological crises. We complement our reflections through real-life examples from our professional experience that illustrate misalignments between our ecologically driven values and our actions. We hope that our exploration of the coping strategies adopted to navigate such inconsistencies will spark further discussion in the academic world.

作为在我们的家庭机构中积极参与自然环境和非人类动物的教学和研究的学者，我们经常对我们的教育和学术活动的意义和有用性感到复杂。我们以本期特刊为契机，反思我们在试图应对多重生态危机带来的紧迫性时所经历的认知失调的感受。我们通过我们的专业经验中的真实例子来补充我们的思考，这些例子说明了我们的生态驱动价值观与我们的行为之间的错位。我们希望我们对应对这种不一致所采取的应对策略的探索将引发学术界的进一步讨论。

引用次数: 0

Indigenous peoples and accounting. The gift of mutual emancipation 土著人民和会计。相互解放的礼物

IF 5.7 2区管理学 Q1 BUSINESS, FINANCE

Critical Perspectives on Accounting

Pub Date : 2025-12-24 DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102841

Peni Tupou Fukofuka , Sue Yong

Much of the existing literature, even when seeking emancipation, continues to reproduce a colonial tone by positioning Indigenous peoples primarily as subjects of domination and in need of liberation. Our study deliberately challenges this tendency by examining the accounting experiences of Aboriginal peoples within two Australian Indigenous corporations, Aroma and Fairwind, in a way that emphasizes reciprocity and shared vulnerability. Through a qualitative field study design, and drawing on Bourdieu’s gift theory, we argue that accounting practices constrain both Indigenous and non-Indigenous actors alike, thereby destabilizing the colonial narrative that frames Indigenous people solely as dominated. Instead, our findings suggest that emancipation must be conceived inclusively, extending beyond Indigenous communities to all who are subjected to the disciplining effects of accounting. While our stories echo the literature on the marginalization of Indigenous peoples through accounting, they also reveal how Indigenous participants identify the everyday oppressions experienced by those in mainstream society. In offering this recognition back to us, they provide what can be understood as a “gift”—a perspective that unsettles the usual tendency of the literature by highlighting the shared conditions of constraint and the possibilities for collective emancipation.

现有的许多文献，即使在寻求解放的时候，仍然把土著人民主要定位为统治的对象和需要解放的对象，继续再现殖民主义的基调。我们的研究以一种强调互惠和共同脆弱性的方式，对两家澳大利亚土著公司（Aroma和Fairwind）中土著人民的会计经验进行了研究，有意挑战了这一趋势。通过定性的实地研究设计，并借鉴布迪厄的礼物理论，我们认为会计实践对土著和非土著行动者都有限制，从而破坏了将土著人民单独定义为被统治的殖民叙事。相反，我们的研究结果表明，解放必须是包容性的，从土著社区延伸到所有受到会计纪律影响的人。虽然我们的故事通过会计反映了土著人民被边缘化的文献，但它们也揭示了土著参与者如何识别主流社会中那些人所经历的日常压迫。在向我们提供这种认识的过程中，他们提供了一种可以被理解为“礼物”的东西——一种通过强调共同的约束条件和集体解放的可能性来打破文学通常倾向的观点。

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引用次数: 0

Black tax – stories of familial financial support in Cape Town 黑人税——开普敦家庭经济支持的故事

IF 5.7 2区管理学 Q1 BUSINESS, FINANCE

Critical Perspectives on Accounting

Pub Date : 2025-12-18 DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102838

Malilimalo Phaswana, Gizelle D. Willows

Black Tax is a common phenomenon in South Africa, where individuals provide financial support to their family members. This practice is often viewed as being detrimental to Black middle-class South Africans’ financial wellbeing and upward social mobility. This study offers an alternative perspective by examining the cultural and socioeconomic factors that influence the financial support landscape. African values of Ubuntu, which emphasise collectivism and mutual solidarity, play a key role in facilitating familial support and providing fulfilment for those who can provide help. The high levels of poverty and inequality in South Africa are also shown to necessitate familial support where the state does not provide adequate assistance. This study employs the oral history method to obtain the perspectives of familial financial support from five families of the amaXhosa tribe in Cape Town. Through multiple perspective interviews, in-depth accounts of the experiences and events that shaped financial support flows within these families are gathered and presented. Results show that cultural influences and socioeconomic factors shaped each family in unique ways across common themes that are representative of Black South Africans. This study contributes to the literature by providing a South African perspective to the global conversation, which is key because of the country’s notable history of colonialism and apartheid.

