Critical Perspectives on Accounting最新文献

Reflecting on the reactions that Bigoni and Mohammed's article “Criticism is unsustainable: A polemic” has provoked in me, I describe in this essay a number of tensions in the field of critical accounting that I sincerely believe must be taken seriously if critical accounting research is to fulfil its emancipatory potential. I also advocate the establishment of a dual analytical/programmatic agenda in the field of critical accounting that enables academic contributions to support the necessary social transformations. This agenda must put the disadvantaged (human and non-human, present and future) at the centre of our research and it should be centred around the co-creation of programmes that allow us to clearly link our academic contributions to the resolution of the social and environmental problems analysed.

This paper is a reflection upon The Audit Society and how, 25 years after publication, it has since shaped thinking and research in audit, accounting and accountability. We first discuss the book’s impact in the context of its publication, and highlight the key messages that the book helped to impart. Second, within the broad scope of the book, we focus upon one of its central themes, ‘making things auditable’. We explore how this early idea was productive of an organizational and sociological understanding of audit and auditing practices, and the reasons why it might still be so. In suggesting this, we travel from the book’s macro-structural elaboration of the ‘audit society’ towards a micro-processual analysis of ‘auditability’. We consider in particular two recent works by Power (2015, 2021), and outline their import and future potential in connecting three central themes of audit research: the constitution of the ‘objects’ of audit, auditees’ subjectivities and ‘dispositions’, and the ‘logic’ of the audit trail and audit performativity.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) was created in 2003 after Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. The mission of the Board is to serve the public interest through regulation of accounting firms who audit public companies. Regulatory agencies are susceptible to regulatory capture whereby the agency serves the interests of the regulated industry rather than the public interest. In 2017, the Securities Exchange Commission appointed five new members, including Chairman Duhnke, to the PCAOB. This paper applies Carpenter’s (2014b) model to evaluate whether the PCAOB was captured during the Duhnke chairmanship. The susceptibility of the PCAOB to regulatory capture is important because the effectiveness of the capital markets depends on trust in financial statement audits. The available evidence is consistent with a “weak” capture conclusion. During the Duhnke Board’s tenure, there was diminished activity in the areas of inspection, standard-setting, and enforcement.

The UK audit profession is facing a crisis of public trust and legitimacy following a series of high-profile audit failures. This resulted in the executive leadership of UK audit firms being summoned before a House of Commons Select Committee as part of its inquiry into ‘the future of audit’. During this inquiry the audit executives walked a tightrope, to both defend the social contract from an existential threat and attempt to influence policy reforms in their favour. This paper draws on ‘neutralisation techniques’ from deviance theory and the ‘grammar of legitimation’ from legitimacy theory to inform a discursive analysis of how auditors use strategic rhetoric to defend their professionalism and maintain their social contract to operate, all the while attempting to affect policy outcomes to align with their firms’ economic interests. Data for this study are drawn from the ‘oral evidence sessions’ and submitted ‘written evidence’ provided by the audit firm leadership. Our findings illustrate how the auditors construct a variety of strategic rationalisations, couched in moral ideals, to effectively deny responsibility for corporate financial scandals while simultaneously identifying with the ‘victims’ of audit failures and representing themselves ‘heroically’, as indispensable solution-bearers, not problem-causers. Their application of logic and language is cleverly designed to defend existing practices, neutralize the allegations of the inquiry, and provide the basis for advocating preferred policy outcomes. We show how, in this UK regulatory context, the Big Four are again successful in diluting and delaying reform, especially that which would legislate a full legal and economic split of their lucrative advisory service business from their audit business - a union which has grown in prominence in recent decades and been the focus of accusations of conflicted interests detrimental to audit quality. Evaluating legitimacy as a rhetorical and communicative process can aid regulators to render visible the means by which auditors use rhetoric to influence reform, and thereby improve democratic oversight over the profession.

Critical perspectives on accounting are not weapons for assaulting capitalism, they are tools which nourish and sustain it: this is the polemic contention of Bigoni and Mohammed. In this commentary, I examine this provocation, exploring its theoretical grounding in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. I suggest that Bigoni and Mohammed’s argument overstates the durability of capitalism, making it appear irresistible, inevitable, and supernatural. Though it may appear irresistible, I argue that we must see capitalism as a contingent, contestable, historically specific way of life. Human beings can live and have lived in many other ways. Paradoxically, in casting radical doubt upon the seemingly unquestionable value of critique, Bigoni and Mohammed exemplify the value of and need for truly critical thought.

Accounting scholars have begun to pay increasing attention to commensuration, in other words the valuation of different objects with a common metric. There are also a few studies on a diametrically opposed process, namely incommensuration. However, what is missing from this prior research is a more nuanced examination of how (in)commensurability is socially constructed in relation to different approaches to value. Such an examination is important as it adds to our understanding about the interplay of those complex social processes and the associated moral reasoning. The purpose of this study is to examine forms of (in)commensuration work associated with different approaches to the value of cultural heritage. In empirical terms, we study a major controversy related to a Canadian mining company’s plans to open a gold mine in the municipality of Roşia Montană, Western Romania. Our empirical data is gathered from a variety of sources: public documents released by the company, national and international non-governmental organisations, state agencies, and religious institutions; online archives of two major national newspapers from 2002 until 2021; and public consultation material from the project’s Environmental Impact Assessment. Our study makes a twofold contribution. First, we add to the accounting literature on (in)commensuration work by developing and applying a framework that considers both commensuration work and incommensuration work and connects these two forms of work to different approaches to value as well as to the different ways of drawing boundaries around elements of cultural heritage. Second, we expand previous research on accounting and sustainability by focusing on the rarely explored theme of cultural sustainability.

