Critical Perspectives on Accounting最新文献

Nigeria subsidises the cost of petroleum products for its citizens, but corruption means that the cost is rising and to maintain the subsidy, Nigeria has sought financial support from international financial institutions, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. However, this support is contingent on neoliberal economic policy reform, in which the World Bank calls for the removal of petroleum product subsidies and the implementation of Western ‘honour’-based regulatory frameworks, that is, International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS), to improve transparency and accountability. Considering endemic corruption in the Nigerian cultural and socio-political context, where political elites can override any rule and politicians, public officials, and professionals can intentionally manipulate accounting records, we examine the limits of governance/accounting frameworks and explore the boundaries of accountants’ oversight function. In particular, we discuss the impact of ‘honour’-based regulatory frameworks, such as IFRS and IPSAS, on transparency and accountability in the Nigerian oil and gas sector and in the government subsidy programme. This study challenges the neoliberal assumption that Western ‘honour’-based IFRS and IPSAS, widely adopted in developed countries where fraud is rare, can improve transparency and accountability in developing economies like Nigeria, where corruption is endemic.

This article proposes a historical analysis of the evolution of both the asset-liability and the revenue-expense views as accounting paradigms functional to the expression of the hegemonic relations exercised by the ruling classes in their social contexts. Focusing on the United States and Italy, the study outlines the common trajectories of the development of the revenue-expense accounting system after the initial classical asset-liability phase. It then highlights the differences in terms of the subsequent changes that drove the United States to new asset-liability positions of a financial connotation, whilst, in Italy, they were more oriented towards the consolidation of the revenue-expense view. The research methodology is based on critical accounting history lenses, using Gramsci’s concepts of Integral State, ideology, and intellectuals to analyse and understand the above developments. The study concludes that the asset-liability paradigm, which has been spreading in the United States since the 1960s, has characteristics that are useful for the neoliberal ideology and the implementation of its programme, contributing to the cultural hegemony of financial capitalism. In Italy, on the other hand, there has been the persistence of the revenue-expense paradigm, which has characteristics less compatible with the aforementioned ideology. Central to this dynamic has been the mediation of intellectuals in the accounting bodies of Civil Society and in the apparatuses of Political Society. These paradigms should, therefore, be the subject of renewed interest in the debate of the international scientific community, as well as in professional practice, in order to support the strengthening of a role of accounting intellectuals functional to the interests of the subordinate classes, for a truly emancipatory function of accounting with respect to the current dominant hegemony.

In this paper, we analyze women’s experiences in the Brazilian accounting academia to understand how entrenched sexism shapes their socialization process. We argue that the doctoral programs's socialization is based on rooted sexism that reinforces and maintains the construction of scarcity of women in accounting academia. Theoretically, we draw upon the discussion of sexism and academic socialization processes. Methodologically, we conducted 19 interviews with 17 women, both pursuing their Ph.D. or already working as faculties. Our evidence points to three main findings: (i) women are constantly being expelled from accounting academia and receiving constant reminders that they are an abject body in a masculine/masculiniized environment; (ii) this expulsion attempt is embodied especially during motherhood – that constitutes an embodied process of othering – and by objectification, navigating both silence and sexualization; and (iii) they resist by relying upon have values opposed to the pale male me(n)ritocratic ideal. We conclude that the “old boys’ club” pillars are being challenged as women subvert the established sexist values. This paper has a twofold contribution: (i) presenting the anatomy of how sexism takes form in the socialization process and questioning the taken-for-granted doctoral program’s rules while presenting a new possibility of academic values, and; (ii) adding Brazilian voices to the diversity and inclusion accounting literature.

This study provides a linguistic analysis of three modern slavery disclosure regulations, the California Transparency in the Supply Chain Act (CTSCA) 2010, section 54 of the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 and the Australian Modern Slavery Act 2018. These regulations require companies to report their actions to tackle labour exploitation within global supply chains. Based on World-System Theory (WST: Wallerstein, 1975, 1979, 2015) and by relying on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), we examined the disclosure regulations and found that the texts of and discourses around the regulations are not neutral and allow social wrongs to continue in global supply chains. Although regulators claim modern slavery disclosure regulations to be a step in the right direction, our investigation reveals a different picture: the linguistic features of the regulations support the perpetuating risk of modern slavery in global supply chains based in the periphery countries. We argue that changing the current global power structure/system is necessary to address the grand challenges of regulating modern slavery. There is a need for disclosure regime that can protect vulnerable communities, including workers in the global supply chains.

This research draws from decolonial, and feminist Science and Technologies Studies approaches to explore the power dynamics of accounting knowledge systems in African contexts. It investigates traditional African indigenous accounting systems, then focuses on the current accounting systems used on the continent and future accounting possibilities presented by AI. We argue that while current accounting systems used in Africa are dominantly Western-centric, AI may reproduce and amplify this structural and systemic power dominance, which has further socio-material consequences on the continent. In trying to mitigate these effects, we propose response-ability in the conceptualization, design, and adoption of AI accounting systems. Fundamentally, we aim to open a discussion for rethinking how these systems can address social issues in alternative worlds and consider alternative and indigenous knowledge systems in African contexts. Toward this end, we seek to open conversations on how accounting AI applications can be designed and adopted in ways that reflect and promote the fundamental principles of objectivity, transparency, accountability, and trustworthiness as embedded locally in African community life and values.

