Critical Perspectives on Accounting最新文献

Big Four accounting firms increasingly focus on non-audit services. Failures in these services may impair the accounting firm’s reputation as an auditor. They may negatively affect the Big Four, its clients, and client stakeholders. From the perspective of critical scholarship, it is vital to understand whether potentially marginalized actors that auditors are meant to protect (e.g., the general public) bear adverse consequences from non-audit failures. Low litigation settings, such as Germany, are of particular interest in this context because they rely on reputation risks to motivate Big Four auditors to provide high-quality services. Accordingly, we analyze two events of observable non-audit service deficiencies of KPMG Germany. We first use an event study and show that KPMG’s audit clients suffer negative capital market reactions after the NAS failure events. We then ask whether KPMG, having caused the events, also faces adverse consequences. Moreover, we explore theoretical mechanisms behind the observed capital market reactions. Using the Eisenhardt Method, we deeply engage with extensive quantitative data sets and explore auditor switches, audit pricing, and clients’ earnings management. The analyses do not reveal significant negative consequences for KPMG. Earnings management data provides some limited indication that KPMG allows clients more opportunistic accounting choices. Overall, our analysis suggests that reputation may be insufficient to discipline Big Four auditors from acting opportunistically at the cost of less powerful actors in low litigation settings.

This essay questions the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models like ChatGPT to enable academics to work in multiple languages. ChatGPT has the potential to dismantle the dominance of English in research communication. Adapting Te Eni's model of communication complexity, I explore the implications of using ChatGPT for non-native English speakers in the development, inputs, process, and impact of research communication. I then relate these technological changes to broader reflections on the relationship between machines and humans and the implications for the future of academic research. I argue that far from democratizing research communication, the proliferation of AI models like ChatGPT is creating new power imbalances and hegemonic positions that raise important ethical concerns for the academic community.

As our lives were suddenly transformed with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments had to act quickly to protect their populations, both in terms of health and economy. While we have seen states massively support civil society through social measures, one wonders what legacy this will leave, especially concerning the current dominant ideology of neoliberalism. In this essay, we want to contribute to this reflection by focusing on the phenomenon of public debts, since they are reaching record levels because of the COVID-19 crisis. We argue that massive public debts are, in fact, central and vital to neoliberalism and that state interventions (and central bank use of quantitative easing) that we have witnessed recently are in accordance with usual neoliberal practices and thus do not necessarily constitute a departure from the latter. We propose avenues of research to better understand public debt as a mechanism for redistributing wealth from the bottom to the top, which has thus far been understudied in the critical accounting literature, while opening avenues for political action related to the subject of this essay.

Sustainability has become a global trend to which Argentina is no stranger. This trend is materialised, among other things, in the surge of the social balance sheet (SBS). In this article, based on the theory of the “system of professions” developed by Abbott (1988), we will try to understand how the Argentinean accounting profession has tried to extend its jurisdiction to the preparation and verification of social balance sheets. We will see how, despite its intellectual, academic and political actions, the Argentinean accounting profession has not succeeded in expanding its jurisdiction to the SBS. Thus, attempts to legislate the preparation and verification of the SBS have not always been successful. Although many Argentinean firms prepare an SBS, very few use the SBS model proposed by this profession or have their SBS verified by accountants.

The background of our analysis is the evolution of the power structure in Argentina, illustrating the tension between a profession originally organised in a corporatist way, which was inherited from a former economic model, and the new global trends, which are linked to the expansion of financial markets and the rise of sustainability. This structural change creates difficulties for the profession that will ultimately impede its expansionist purpose. We use this case to illustrate certain limitations of the Abbottian approach when it is applied to a context outside the Anglo-Saxon world.