黑税是南非的一种普遍现象，个人向其家庭成员提供经济支持。这种做法通常被视为不利于南非黑人中产阶级的经济福利和向上的社会流动性。本研究通过考察影响财政支持格局的文化和社会经济因素，提供了另一种观点。乌班图的非洲价值观强调集体主义和相互团结，在促进家庭支持和为那些能够提供帮助的人提供满足感方面发挥了关键作用。南非的高度贫穷和不平等也表明，在国家不提供充分援助的地方，需要家庭支助。本研究采用口述历史的方法，从开普敦amaXhosa部落的五个家庭获得家庭经济支持的视角。通过多角度访谈，收集并呈现了影响这些家庭财务支持流动的经历和事件的深入描述。结果表明，文化影响和社会经济因素以独特的方式塑造了每个家庭，这些家庭涉及具有代表性的南非黑人的共同主题。这项研究为全球对话提供了一个南非的视角，从而为文献做出了贡献，这一点至关重要，因为这个国家有着著名的殖民主义和种族隔离历史。

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引用次数: 0

Morality as performance: Studying the rise of performance measurement in citizen governance through the case of Chinese Social Credit System 道德即绩效：以中国社会信用体系为例研究绩效衡量在公民治理中的兴起

IF 5.7 2区管理学 Q1 BUSINESS, FINANCE

Critical Perspectives on Accounting

Pub Date : 2025-12-17 DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102837

Afshin Mehrpouya , Julien Malaurent

In this paper, relying on a qualitative study of the Chinese Social Credit System (SCS), we explore how performance measurement is being mobilized to enact a moral regime to guide citizens’ behavior. Basing our analysis on governmentality studies in general but also studies of governmentality regimes in post-reform China, we conceptualize the techniques of government mobilized in SCS to normalize traditional civic value of trust (Chengxin) amalgamated with market value of creditworthiness. We discuss how under SCS, three visual regimes are at work, the Panoptic, the Synoptic and what we term the Alloptic. The first, the Panoptic gaze involves algorithmic and diffuse surveillance of citizens’ behavior backed by a regime of reward and punishment, the second, the Synoptic gaze is about guiding the gaze of citizens to the stories and images of model citizens, and the third, what we term the ‘Alloptic’ gaze others the “untrustworthy” citizens under the shaming gaze of the mobile, unknown community shadowing them in their physical movements and online. We discuss how algorithmic governance enables such a coming together of the three gazes in a dynamic and highly uncertain nexus of visibility wherein the contours of the regime, and the purveyor of the othering/shaming gaze are changing and unknown. We discuss the implications of our study for analysis of governance in other settings – especially considering the rise of illiberalism in conjunction with new technologies or what has been termed “techno-fascism” particularly in the US, but also throughout the world.

本文通过对中国社会信用体系（SCS）的定性研究，探讨了绩效衡量如何被动员起来，以制定一种道德制度来指导公民的行为。基于对治理学研究的总体分析，以及对改革后中国治理机制的研究，我们对政府在社会经济中动员的技术进行了概念化，以规范传统的公民信任价值（诚信）与信用的市场价值相结合。我们讨论了在SCS下，三种视觉机制是如何起作用的，全视，观视和我们所说的同位视。第一种，全景凝视涉及到由奖惩制度支持的对公民行为的算法和分散监视，第二种，全局性凝视是关于引导公民的凝视到模范公民的故事和形象，第三种，我们称之为“异域”凝视他人“不值得信任的”公民在移动的、未知的社区在他们的身体运动和网络上阴影下的耻辱凝视。我们将讨论算法治理如何在动态和高度不确定的可见性关系中使三种目光汇聚在一起，其中政权的轮廓和他人/羞辱目光的提供者正在变化和未知。我们讨论了我们的研究对其他环境中治理分析的影响——特别是考虑到与新技术相结合的非自由主义的兴起，或者被称为“技术法西斯主义”的现象，特别是在美国，而且在全世界。

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引用次数: 0

Normalising individual responsibility? A gendered study of retirement planning in a financialised system 使个人责任正常化？金融化体系中退休计划的性别研究

IF 5.7 2区管理学 Q1 BUSINESS, FINANCE

Critical Perspectives on Accounting

Pub Date : 2025-12-12 DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102839

