Pub Date : 2025-08-12DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102812
Åsa Plesner
Organizations exert control over workers’ time-use; some more than others. This paper contributes to studies of temporal structuring with a case study of a home care unit, where care workers’ time-use is planned down to the minute. Drawing on feminist theorizations of time, this study problematizes the ‘time’ that is assumed to be structured through temporal structuring. The question addressed is: how, and by whom, is care work temporally structured, and what internal contradictions arise in this process? Through the notion of process time (Davies, 1994), a temporality necessary for certain forms of care work, the study highlights internal contradictions between the necessary conditions for care work, and the actually existing temporal structures provided by formal control tools. Ethnographic materials are presented that show how nonmanagerial staff are sometimes able to overcome these contradictions. This finding forms the basis for an immanent critique of professional care organizations, with practical and political implications.
{"title":"Time to care? The temporal structuring of care work","authors":"Åsa Plesner","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102812","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102812","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Organizations exert control over workers’ time-use; some more than others. This paper contributes to studies of temporal structuring with a case study of a home care unit, where care workers’ time-use is planned down to the minute. Drawing on feminist theorizations of time, this study problematizes the ‘time’ that is assumed to be structured through temporal structuring. The question addressed is: how, and by whom, is care work temporally structured, and what internal contradictions arise in this process? Through the notion of process time (<span><span>Davies, 1994</span></span>), a temporality necessary for certain forms of care work, the study highlights internal contradictions between the necessary conditions for care work, and the actually existing temporal structures provided by formal control tools. Ethnographic materials are presented that show how nonmanagerial staff are sometimes able to overcome these contradictions. This finding forms the basis for an immanent critique of professional care organizations, with practical and political implications.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"102 ","pages":"Article 102812"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2025-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144827344","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-08-06DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102809
Tobias Johansson-Berg , Sven Siverbo
This study contributes to our understanding of how new control archetypes emerge in institutional fields. We conceptualize and explore how a competing control archetype is theorized to promote archetype change. Our empirical case illustrates how a governmental committee developed and promoted Trust-Based Control (TBC) as an alternative to New Public Management (NPM)-oriented control in the public sector field. The emerging new control archetype gained momentum through the active work of the committee (the “theorists”) in six lines of theorization: Self-recognizing, Homogenizing, Explicating, Abstracting, Refocusing, and Role-remodeling. By analyzing the role of theorization in the creation of an emerging control archetype, our study contributes to research on theorization for the emergence of field-wide accounting and control variation. Our case and conceptualization also contribute to a critical examination of NPM critics and how the committee’s theorization may enable or hinder ending the NPM era in the field in the longer term.
{"title":"The emergence of control archetypes: Theorization of trust-based control in the Swedish public sector","authors":"Tobias Johansson-Berg , Sven Siverbo","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102809","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102809","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study contributes to our understanding of how new control archetypes emerge in institutional fields. We conceptualize and explore how a competing control archetype is theorized to promote archetype change. Our empirical case illustrates how a governmental committee developed and promoted Trust-Based Control (TBC) as an alternative to New Public Management (NPM)-oriented control in the public sector field. The emerging new control archetype gained momentum through the active work of the committee (the “theorists”) in six lines of theorization: Self-recognizing, Homogenizing, Explicating, Abstracting, Refocusing, and Role-remodeling. By analyzing the role of theorization in the creation of an emerging control archetype, our study contributes to research on theorization for the emergence of field-wide accounting and control variation. Our case and conceptualization also contribute to a critical examination of NPM critics and how the committee’s theorization may enable or hinder ending the NPM era in the field in the longer term.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"102 ","pages":"Article 102809"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2025-08-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144781378","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-07-18DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102807
Jane Andrew, Yves Gendron, Helen Tregidga
This editorial is intended as an opening to a broader dialogue about sustaining critical inquiry amid growing threats to speech and democracy. We encourage all those committed to critical scholarship and democratic accountability to participate actively, sharing strategies, experiences, and new possibilities for collective action in the face of epistemic assault.
