Critical Perspectives on Accounting最新文献

This paper acts as a counterweight to the recent swell of optimism among some accounting scholars about how the performative potential of environmental accounting might be harnessed to address the planetary crisis. Mimicking the style of Ruth Hines’ seminal contribution, ‘Financial accounting: In communicating reality, we construct reality’ (1988), the paper questions whether environmental accounting can play the transformational role that many envisage for it.

This research explores director and shareholder two-way face-to-face interactions at the shareholder meetings of Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company, as reflected in verbatim minutes of those meetings. Shareholder meetings are traditionally viewed as being for accountability. Alternatively, directors may engage in manipulative game-playing through skillful political maneuvering of shareholders, thereby compromising accountability. The research analyzes unique data, comprising 25 full sets of verbatim meeting minutes of 29 shareholder meetings over the period 1895–1925, using manual close-reading interpretive content analysis. Our unit of analysis is the interactions between directors and supportive/approving and dissenting shareholders. Our research question is how did the directors and shareholders interact at the shareholder meetings. We develop a typology of 16 types of interactions the directors and shareholders used in their exchanges. We complement our analysis with illustrations of types of interactions extracted from our verbatim minutes. We demonstrate how powerful directors mobilized supportive/approving shareholders to quash the dissenting shareholders’ voices. Our findings have implications for how modern-day shareholder meetings are conducted.

This paper compares the extent of engagement between the Ghanaian government and the nation’s oil and gas firms with the nature of the financial accountability offered by each of these parties to the citizenry. The findings indicate that whilst the Ghanaian government and the nation’s oil firms pay (at best) cursory regard to societal needs for information and engagement, when interacting with each other an effective and unapologetic form of discharge exists, suggesting the existence of an exclusionary hegemony. We mobilize elements of work by Jessop, 2003a, Jessop, 2003b, Joseph, 2002, Joseph, 2003 and Andrew and Baker (2020) to contextualise the evidence around recent theoretical debates on selectivity in information flows and accountability discharge in developing nation settings.

This article draws on the Foucauldian concept of “discursive formation” to conceptualize generative artificial intelligence (GAI)’s potential influence on management. It shows how ChatGPT, a typical GAI, can affect practices, decision-making responsibility and the management disciplines through a dual discourse. The first one emanates from technological solutionism, a belief that any problem can be solved with the assistance of technology (the technosolutionist discourse), and the second one concerns the utterances generated by ChatGPT itself, which are shaped by various algorithmic, epistemic and linguistic influences (the generative discourse). In simpler terms, what ChatGPT can do to management appears to depend on “what is said about it” and “what it says”. In contrast to the existing literature on ChatGPT’s potential influence on organizations, this article, through its discursive approach, takes a non-normative position, to reveal the subtler influences of generative artificial intelligence, and highlight the individual and organizational responsibilities of actors interacting with these two discourses. The conclusions may be of interest to management readers in general, and of more particular interest to the accounting profession, as the conceptualization is based more broadly on examples taken from accounting, given the close link between the accounting profession and information technologies.

The European Commission (EC) conducted a major reform of statutory audit between 2010 and 2014, with the primary aim of improving competition in the market. The Big 4, who were targeted by this reform, were strongly opposed to it. The present study employs the typology of Oliver (1991) and the “presentation of self” theory developed by Goffman (1956) to identify the strategic responses employed, frontstage and backstage, by the regulator (EC) and the regulatees (Big 4) to influence the outcome of the reform. The results reveal that passive strategic responses tend to take place frontstage, while active and aggressive strategies generally take place backstage. This work also reveals the incursion of the neoliberal model into the European regulatory arena, and allows us to characterize the Big 4 as cynical actors defending a commercial logic.

This article advances understanding of how tax administration influences social justice. Critical accounting research is paying increasing attention to social justice, but conceptualisations and empirical studies of tax administration are scarce. Drawing on Bourdieu’s social theory, we analyse how accounting technologies exercise relational power that reproduces or worsens socio-economic inequalities. Our critical ethnography of the Tax Credits (TC) system in the United Kingdom identifies four original practices through which claimants interact with accounting technologies. We reveal how claimants utilise certain types of capital to play the game of the TC system and reproduce their habitus and position of powerlessness in the field. While some claimants manage to play the game successfully and improve their position, most end up ‘giving in’ to living with financial and emotional hardship and accepting the relational power of the field. We conclude by developing a research and reform agenda for analysing and changing the relational power of accounting technologies in tax administration towards social justice.

