Critical Perspectives on Accounting最新文献

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised serious questions about corporate accountability, exposing how poorly our systems of corporate accountability function under pressure. This paper examines one industry and jurisdiction where this problem is particularly visible, for-profit care homes for the elderly in Ontario, Canada (where the industry is called “long-term care” [LTC]). LTC companies continued to pay bonuses to executives and dividends to investors while COVID-related deaths mounted in their facilities. What does this tell us about how society holds companies accountable for their actions? This paper focuses on two highly institutionalized systems of accountability in the LTC industry in Ontario, namely healthcare governance and financial governance. We examine these two systems in the context of public pressure for regulatory action, pressure that has manifested in mainstream media coverage, social media outrage, and the threat of civil lawsuits. We compare the efficacy of healthcare and financial governance in this industry using a theoretical framework drawn from accountability literature, and explore the possibility of legal consequences for LTC corporations under corporate criminal law. We show how these systems together serve to dissipate corporate accountability through a fragmented, inadequate system of conflicting governance mechanisms, despite making a show of accountability rituals. We argue that these systems work together to divide the moral community in which corporations exist and where meaningful accountability might be possible, facilitating the misrecognition of the “corporate imaginary” as an accountable entity.

We investigate the politicizing of migrant farmworkers’ rights regarding a fair and humane work environment using an agonistic-based critical dialogic accounting and accountability (CDAA) lens. The aim of CDAA is to employ accounting and accountability in the service of progressive social and environmental programs by taking pluralism seriously. This process of democratization means engaging the political by making visible the contestable that is presumed otherwise; bringing the contestable into the political/public arena; and giving power and voice to traditionally underrepresented groups. The Fair Food Program (FFP) developed by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) presents a meaningful opportunity to study a rights-based, worker-driven, non-state directed accountability system designed and implemented by the workers in a highly contested, for-profit arena where workers’ rights traditionally have been egregiously oppressed and abused.

Constructing an accountability system is a political process that can be made sense of using critical dialogic accountability (CDA). We describe the FFP’s effective accountability system, and the associated responsibility network, that enables the enactment, and facilitates the ongoing assurance, of the human rights of migrant farmworkers. The study goes beyond “thought experiments and conceptual discussions” and demonstrates that the CDA framework offers a useful approach for considering ways to hold powerful actors accountable for their treatment of people and resources, specifies what is important, indicates if change is needed, and provides the evaluation criteria used to motivate and appraise the powerholder’s actions. The analysis provides useful insights into the challenges associated with implementing progressive social programs for underrepresented groups and how the challenges might be addressed.

The implementation of thorny or problematic regulation is challenging for both regulators and regulatees. The reasons for the existence of problematic regulation are not to be found in the regulation itself, but rather in the policy-making process that creates it. This paper examines the process by which a problematic tax rule, the transfer pricing rule, was created in Chile in 1997. Based empirically on documents and semi-structured interviews with relevant elite rule-makers and other informants, and theoretically inspired by Bourdieusian concepts, this paper illustrates how powerful rule-makers in various spheres of activity confront each other in the definition of the final content of the rule. On the one hand, how bureaucratic, professional and scholarly rule-makers drafted the bill of law depended on their relevant technical capital, administrative capacity, and political concern that the rule would make it through the parliamentary process in the hands of political adversaries. On the other hand, this paper shows that once the rule entered the political sphere, political adversaries’ views about the role of the State, the mobilisation of silence and other explicit techniques were used to curtail the State’s power. Eventually, these power struggles gave rise to a problematic tax regulation. This paper broadly illustrates the role of powerful agents in favouring or constraining the creation of fairer tax systems and the factual operation of democracy and politics.

This paper aims to contribute to some recent efforts to broaden and foster discussion regarding the accounting field's opening to research perspectives that challenge colonialism from (and within) the margins. The paper presents a conceptual review that differentiates the Postcolonial Critical Theory (PCT) and the Decolonial Epistemology Movement (DEM); also presents some recent studies published in critical international accounting journals in the past few years regarding colonialism, revealing how the field is opening up to discuss colonial issues. The paper embraces emergent contributions from Latin America authors that proposes an alternative to postcolonial thought, aiming to move forward studies in critical accounting in the margins. Finally, the authors trace some considerations by exploring delinking inquiry and non-extractivist methodology to cultivate engagements with relationality, transmodernity, and transculturality, as new contributions to face colonialism and surpass the dichotomy between theory and praxis.

For the vast majority of accounting and management research journals, the length of submitted articles is now considered an essential criterion, and the watchword in this respect is: “keep it as short as possible!” Our goal in this essay is to highlight the potential damaging side-effects that this “diktat of concision” currently imposed on researchers can have on the creation of knowledge. We also seek to better understand how the current circumstances constitute a fertile ground for such a diktat to thrive despite its possible negative repercussions. As we advance in our reflection, we come to illuminate a set of possible resonances between (1) the academic writing style promoted by the “diktat of concision” and a context marked by: (2) the “McDonaldization” of research, (3) the persistent domination of the positivist approach in accounting and management academia, and (4) the increasing performatization of science. In sum, we endeavor to challenge the mythological edifice underpinning the voice of concision in the world of research.