{"title":"The risks of speech in times of epistemic assault – Part I","authors":"Jane Andrew, Yves Gendron, Helen Tregidga","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102807","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102807","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This editorial is intended as an opening to a broader dialogue about sustaining critical inquiry amid growing threats to speech and democracy. We encourage all those committed to critical scholarship and democratic accountability to participate actively, sharing strategies, experiences, and new possibilities for collective action in the face of epistemic assault.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"102 ","pages":"Article 102807"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2025-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144771351","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-07-15DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102808
Dan-Richard Knudsen , Bino Catasús , Katarina Kaarbøe
This paper examines how digitalization transforms management control by reshaping the epistemic conditions under which relevance is made and sustained. Drawing on an in-depth case study of MediaCorp, a media conglomerate undergoing a data-driven transformation, we identify two co-existing epistemic cultures: a narrative-driven culture, where relevance emerges through storytelling and strategic framing, and a data-driven culture, where relevance is discovered through empirical rigor and standardized analytics. While the ambition to become data driven initially emerged as a narrative, we find that both cultures persist, creating ongoing tensions in decision-making processes.
To conceptualize how organizations actively manage these tensions, we introduce the notion of epistemic control—the organizational practice of aligning epistemic cultures with their associated epistemic machineries (empirical, technological, and social). Our findings suggest that management control does not merely structure decision making but also serves as an active mechanism for shaping how knowledge is produced, validated, and institutionalized. Through epistemic control, management control systems can reinforce, challenge, and recalibrate epistemic cultures, ensuring that relevance remains both contested and actionable in a digital environment.
This study contributes to management control research by highlighting the interdependence between the digital context and knowledge-making practices. We argue that management control in digitalized organizations involves more than implementing algorithmic and data-driven decision systems—it also requires the active mediation of competing epistemic cultures. Our findings extend existing literature by showing that epistemic control is an integral yet often overlooked dimension of management control, essential for maintaining organizational coherence amidst digital transformation.
{"title":"Epistemic control: A case study on managing relevance in a data-driven organization","authors":"Dan-Richard Knudsen , Bino Catasús , Katarina Kaarbøe","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102808","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102808","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper examines how digitalization transforms management control by reshaping the epistemic conditions under which relevance is made and sustained. Drawing on an in-depth case study of MediaCorp, a media conglomerate undergoing a data-driven transformation, we identify two co-existing epistemic cultures: a narrative-driven culture, where relevance emerges through storytelling and strategic framing, and a data-driven culture, where relevance is discovered through empirical rigor and standardized analytics. While the ambition to become data driven initially emerged as a narrative, we find that both cultures persist, creating ongoing tensions in decision-making processes.</div><div>To conceptualize how organizations actively manage these tensions, we introduce the notion of epistemic control—the organizational practice of aligning epistemic cultures with their associated epistemic machineries (empirical, technological, and social). Our findings suggest that management control does not merely structure decision making but also serves as an active mechanism for shaping how knowledge is produced, validated, and institutionalized. Through epistemic control, management control systems can reinforce, challenge, and recalibrate epistemic cultures, ensuring that relevance remains both contested and actionable in a digital environment.</div><div>This study contributes to management control research by highlighting the interdependence between the digital context and knowledge-making practices. We argue that management control in digitalized organizations involves more than implementing algorithmic and data-driven decision systems—it also requires the active mediation of competing epistemic cultures. Our findings extend existing literature by showing that epistemic control is an integral yet often overlooked dimension of management control, essential for maintaining organizational coherence amidst digital transformation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"102 ","pages":"Article 102808"},"PeriodicalIF":8.3,"publicationDate":"2025-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144632227","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-06-26DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102795
Pierre Lescoat , Pénélope Van den Bussche
The concept of narrative authority has recently been mobilised to understand the work of financial analysts, focusing less on the technical content of their recommendations than on how they construct their legitimacy and discourse. Drawing on the sociology of evaluation, we look at systems used to evaluate the individual performance of sell-side analysts in order to understand their role in the construction of narrative authority. This study is based on 33 interviews with 13 financial market professionals. It examines in detail the representations of sell-side analysts’ performance the system conveys, as well as the analysts’ own perceptions of it. We show how they need to reach out to other financial professions in order to build their narrative authority, particularly internally. To make sense of the dynamics we unveil, we propose the idea of an accounting system—a performance evaluation system—which embodies and ‘performs’ the market, maintaining a circularity between narrative authority and stock market valuations and evaluations. The study shows just how difficult it is to construct a narrative authority and how fragile it is. We contribute to the literature on commodification and marketisation (Çalışkan & Callon, 2009) by showing how the evaluation of financial analysts’ performance positions them on the market as assets. Ultimately, our study shows how an accounting system plays a key role in understanding economic phenomena when these are constructed by performative narratives.
