Critical Perspectives on Accounting最新文献

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.

Problems linked to tax injustices have gained worldwide attention recently, as the aggressive tax planning practices of multinational companies have increasingly been exposed. Legislative reforms and enhanced corporate social responsibility practices have been introduced to deter tax avoidance, yet with little enduring success. However, little attention has been paid to the role of tax scholarship or to the statutory interpretation in the problems of tax avoidance. This paper contradicts the commonplace view that tax law scholarship serves the public interest. The paper approaches tax scholarship as a social practice, and argues that conflicting interests emerge when tax scholars conduct doctrinal study of law. As many tax scholars work for the tax advisory industry alongside their scholarly jobs, they have an incentive to propose legal arguments in their scholarly work that advance their private clients’ interests. Since judges use scholarship as an interpretive aid when defining the content of tax law, tax scholarship might bias the development of legal doctrine. It is argued that scholarship may therefore change the distributive effects of tax systems, in favor of the tax advisory firms’ clients. As a result, the democratic legitimacy of tax systems may be undermined. This article illustrates the problematic aspects of tax scholars’ double roles using empirical examples from Finnish legal culture and Finnish law reviews and codes of conduct in universities. This paper develops an argument that if such problems are prevalent in a country with little corruption and strong democratic institutions, they may be widespread in jurisdictions beyond Finland.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

How do the media represent the complex, opaque and controversial phenomenon of corporate tax avoidance? Based on media’s articles pertaining to the international “LuxLeaks” news leak, we identify a contest over tax avoidance representation which reveals a peculiar normative dynamic. We find that the field of tax avoidance is characterized by a vague and highly ambiguous normative framework, as the media rely on very different norms to elaborate distinct normative standpoints to represent LuxLeaks. How can the problem of tax avoidance (and consequently its solution) be delimited if there is disagreement over which norm should be used to assess it? Our study then highlights the need to step back and (re)consider broader assumptions of normativity in relation to tax avoidance, to advance the debate. We propose to import Baier’s (2013) socio-legal perspective on normativity into the tax realm, to better understand not just the legal and social norms as distinct normative systems but also their interdependence. Based on discursive insights from the press, we map out the normative structure specific to LuxLeaks, as conceptualized using Baier’s platform. To exemplify how this kind of conceptualization can nurture future research, we initiate a reflection on how normativity could evolve in the tax avoidance field, considering possible implications of the press representations analyzed.

This paper introduces silence as a form of resistance. Critical accounting studies portrayed resistance in terms of visibility and voice, and silence as a passive reaction from marginalized groups unable to speak, deprived of ‘voice’. Instead, we draw on an ethnographic study to follow various resisting strategies drawing on silence to actively undermine accounting technologies and practices. We draw on Scott’s infrapolitics and introduce silence as a strategic act, constitutive of power relations yet with multiple and situated meanings. We argue that silence acts both to forge a form of contestation that dares not speak its name and to constitute a space for the development of an alternative conduct to reclaim independence. Specifically, we identify four tactics using silence as a form of resistance – silence to escape accountability and control; silence to negotiate an alternative; silence to reclaim independence; and silence to retain power and authority. We then discuss the potential and limits of such silent resistance to support the emergence of alternative conducts.