Applications of accounting ideas and practices have consequences. In exercising social, political, economic, environmental and cultural responsibility, individuals and organisations have moral responsibility for consequences for anyone (and anything) else of whatever uses they make of accountings. This article exposits consequences of accountings as a concept; and explains an interpretative process to recognise and classify these consequences, and configure them wholistically. These matters are exemplified using a Pacific atoll people. Longitudinal materials are used to analyse how, in the changing life circumstances of this people (not least that most are living in diaspora), several accountings practised around, about and among them have had consequences for them. Most of the accountings in question have been practised in conjunction with various forms of colonialism. However, one comprises the people’s own accounting, based on genealogy, and remnants of it are helping sustain the diaspora. The consequences recognised through the analysis are distinguished into 14 classes, including so called distributional consequences.

The article can assist researchers to articulate consequences for socially constructed entities or identities (e.g., a community, settlement, society, organisation, industry, country, planet). For people on whom accountings are being applied by others, it may assist them to withstand or mitigate undesirable, objectionable consequences. However, given power asymmetries between them and sorts of individuals and organisations knowledgeable and wealthy enough to make extensive use of accountings, its main intent is to assist the latter in exercising moral responsibility when applying accountings. This they should do by being more appreciative of accountings’ complex consequences.

Imwiin rokoia taan Waikua iaon Nikunau n ririki ake a bwakanako tao n aia tai ara bakatibu ake a tibutarara ao e kakoauaki bwa iai aia aanga kain Nikunau ni ikonibwai n oin aia katei. Aanga ni iokinibwai akanne ake a kaungaia kain Nikunau ni iangoi aanga n numerai aia aanga ni karikirake n aia utu, n aia kaawa ao n aia abwamakoro. Iai aika a nako raoi ao iai naba aika a nako buaka bwa are bon anne aron te waaki ni karikirake ke ni ikonibwai.

E mwenga raoi te I-Nikunau, e bon tiku ni mwengana, ma ngkana e tarai boong aika ana roko ibukin kabwaiaia natiia ma tibuia ao anne, ea tau te borau ni ukoukora te kabwaia. Akea bwa ea borau te nati ma tibu n Nikunau ibukin ukoran te kabwaia ke te maiu raoi nako Tarawa, Niutiran, Toromon, etc.

Te kamatebwai aio e maroroakina aia kanganga ke kabwaiaia te nati n Nikunau ni iruwa i abatera ma te kantaninga ma te onimaki bwa iriaia are te mauri, te raoi ao te tabomoa.

This paper evaluates the impact of the European Capital Reporting Requirements IV (CRD IV) country-by-country reporting (CbCR) requirements as a form of emancipatory accounting, considering whether and how it has delivered the progressive or regressive potential of transparency standards. We discuss how, despite the many significant flaws in the currently available CbCR data and in the current publication standards, the capital requirement standard has been a progressive force in multinational corporation (MNC) tax accounting, in part because of its moderate success in aggravating tension and conflict around the behaviour of MNCs and revenue authorities. The standard has delivered five key benefits: it has brought some evidence to a conversation where historically there has been almost none; it has safely tested some of the arguments against tax transparency and found them wanting; it has demonstrated the appropriate path for future incremental progressive change; it has highlighted issues that need to be resolved before a post-exploitative structure exists; and in some cases it appears to have shifted MNC behaviour, indicating that more and better transparency could support a more emancipatory accounting for transnational corporate taxation.

This study explores developing responses to the recognition of LGBTIQ+ staff within the ‘Big 4’ professional service firms in Australia through the 2010s. Employing semi-structured interviews, we explore the substance underpinning claims to related change, and the drivers of those developments. We draw on arguments of ethical praxis, which build in turn from insights of Judith Butler and Emmanuel Levinas about possibilities for the representation of some, while dehumanising others. We identify a first pre-ethical praxis phase of business case driven rhetoric from around 2010, as each firm sought to redress perceptions of a ‘male, pale and stale’ image. Here, rhetoric had some value for LGBTIQ+ staff, from whom silence had formerly been expected. Those rhetorical moves then transitioned into more substantive praxis from the mid-2010s, as activists for social justice found opportunity to link related messaging to broader community momentum for change. Nonetheless by 2019, hetero-male centres of power continued to dominate, and tenuous achievements remained focused on ‘white’ gay men. With an ongoing dominance of business case logics, violence and silence persisted for many. By 2019, any sense of opportunity for further praxis change was passing.

This paper investigates the role of household accounting in mitigating the oppressive force that is consumerism. Accounting helps to educate a community of families, allowing them to achieve a more restrained, just, and happier life. In this paper, the case study approach was used, and an in-depth analysis of an Italian community of families called the “Reports of Justice” was conducted. These families use accounting spreadsheets to view, analyze, and reallocate their expenditures toward more sustainable products. In this way, these families could observe an emancipatory change in progress and reflect on it. Additionally, by sharing reports and engaging in open discussions on accounting within local groups and other meetings, the whole community learns to achieve a more sober and just lifestyle, as opposed to a consumerist one. The paper shows how a community of families can learn to mitigate consumerism’s negative impacts through a process of problematization and praxis. The results are explained by relying on a Freirean-based theoretical approach. Accounting acts as a dialogic and mobilizing codification that codifies familial changes and helps achieve a transformational praxis. The paper is thus one of the first real-life examples of accounting’s contributions to responsible, sustainable consumption outside the corporate arena in a neglected micro-level context.