{"title":"(E)valuated by the market: The challenges of evaluating the individual performance of sell-side analysts in the quest for narrative authority","authors":"Pierre Lescoat , Pénélope Van den Bussche","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102795","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102795","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The concept of narrative authority has recently been mobilised to understand the work of financial analysts, focusing less on the technical content of their recommendations than on how they construct their legitimacy and discourse. Drawing on the sociology of evaluation, we look at systems used to evaluate the individual performance of sell-side analysts in order to understand their role in the construction of narrative authority. This study is based on 33 interviews with 13 financial market professionals. It examines in detail the representations of sell-side analysts’ performance the system conveys, as well as the analysts’ own perceptions of it. We show how they need to reach out to other financial professions in order to build their narrative authority, particularly internally. To make sense of the dynamics we unveil, we propose the idea of an accounting system—a performance evaluation system—which embodies and ‘performs’ the market, maintaining a circularity between narrative authority and stock market valuations and evaluations. The study shows just how difficult it is to construct a narrative authority and how fragile it is. We contribute to the literature on commodification and marketisation (Çalışkan & Callon, 2009) by showing how the evaluation of financial analysts’ performance positions them on the market as assets. Ultimately, our study shows how an accounting system plays a key role in understanding economic phenomena when these are constructed by performative narratives.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"102 ","pages":"Article 102795"},"PeriodicalIF":8.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144491955","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-06-21DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102804
Susan O’Leary
Within critical accounting scholarship, we are beginning to understand that the enduring coloniality of our academic field limits its possibilities and potential, inflicts harm on the very people it seeks to understand and alienates critical accounting researchers hoping to use their research to impact the world. Implicitly, as a community of critical scholars we have both collectively and individually turned the gaze on ourself, our discipline and the structures and constraints it operates under that has done little to escape coloniality and, at times, serves to perpetuate and extend it. Yet this paper contends that while we use this reflexive sensibility for objectivating ourselves, our research and the structures we operate within, we have struggled to show what difference this makes to our study of accounting. The author’s experience, as a Northern ethnographic researcher within the Global South, is used to illustrate these limitations to current modes of reflexivity used in critical accounting. It concludes by offering some tentative suggestions based on Knafo (2010, 2016; Knafo & Teschke, 2021) on how we might put reflexivity to better use in the project of decoloniality.
{"title":"Problematising the role of reflexivity in critical accounting scholarship: The case of a Northern ethnographer in the Global South","authors":"Susan O’Leary","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102804","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102804","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Within critical accounting scholarship, we are beginning to understand that the enduring coloniality of our academic field limits its possibilities and potential, inflicts harm on the very people it seeks to understand and alienates critical accounting researchers hoping to use their research to impact the world. Implicitly, as a community of critical scholars we have both collectively and individually turned the gaze on ourself, our discipline and the structures and constraints it operates under that has done little to escape coloniality and, at times, serves to perpetuate and extend it. Yet this paper contends that while we use this reflexive sensibility for objectivating ourselves, our research and the structures we operate within, we have struggled to show what difference this makes to our study of accounting. The author’s experience, as a Northern ethnographic researcher within the Global South, is used to illustrate these limitations to current modes of reflexivity used in critical accounting. It concludes by offering some tentative suggestions based on Knafo (2010, 2016; Knafo & Teschke, 2021) on how we might put reflexivity to better use in the project of decoloniality.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"102 ","pages":"Article 102804"},"PeriodicalIF":8.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144330904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This study explores the nature and limits of transparency in the context of the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative’s beneficial ownership regime. To do this, we draw on Ball’s (2009) three transparency metaphors – public value or norm of behaviour, openness, and complexity – to frame our study and conceptualise transparency as an ambiguous and ambivalent concept connoting light and darkness, clarity and opacity. Empirically, we draw on diverse country-level data (supplemented by company-level data to highlight exemplars) from the period between 2013 and 2021. Our findings show how the beneficial ownership regime’s intersection with the wider political culture provides a space wherein the nature of transparency and the resultant visibilities and invisibilities are negotiated and contested and eventually compromised. We conceptualise this space as a zone of in-betweenness, or translucence, and represent it as an opacity–transparency continuum. As such, what is revealed is the social construction of translucence – a state in which there is neither full transparency nor complete opaqueness but, rather, something in-between. Our findings also highlight how resistance – in both subtle and confrontational forms –influences placement within this zone of in-betweenness (translucence).