Over the last two decades, sustainability disclosure has become a well-established practice among large and medium-sized companies. Despite the increasing number of sustainability reports published annually, concerns have arisen regarding their credibility. Skeptics view sustainability reporting as a form of decoupling – a symbolic practice disconnected from the actual practices. The purpose of this study is to investigate the phenomenon of decoupling in corporate sustainability, exemplified by selective disclosure. Drawing on the counter-accounting approach and institutional theory, we identify forms of selective disclosure and their drivers. We test our hypotheses on a sample of 333 negative events derived from MSCI’s controversies database. The analysis reveals that 69 % of negative events were reported selectively indicating a prevalence of decoupling in sustainability reporting. Selective disclosure manifests in three forms: vague disclosure, avoidance, and hypocrisy. Our findings indicate a higher likelihood of selective disclosure in the areas of labor rights/supply chain and human rights/community. Additionally, companies that publish integrated reports are less likely to engage in selective disclosure. Strikingly, neither Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines nor assurance measures can effectively deter companies from engaging in selective disclosure. Our findings underscore the urgency of transitioning from a sustainability reporting practice primarily driven by business-case considerations to a more dialogic accounting approach.

What purpose does ESG accounting really serve? As the “alphabet soup” of sustainability accounting standards thickens with the growing interest in ESG investing, this article looks beyond the usual critiques of social and environmental accounting to reveal how these new standards are productive for capital. Analysing the work of the SASB and the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC), the article shows that accounting for ESG is more than the smoke-screen or green-washing exercise that critical voices often observe. By mapping, quantifying and coding social, environmental and political issues to be incorporated into capital’s valuation regime, ESG accounting standards establish a technical and rhetorical basis upon which ethical claims can become productive for capital, regardless of whether or not these ethical claims translate into any practical difference in business operations and their socio-ecological impacts.

The opportunities of digital technologies, but also their risks, are shaping organisations and societies. Their influence on the future of accounting is often presented as decisive. In fact, information technologies and accounting are so intertwined that it seems impossible to separate the two. Nevertheless, as practices, they emerge from different knowledge disciplines. We examine the intersection of accounting and information technologies through an ethnographic study conducted in a multinational high-tech company in the process of implementing a new IT system. We pay particular attention to the interactions between accountants and technologists, which we analyse through the concept of knowledge templates. A template based on mobilising formalised knowledge to intervene on the organisation in a systematic way treats technology as a set of solutions for predetermined needs. Conversely, a template that treats technology as an emerging complex imposes modes of coordination based on modularity, traceability, and collaboration. Through sociomaterial interactions, a plurality of templates emerges that influences local practices. This article contributes to the literature by showing that accounting emerges through its entanglement with different bodies of knowledge following potentially divergent knowledge templates. Information technologies therefore pose a challenge to accounting: is it possible to conceive of a modular and radically decentralised accounting? This would be an accounting that accepts the pluralism of representations, orientations, and legitimate organisational discourses. It would be an accounting system with greater emancipatory potential.

Prevailing criticism of tax minimization strategies is impacting contemporary business decisions. While extant research has focused on an alleged ‘moral’ shift among large accounting firms and corporates, little is known about tax responsibilities in the context of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Thus, we examine the following research question: How do SMEs and tax accountants perceive responsibility within the context of taxation? Our empirical investigation involves semi-structured interviews with accountants and their SME clients in Italy. Our findings point to an entanglement of legal, economic, ethical, and philanthropic responsibilities enacted in mundane tax strategy work. We propose a model of ‘shared responsibility’, aiming to clarify the complementary role of SMEs, tax accountants, and state actions in the curtailment of public funding, ultimately affecting the survival of all actors involved. Our work contributes to growing scholarship on business taxation as a form of social responsibility by emphasizing the shared nature of such responsibility, as well as showing how a current reliance on reputational risks to incentivise more responsible tax behaviour is ill suited to the SME context.

In this polemical essay, we seek to provoke reflection and debate on the role of critique in addressing the global ecological crisis that we find ourselves confronted with in the Anthropocene. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of capitalism, we will suggest that the core functional process of capitalism is one of infinite growth that subsumes any attempts at resistance, escape, or socially progressive practice. Critique, we will suggest, is a part of capitalist processes, not an opposition to it. Consequently, we will argue that, given the inextricable imbrication of accounting and capitalism, without an impossible and unconceptualisable ‘post-capitalist accounting’, all notions of sustainable accounting are protracted exercises in futility that serve rather than abate ecological collapse. Paradoxically, any attempt to produce such accounting makes it harder to achieve.