This article analyses the role played by accounting in the social order, drawing inspiration from the works of Ezzamel and the literature related to accounting inscriptions and discourse. To that end, our research examines four Spanish charitable organisations with which the Catholic Church collaborated closely in the final years of the eighteenth century and early years of the nineteenth, a period during which enlightened ideas about how to deal with poverty threatened the traditional role of the Church.

Based on this study, we argue that accounting, as a relevant part of the discursive practices of the dominant actors in charitable activity, (i) structures society, creating social spaces in which it inscribes people, and establishes links and distances between these spaces, (ii) constructs the truth about the achievements of charitable organisations and the charitable work of donors/collaborators, and (iii) collaborates in strengthening power relations and promotes both social equilibrium and the social mobility of individuals and groups.

In 2019 we called for papers that considered, from a critical perspective, the developments, articulations and implications of integrated reporting (IR) within the contemporary economic, social and political context. Who could have then foreseen the developments that would unfold? In this editorial we first trace the developments leading up, and subsequent to, our initial call for papers before introducing the contributions that responded to our call. Then, picking up on O’Dwyer et al.’s (2024) discussion of the “disintegration” of IR and the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) and on the other contributions to the Special Issue, we suggest that fragments and traces of IR prevail in the drastically changed ‘sustainability’ reporting environment. We highlight the need for further critical accounting research on ‘sustainability’ reporting and its socio-political context, a consideration of these fragments and traces, the form they take and the way they persist, and their implications. We argue that in order to make progress on sustainability, our world needs imagination, something different – not the mere reinvention of reporting standards.

We show that alumni events, as settings where workplace identities and relationships reappear and are restaged, are not simply instruments to build and sustain commercially valuable networks. In some cases, they are also forms of post-death organizing for the purpose of celebrating and remembering defunct organizations. Based on participant observation of three annual lunches for alumni of the former accountancy firm Deloitte Haskins & Sells, and interviews with participants, organizers and non-participants, we show that, while alumni reveal an identification with the firm by the act of attending, their first-order motives are primarily social i.e. to meet old colleagues. The “dead” firm as an organization is an indistinct object for them. Yet notwithstanding the weak nature of their firm-based identity, in aggregate the seating arrangements at these lunches re-stage formal features of the dead organization simply from individual alumnus choices to sit with former colleagues. Far from being a trivial emergent outcome, our hand-collected seating plan data is suggestive of how organizations can have a “ghostly” afterlife via alumni events. This analysis establishes intersections between studies of professional service firm alumni events, post-death organizing and ghostliness and points to a broader agenda of enquiry into the afterlife of defunct organizations.

In many countries, relational field dynamics between tax administrators and corporate taxpayers have undergone significant changes in recent years. We conceive of cooperative compliance models implemented in the Netherlands and the UK between large corporate taxpayers and the respective tax administrations as dynamic strategic action fields, nested within the wider tax field and influenced by shifts in the external environment. Drawing on a series of interviews with skilled actors we identify similarities between the two countries in terms of the initial motivation for introducing cooperative compliance. We also identify differences in the subsequent trajectories. We find that within the respective strategic action fields, an imaginary of cooperation built around mutual trust contributes to the sustainability of the field. Vulnerability to developments in proximate fields on the other hand undermines field sustainability. Together these concepts help to explain the different trajectories and demonstrate the value in exploring shared understandings in strategic actions fields as imaginaries and paying more attention to the influence of proximate fields. The findings have implications for regulatory policy design in other settings.

Audit firms’ diversity initiatives have focused on enhancing surface-level diversity (e.g., gender and race). While these initiatives serve an important social and business function, we argue that they may not enhance deep-level diversity (e.g., personality traits and thinking styles), creating a gap between rhetoric and reality in terms of deep-level characteristics. We combine critical and positivistic research perspectives to make sense of this rhetoric-reality gap and specifically examine personality trait diversity in audit firms. Focusing on deep-level traits is important because people may appear diverse while thinking and acting similarly. We use data from 981 auditors to examine personality trait diversity using the Five Factor Model: neuroticism, extroversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Our results show a remarkable homogeneity of personality traits for auditors within the same firm type or experience level. We also find important differences within each personality trait. For example, all firm types and experience levels tend to be more homogenous on extroversion and conscientiousness, but more diverse on openness. Taken together, the results suggest that audit firms remain largely homogenous at the personality level, notwithstanding their recent diversity rhetoric and initiatives. These results provide timely evidence to support audit firms’ efforts to re-evaluate and re-consider their diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.