Critical Perspectives on Accounting最新文献

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.

This editorial discusses how the hegemony of the English language in academic research shapes and perpetuates specific forms of power. This is a matter of both equity and justice—the additional effort faced by researchers to integrate themselves into the dominant language and the racial, economic, and social hierarchies that are often expressed and acknowledged through language. The aim of this special issue is to give the Spanish language a central position and in so doing, foster a space for contemplation that presents diverse viewpoints, research focuses, themes, and styles that have previously been overshadowed by the dominance of English. The special issue features five articles showcasing the diversity of critical accounting research in Spanish-speaking contexts. This editorial concludes with a note from the journal’s co-editors, reaffirming Critical Perspective on Accounting’s commitment to promoting multilingualism. This initiative aims to enrich academic dialogue and ensure that local contexts and perspectives are adequately represented in global discussions.

This article seeks to understand the effects produced by a gender equality measure founded on a career-advancement approach to equality, by scrutinising a managerial control process introduced by the women’s network of a large SBF120 firm to promote women’s representation in leadership positions. Through a qualitative study, and drawing on the work of Acker, we uncover the mechanisms through which action designed to bring more women into leadership positions sustains, and masks, the perpetuation of the surrounding inegalitarian structure. We show that the assumptions underlying such processes – approaching equality through the ideas of career advancement and a better work/life balance for women, and as good for financial performance – reflect patriarchal arrangements – the male worker pursuing self-maximisation, women as complementary to men, women as the principal subjects of reproductive work. Those patriarchal arrangements are then perpetuated through the effects of the related managerial control process. We highlight how it is difficult for the women heading this process to escape the career-advancement view of equality, because it is entrenched in organisational and societal structures that place constraints on the design of the control system. We thus contribute to the accounting literature on gender equality measures 1/ by underlining that the measure studied cannot challenge the status quo because it is constructed by, and locked into, a patriarchal, elitist arrangement; 2/ by arguing that a managerial control process intended to advance women’s representation in leadership positions creates a “blind spot” in the gender equality measure; 3/ by uncovering the “destructive power” of a managerial control process, which lies in its tendency to sap any possibility of understanding the problem structurally, but also in its propensity to wipe out the ability to imagine alternative ways of living and working that differ from the patriarchal arrangements on which our social order is founded.

The aim of this paper is to investigate how fraud scandals are portrayed by the media. While accounting research predominantly explored the role of the media in fraud scandals in terms of their ‘watchdog’ function, how fraud scandals are portrayed by the media has been under-explored in the accounting literature. Drawing on Entman’s and Goffman’s seminal works on frames and framing, we examine the revelatory case of the Wirecard 2020 fraud scandal. Through an abductive analysis of 795 newspaper articles, we identify six frames that differ in selection and salience and that prevail in media coverage to varying degrees. Across these frames, our findings show that not only the selection of certain fraud aspects through bounding and contextualization becomes key, but also how selected aspects are made salient to readers by means of articulation through rhetoric and stylistic devices. Media frames that endure over time utilize rhetoric that is emotional, sensational, and judgmental to evoke feelings of outrage, shock, and fascination which are selectively connected to fraud victims, top managers as perpetrators, and the malpractice of auditing institutions. Our findings shed light on how the media can direct attention through specific frames with which they may steer and shape public opinion about the responsibilities of selected corporate and institutional stakeholders as well as related calls for reforms. Our research contributes to a social construction view of fraud scandals and draws further attention to the media’s ambiguous role as social-control agent.

This study is framed in the debate concerning the measurement of academic performance, and particularly the strand of studies that explores the risks associated with the metrification of research. The objective, guided by the conceptual framework of the banality of evil (Arendt, 1964), is to delve into how research evaluation can shape banal and unoriginal evaluative practices. These practices, in turn, can trigger a fatally efficient machine within the academic system and institutions, and among researchers.

The paper focuses on examining the recently concluded Research Quality Assessment 2015–2019 (VQR3) exercise in Italy, using an autoethnographic approach. The results highlight the risks stemming from the growing dependence of research quality assessment on automatisms, which can cause its commodification at the cost of intellectual innovation and, eventually, force actors to conform to the rules of the game.

This work contributes to the ongoing academic debate by offering an innovative and multilevel (i.e. macro, meso and micro) theoretical perspective. Not only does this perspective conceptualise and present the dynamics, processes, instruments and actors at play in the phenomena under scrutiny but also provides a deeper understanding of the dynamics that promote the widespread application of research evaluation systems, despite their well-known weaknesses and potentially undesirable practical and ethical effects.

This article examines an organization’s attempts to manage strong sustainability with management control devices – i.e., indicators, budgets, and tools for reporting, deliberating, and decision-making. Our study is based on interviews and non-participant observations conducted in a cooperative engaged in sustainable energy production. We show that the cooperative faces difficulties pursuing its conflicting objectives when using management control devices to manage its strong sustainability activity. In particular, its management is hampered by the difficulty of articulating economic growth with the energy restraint needed to minimize its environmental impact. Our results provide an empirical illustration of bricolage attempts to adapt control devices in order to (1) translate the raison d’être of a strong sustainability activity into practice, and (2) represent and (3) deliberate on the resulting short- and long-term consequences. We explore the consequences of imperfect and layered control devices on the management of strong sustainability. Our study makes an original contribution by highlighting the situations and challenges faced by militant and engaged actors in their attempts to support a more sustainable type of development.

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency and payment system that leverages blockchain technology to disintermediate financial transactions. Drawing on a netnography of the early Bitcoin community from the technology’s formation in 2008 through to the disappearance of its founder in 2011, this paper demonstrates the contours of Bitcoin as an accounting regime. We propose that Bitcoin constitutes a new technology built upon social practices infused with accounting language to inscribe economic value in a particular regime of verification and validation. These practices are shaped by social relations and fuse accounting and programming logic to create a new Bitcoin mindset. While Bitcoin purports to replace trust-in-persons with trust-in-systems, we demonstrate that the actual power of Bitcoin as an accounting regime depends on the human interactions underpinning the system. We also offer a critical perspective on Bitcoin by examining the potential consequences of a payment system that mobilizes accounting practices in service of an ideology that rejects any form of oversight.

This study examines accounting scholars’ decision-making when engaging with research outlets of dubious quality within the Indonesian education neocolonialist reform context. Using researcher experiences, the focus adopted is first to understand country-wide reforms and second to consider the individual scholar’s level within a university. Dominant in the case are sector-wide suites of performance measurement and funding reforms coupled with an explosion of predatory publishing opportunities. This potent mix of change has produced organizational behavior that is not in the interest of scholars or their research institutions. Using three data sets (documentary; survey; and, autoethnography) the findings are that: Indonesia’s objective to produce ‘international research’ has had dysfunctional impacts at the level of individual scholars; an explosion in predatory publishing in Indonesia has been mostly ‘ignored’; an overly ambitious and unattainable research performance management regime has contributed to scholars and their departments resorting to dubious outlets; and, scholars have adopted a strategic ignorance of dubious quality research in their responses to the pressures placed upon them by the performance management regime. Emancipatory reforms are called for by dismantling Indonesia’s neocolonialist reforms and replacing them with a regime that respects indigenous research.