{"title":"The translucence of transparency: Extractive industry beneficial ownership disclosure as an emerging transparency regime","authors":"Amanze Ejiogu , Mercy Denedo , Osamuyimen Egbon , Sarah Lauwo","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102806","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102806","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study explores the nature and limits of transparency in the context of the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative’s beneficial ownership regime. To do this, we draw on <span><span>Ball’s (2009)</span></span> three transparency metaphors – public value or norm of behaviour, openness, and complexity – to frame our study and conceptualise transparency as an ambiguous and ambivalent concept connoting light and darkness, clarity and opacity. Empirically, we draw on diverse country-level data (supplemented by company-level data to highlight exemplars) from the period between 2013 and 2021. Our findings show how the beneficial ownership regime’s intersection with the wider political culture provides a space wherein the nature of transparency and the resultant visibilities and invisibilities are negotiated and contested and eventually compromised. We conceptualise this space as a zone of in-betweenness, or translucence, and represent it as an opacity–transparency continuum. As such, what is revealed is the social construction of translucence – a state in which there is neither full transparency nor complete opaqueness but, rather, something in-between. Our findings also highlight how resistance – in both subtle and confrontational forms –influences placement within this zone of in-betweenness (translucence).</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"102 ","pages":"Article 102806"},"PeriodicalIF":8.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144291422","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-06-14DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102805
Keith Dixon
Calculative practices resembling conventional accounting and sometimes termed ‘audit culture’ have materialised in higher education to account for learning and related activities. I posit these practices as curricular accounting, thus contributing an unrecognised but very real form of accounting to our discipline. Comparable with other accountings, the processes and practices this one comprises are potentially constituting the people, activities and organisations it involves (i.e., scholars and administrators, teaching and learning, disciplines and universities) as economic actors and entities, with the potential inadequacies and consequences that entails. Thus, my purpose is to increase and distribute knowledge and understanding about curricular accounting to students and academics, among others, to give them agency to allay the inadequacies it holds for them. The paper involves insider research: it reflects my observing and participating in the development and ubiquitous expansion of this accounting from within universities in Britain and Aotearoa New Zealand. Framing the study historically and critically, I treat curricular accounting as a form of accounting, define and configure its aspects, explain its functioning and show that this is another accounting which never simply began. I find that its development connects with student growth, because of demand increasing for university-educated labour, wider access to universities becoming a social policy imperative, and knowledge, discipline-diversification and modularisation expanding. I also find that its recent development and current practice connect with neoliberalism and managerialism taking hold in government, public policy and higher education. Among the critical matters I raise are whether curricular accounting is serving to emancipate society; or whether it is enabling the business of higher education to fabricate products which consumers find compelling, resulting in exploitation of students and constraint of academics.
{"title":"Accounting for higher education: Calculative practices in curricular administration","authors":"Keith Dixon","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102805","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102805","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Calculative practices resembling conventional accounting and sometimes termed ‘audit culture’ have materialised in higher education to account for learning and related activities. I posit these practices as <em>curricular accounting</em>, thus contributing an unrecognised but very real form of accounting to our discipline. Comparable with other accountings, the processes and practices this one comprises are potentially constituting the people, activities and organisations it involves (i.e., scholars and administrators, teaching and learning, disciplines and universities) as economic actors and entities, with the potential inadequacies and consequences that entails. Thus, my purpose is to increase and distribute knowledge and understanding about curricular accounting to students and academics, among others, to give them agency to allay the inadequacies it holds for them. The paper involves insider research: it reflects my observing and participating in the development and ubiquitous expansion of this accounting from within universities in Britain and Aotearoa New Zealand. Framing the study historically and critically, I treat curricular accounting as a form of accounting, define and configure its aspects, explain its functioning and show that this is another accounting which never simply began. I find that its development connects with student growth, because of demand increasing for university-educated labour, wider access to universities becoming a social policy imperative, and knowledge, discipline-diversification and modularisation expanding. I also find that its recent development and current practice connect with neoliberalism and managerialism taking hold in government, public policy and higher education. Among the critical matters I raise are whether curricular accounting is serving to emancipate society; or whether it is enabling the business of higher education to fabricate products which consumers find compelling, resulting in exploitation of students and constraint of academics.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"102 ","pages":"Article 102805"},"PeriodicalIF":8.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144279561","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-06-07DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102796
Jan Friedrich , Tessa Kunkel
There is increasing awareness in the critical accounting literature that the silos between financial accounts and sustainability reports cement the displacement of environmental externalities in the disclosure narrative of business entities. This paper aims to break down the silos between financial and sustainability reporting by proposing an alternative conceptual foundation that incorporates an entity’s environmental externalities into its financial accounts. In our endeavor, we draw inspiration from Boltanski and Thévenot’s (2006) “orders of worth” framework to detail how the logic of the market world underpins and reinforces the siloed approach in traditional financial reporting. We show how neo-institutional economics was translated into the conceptual foundation of assets and liabilities and shields an entity’s financial position and performance from its environmental externalities. Based on this analysis, the paper mobilizes features of a green order of worth and introduces the concept of environmental wealth owned by the society at large. We argue that the institutionalization of this transnational body creates an accounting device that can transcend both the market and green rationality within financial reporting, allowing for the recognition of a firm’s environmental liabilities in financial accounts.