Roberta Adami , Liam Foster

The individualisation of risk and responsibility for retirement planning, with the requirement to make ‘good saving decisions’, is an essential feature of the financialisation of pensions. Individuals are encouraged to become active financial subjects to ensure their own economic welfare. Additionally, concepts such as individual responsibility, risk management and financial planning are presented as moral obligations. This narrative has become an intrinsic part of neoliberal policies implemented over the last four decades in the UK, aimed at further privatising retirement. This paper examines the views and attitudes of young women towards individual responsibility and risk, within the context of retirement planning in the UK. The study presents a gendered analysis of financialisation of the pension system. It draws from the concept of ‘individual investor’ to critically discuss its shortcomings, using interviews and a focus group with young British women. The findings show how deep-rooted the idea of personal responsibility is amongst respondents, but also that the concept of managing risk and uncertainty is not adequately recognised, despite its centrality to investment practices.

退休计划的风险和责任的个性化，以及做出“良好的储蓄决策”的要求，是养老金金融化的一个基本特征。鼓励个人成为积极的金融主体，确保自身的经济福利。此外，个人责任、风险管理和财务规划等概念也被视为道德义务。这种说法已经成为英国过去四十年来实施的新自由主义政策的内在组成部分，旨在进一步将退休私有化。本文考察了年轻女性对个人责任和风险的看法和态度，在英国退休计划的背景下。该研究对养老金制度的金融化进行了性别分析。它从“个人投资者”的概念出发，通过采访和对英国年轻女性的焦点小组，批判性地讨论了它的缺点。调查结果表明，个人责任的观念在受访者中根深蒂固，但同时也表明，尽管管理风险和不确定性的概念在投资实践中处于中心地位，但它并未得到充分认识。

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引用次数: 0

Accounting academics and political engagement. Professors as parliamentarians and ministers in Italy 会计学术和政治参与。教授在意大利担任议员和部长

IF 5.7 2区管理学 Q1 BUSINESS, FINANCE

Critical Perspectives on Accounting

Pub Date : 2025-12-05 DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102836

Valerio Antonelli , Roberto Rossi

Recently, scholars have paid increasing attention to accounting academics’ lives and work. The analysis of the relationships between academics and politicians is certainly of interest, if we remove the assumptions of a clear separation between the two that are assumed to underpin research in this field.

This study aims to elucidate the role played by Italian accounting academics in national political institutions, considering those elected to Parliament and/or holding a role in the Italian Government, under the Fascist regime and the ‘First Republic’. To this end, it analyses the academic and political fields and the relationships between the two through a Bourdieusian approach, highlighting how these fields are intertwined and how forms of capital can be transferred from one to another. Drawing on primary sources, the study employs a collective biography approach, focusing on five pivotal academics who served as parliamentarians and ministers from 1933 to 1992. Based on this evidence, it argues that accounting academics can play a crucial role by transferring their academic capital to the political field and mobilising the power of theories to serve the objectives of intervention in the economy and society, while political capital can also be an important source of academic capital growth. Thus, this study situates the relationships between the academic and political fields in a subfield–field theoretical perspective, thereby contributing to the literature on the role of accounting academics and their impact on the economy, society, and politics.

近年来，学者们越来越关注会计学者的生活和工作。学者和政治家之间的关系的分析当然是有趣的，如果我们去除两者之间的明确分离的假设，假设这是该领域研究的基础。本研究旨在阐明意大利会计学者在国家政治机构中所扮演的角色，考虑到那些在法西斯政权和“第一共和国”下当选为议会议员和/或在意大利政府中担任角色的人。为此，它通过布尔迪厄的方法分析了学术和政治领域以及两者之间的关系，强调了这些领域是如何交织在一起的，以及资本形式如何从一种形式转移到另一种形式。根据第一手资料，这项研究采用了集体传记的方法，重点关注了五位在1933年至1992年期间担任国会议员和部长的关键学者。基于这一证据，本文认为会计学者可以通过将其学术资本转移到政治领域并调动理论的力量来服务于干预经济和社会的目标，而政治资本也可以成为学术资本增长的重要来源。因此，本研究将学术领域与政治领域之间的关系置于子领域-领域理论视角中，从而为有关会计学者的角色及其对经济、社会和政治的影响的文献做出贡献。

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引用次数: 0