This paper explores the relationship between the non-able body and accountability practices in organizations. Through oral history interviews with celiac-afflicted professionals, we illustrate that employees with this autoimmune condition seek to give an account, but often fail to live up to, accountability standards at work. We focus on the way that social elements of performance, social attributes and embodied perceptions of a healthy body are accounted for in organizations, paying attention to employer-initiated accountability practices and employees’ responses which we term employee-adjusted accountability practices. We find that employees with celiac disease attempt to embody an able body, hiding experiences with the disease and can do violence to their own bodies in the name of accountability. In particular, drawing on Messner (2009), who articulated the experience of ethical violence on the accountable self in organizations, our findings show that the accountable non-able body self can enact physical violence to the body in an attempt to meet accountability expectations. We contribute to a growing body of literature in critical accounting that researches the way that accounting practices restrict the experiences of the accountable embodied self. We extend such efforts by exploring the impact of accountability practices in the area of long-term health and disease management at work.

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT are likely to amplify epistemic injustice through the lack of transparency and traceability of data sources. The unethical alienation of original knowledge producers from their intellectual products, which are repackaged by LLMs as artificial intelligence, conceals power asymmetries in the global knowledge production and dissemination system. As elaborated by Miranda Fricker (2010), Western White male actors traditionally dominate knowledge production; therefore, ChatGPT and other LLMs are inclined to reproduce patriarchal perspectives as universal understandings of the World. Our commentary applies this logic to accounting practice and research in Africa, and asserts that epistemic injustice, resulting from colonization and racism, means that ontological and epistemological approaches situated in the accounting needs and experiences of African communities are missing from or poorly articulated by ChatGPT and other LLMs. If LLMs are to attain legitimacy as (ethical) sources of knowledge, regulation must be enforced to ensure transparency—as a foundation for promoting pluriversality and eliminating epistemic injustice.

Previous literature has suggested that temporality is an important component of enterprise risk management (ERM). Studies have focused attention on single instruments or processes, such as budgets, forecasts, risk maps, or risk silos, and the ways these shape the time horizons of organizational actors. Yet, we still know relatively little about the role of time in shaping the “dynamics of (dis)integrated risk management” (Arena, Arnaboldi & Palermo, 2017). To explore the notion of temporality and its role in shaping the contours of ERM, we investigated a Brazilian sugar-ethanol conglomerate (Group) and its use of ERM during a period of change and accelerated expansion between 2008 and 2015. To better understand how different temporalities were embedded and performed in ERM arrangements across Group, we draw upon the works of social theorist Theodore Schatzki (2002, 2010) as well as literature in accounting. In examining ERM through a temporal lens, this paper makes two contributions. First, we complement previous studies on the everyday practices underlying enterprise risk management by focusing on how temporality shapes the trajectories and limits of ERM practice. Second, we contribute to research interested in exploring how temporality shapes the situated functionality of accounting (Ahrens & Chapman, 2007) by highlighting how multiple representations of the past, present, and future are simultaneously implicated in risk management practice across organizational sites. Overall, our findings suggest that without a clear understanding of how different and sometimes conflicting time-horizons shape particular practices of risk management, it is rather difficult to assess whether ERM can become sensitive to longer-term risks.

Latin American decolonial thinking offers an alternative perspective to modern Western thought for the analysis of the role of accounting in relations of power, economic domination, knowledge and subjectivity in corporate capitalism. By applying a decolonial perspective, this paper contributes to previous literature on how conflicting public and private economic interests shape and are shaped by accounting practices. In particular, it analyses the role of accounting in the web of domination and power relations of a foreign company involved in the private management of a monopoly. To that end, it examines the historical case of the private management of the Spanish telephone monopoly at a time when the Spanish concessionary company was a subsidiary of the US multinational, International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation. The analysis of the case shows that the accounting was embedded within a geopolitical system of knowledge that strengthened a colonial matrix of power resulting in the domination of US capital over the Spanish state. This research contributes to a better understanding of how the colonial matrix of power operates through the subalternisation of the population not only in the Global South but also in Europe, imposing the rhetoric of modernity (conversion, progress and development) and exporting it to other latitudes by claiming its universality.

Although immigrants are subject to structural and cultural vulnerability, little attention has been devoted to understanding the integration challenges they face in building a career in accounting and finance. This study investigates those challenges and addresses how such challenges and immigrant characteristics influence career satisfaction. The study draws on the life course perspective to survey Canadian immigrants. It finds that the integration challenges are multidimensional, comprising workplace discrimination, non-recognition of foreign education and experience, and ethnic differences, where the devaluation of prior education and experience is the worst challenge for new Canadian immigrants. Further, workplace discrimination and devalued education and experience negatively influence career satisfaction. However, ethnic differences exert no significant effect on career satisfaction. Evidently, this study is the first to measure dimensions of immigrant integration challenges and how they relate to career satisfaction. The identified challenges and suggestions may be of benefit to enterprises, government institutions, and professional bodies that aim to improve inclusion, equity, and career outcomes.