{"title":"Reimagining the foundation of financial reporting: A rights-based approach to account for environmental externalities","authors":"Jan Friedrich , Tessa Kunkel","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102796","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102796","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>There is increasing awareness in the critical accounting literature that the silos between financial accounts and sustainability reports cement the displacement of environmental externalities in the disclosure narrative of business entities. This paper aims to break down the silos between financial and sustainability reporting by proposing an alternative conceptual foundation that incorporates an entity’s environmental externalities into its financial accounts. In our endeavor, we draw inspiration from Boltanski and Thévenot’s (2006) “orders of worth” framework to detail how the logic of the market world underpins and reinforces the siloed approach in traditional financial reporting. We show how neo-institutional economics was translated into the conceptual foundation of assets and liabilities and shields an entity’s financial position and performance from its environmental externalities. Based on this analysis, the paper mobilizes features of a green order of worth and introduces the concept of environmental wealth owned by the society at large. We argue that the institutionalization of this transnational body creates an accounting device that can transcend both the market and green rationality within financial reporting, allowing for the recognition of a firm’s environmental liabilities in financial accounts.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"102 ","pages":"Article 102796"},"PeriodicalIF":8.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144242175","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Intervention in Africa by the Italian Fascists was not justified only by economic motives but sought to re-engineer the Indigenous population and settlers in the creation of a new society shaped by Fascist ideology. Accounting tools in the form of budgets, censuses and reports from the colonies of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya and Somalia between 1922 and 1941 were essential means to gather information which would inform policies that would control the way in which both the Indigenous population and Italian settlers conducted themselves. Ultimately this was meant to change their motives and actions to create the conditions that would lead to significant political and economic gains for the colonising power. Informed by the work of Arendt and Foucault on biopolitics and totalitarianism, this study investigates the way in which Fascist accounting in the colonies, rather than being solely a means to promote the efficient expropriation of local resources, was to be used to build a new generation of strong, ruthless Italians and develop a highly racialised society. In unseen ways the biopolitical properties of accounting can allow interventions in the lives of individuals which can modify an individual’s lifestyle and priorities and even promote discrimination and racism that enable control.
{"title":"Accounting and biopolitics for a new society: Italian colonialism in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya and Somalia (1922–1941)","authors":"Michele Bigoni , Valerio Antonelli , Warwick Funnell , Emanuela Mattia Cafaro","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102803","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102803","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Intervention in Africa by the Italian Fascists was not justified only by economic motives but sought to re-engineer the Indigenous population and settlers in the creation of a new society shaped by Fascist ideology. Accounting tools in the form of budgets, censuses and reports from the colonies of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya and Somalia between 1922 and 1941 were essential means to gather information which would inform policies that would control the way in which both the Indigenous population and Italian settlers conducted themselves. Ultimately this was meant to change their motives and actions to create the conditions that would lead to significant political and economic gains for the colonising power. Informed by the work of Arendt and Foucault on biopolitics and totalitarianism, this study investigates the way in which Fascist accounting in the colonies, rather than being solely a means to promote the efficient expropriation of local resources, was to be used to build a new generation of strong, ruthless Italians and develop a highly racialised society. In unseen ways the biopolitical properties of accounting can allow interventions in the lives of individuals which can modify an individual’s lifestyle and priorities and even promote discrimination and racism that enable control.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"102 ","pages":"Article 102803"},"PeriodicalIF":8.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144221767","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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