Capitalizing on what we currently know about artificial intelligence (AI), the editorial of this special issue, entitled “Artificial Intelligence in the Spotlight”, adds our voice to a call to order in the face of the unbridled enthusiasm we often encounter regarding the benefits of AI. In short, we maintain that there is a crucial need for skepticism about the all-out colonization project vigorously pursued by AI and its sustaining infrastructure. We draw on our own analysis and that of the contributors to this special issue to consider what we see as a bold agenda for colonizing our communities, our ways of doing, and our minds – so that we become fundamentally dependent on technologies whose reliability is dubious and whose algorithms are secretly maintained behind the safety of corporate walls. Our thesis is that the cacophony of aberrations, disorder, and worries that emerge in the wake of AI can be meaningfully viewed as a juggernaut, an inexorable force that is ready to unsettle all things in its tedious path. The juggernaut metaphor constitutes our way of putting “artificial intelligence in the spotlight”. We call for researchers from all disciplines to engage in the study of the AI juggernaut and speak out as much as they can, in public and in academic spheres, about its dangers.

We build on previous literature regarding financial literacy in the home by turning our focus to financial literacy of the home and exploring the connection between housing and financial issues. We use a netnographic approach to investigate how tenants and landlords conceptualise their housing experiences on an online platform during the Covid-19 pandemic context. Drawing on Giddens’ concept of ontological security and the literature on financial literacy, we develop the notion of ‘housing literacy’ by examining the rental relationship between tenant and landlord. We show that tenants’ ontological insecurity is manifested via financial uncertainties and exacerbated when landlords seek to maintain their own ontological security. We also show that landlords’ ontological insecurity is manifested via financial instabilities while exacerbated by tenants’ behaviours. We posit that housing literacy is constructed at the intersection of tensions prompted by ontological (in)securities of both tenants and landlords. We also posit that housing literacy comprises developing the skills to maintain the home’s use value (tenants) and exchange value (landlords), and that these skills involve much more than budgeting, making rent payments, and collecting rents. We find that the ontological security of both parties is in a constant cycle of disruption and security, linked through financial precarity and learning to ‘trade-off’ elements of security. We demonstrate how both parties use anonymous advice received through their online interactions, to become housing literate. Their housing literacy is cultivated through experience, information seeking, and learning extra-legal norms in the rental market.

This paper examines the role of accounting in a public social housing organisation, joining a conversation on how accounting participates in the stigmatisation of poverty. We draw upon the structural stigma approach, which considers stigmatisation within its broader political structures and temporal perspectives, to analyse the role accounting plays in the stigmatisation of the poorest applicants. Drawing upon Tyler’s approach, we conduct an upward and backward analysis of this stigmatisation, with the role of the Performance Measurement and Management Accounting Systems (PMS and MAS) as a central phenomenon. The analysis shows the importance of institutional housing policies (funding schemes, social mix, and social housing sector governance) in shaping the MAS, entrenching the poorest’s structural stigmatisation. It also reveals how the operations surrounding the PMS led to a classification of applicants, negatively labelling the poorest and thus denying them access to dwellings. This research contributes to the accounting literature on stigma by outlining the role of accounting in the structural stigmatisation of the poorest applicants, shedding light on the fact that accounting reproduces the stigmatisation of the poorest and is part of the machinery of inequality. We also contribute to the stigma literature by adopting a backward temporal perspective on the stigmatisation of the poorest. We finally add to the limited accounting literature on social housing by showing the impact (and negative outcomes) of New Public Management (NPM)-related PMS on the poorest beneficiaries.

To incentivise active engagement with investments and the development of a diversified asset portfolio for retirement, the government has introduced subsidized, tax-efficient financial products. Drawing on the narratives of 60 UK individuals, this paper reveals the unintended outcomes of financial products being employed as governmental technology. Whereas performativity studies have explored how institutional changes, discourses and devices impact financial practices, they concentrate on devices employed within institutions such as calculative tools, models and rankings rather than everyday financial products and their accompanying constraints. This study responds to this gap by centring the characteristics of financial products within a layered performativity framework and incorporating inequalities inherent in a capitalist welfare state. By unravelling the interaction between the characteristics of financial products and income and work constraints, this paper extends understandings of overflows within a performativity framework. Government-supported financial products inadvertently construct the conditions for passive financial practices, being utilized as savings tools instead of as a stepping stone for active engagement with investments. Yet, these mis- or backfires of financial products nevertheless conform to norms of self-reliance, showcasing how seemingly contrasting elements of performativity can be present at the same time.