Critical Perspectives on Accounting最新文献

There are fewer women in the upper echelons of accounting academia in Italy than in other European countries, and fewer female full professors than in other disciplines at Italian universities. The purpose of this research is to investigate the barriers experienced by Italian women in accounting academia and contributes with suggestions to alleviate these. The paper adopts a phenomenographic approach to identify the ways in which a group of 24 Italian women, at different hierarchical levels, experienced barriers to their academic careers. The study identifies different categories of barriers that combine to prevent female perspectives and progression within accounting academia. Underpinning these barriers is a patriarchal culture that has a significant influence on women’s careers in academia. The patriarchal structure in both the workplace and society, engenders difficulties in maintaining work-life balance, and shapes male and female roles in the academic workplace.

The paper contributes to the literature on gender in the academic accounting discipline, exploring women’s experiences of accounting academia, linking findings of a persistence of patriarchy, and arguing for a more feminist academic organisation. This is the first research in this area to use a phenomenographic method to investigate the barriers to career progression for Italian female academics in accounting and in examining the experience of women at different career levels, including those who have left accounting academia. The paper contributes to research on women’s barriers to career advancement, bringing new insights to the understanding of the gender gap in accounting academia and in making suggestions for structural change.

This paper offers a critical analysis of the politics of accounting standard setting. The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) hold an increasingly monopolistic role in accounting regulation across the globe, and make claims to transparency, neutrality and superior expertise to legitimize their hegemonic position. In 2009 the IASB extended their standard setting beyond listed entities to the International Financial Reporting Standard for Small and Medium-Sized Entities (IFRS for SMEs). This paper explores the political antagonisms surrounding this extension, finding that the IASB undertook this project to block counter articulations from several bodies. To unpack the politics of the IASB’s extension this paper draws on Laclau and Mouffe’s hegemony and Glynos and Howarth’s political logics, to argue that the IASB maintain and extend hegemony by dismissing and blocking alternatives through the rhetoric of superior expertise, which ultimately enables them to extend ideologies of advanced financial capital and capital markets to new spaces.

The emergence of double-entry bookkeeping has been traced back to roughly the same period as the emergence of practices which are today broadly understood as capitalist. This has led some to suggest that capitalism and accounting are interdependent. This thesis, however, neglects an important set of similarly-paired developments that occurred much earlier: around the same time as the first traces of accounting appeared in ancient Mesopotamia, patriarchal forms of social organization were also spreading across that region. In this paper, we propose that accounting practices are less a function of the rise of capitalism and more a function of the expansion of patriarchy, which itself fuelled the widespread adoption of capitalism. Drawing on anthropological insights and the work of feminist scholars, the paper offers an alternative perspective, one that we hope will help fuel resistance against the current, damaging hegemony: a ‘herstory’ of accounting. In addition, this study has implications for how we understand a number of topics of importance to critical accountants, including accountability, violence and subjugation, women’s rights and working and living conditions, capitalism (and neoliberalism), environmental degradation, spirituality, and the rise of political states.

Although wealth inequality is increasingly considered a massive societal problem, only a few jurisdictions charge wealth taxes on a wide range of assets on annual due days.

Against this backdrop, the present paper asks whether there are reasons to tax wealth from a tax equity perspective. It interprets tax equity as a procedural rule, which means taxing people with equal ability to pay equally and people with unequal ability to pay unequally. Since ability to pay refers to ‘economic capacity’, which is often understood as economic power, which in turn depends on the interpretation of market theories, answering the research question requires reference to market theories.

The paper shows, firstly, that economists who argue that a wealth tax in addition to an income tax leads to double taxation refer to neoclassical market theory and its power interpretation. However, neoclassical market theory is not adequate to justify that wealth should not be taxed.

Secondly, the paper provides an alternative ability to pay interpretation and a different understanding of wealth. It refers to political-cultural market theory that explicitly deals with power and power distribution. From this perspective, there are reasons to ascribe an ability to pay to wealth that is independent of the ability to pay of income. For that reason, taxing individuals’ wealth supports tax equity.

Thirdly, the present paper asks whether wealth taxation is feasible. It finds that, from the perspective of the political-cultural market theory, the main obstacle preventing the introduction of wealth taxation lies in the prevailing neoclassical market culture.

This paper discusses the significance of Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Machine Learning (ML) and Large Language Processing (LLP), in the context of management control. The key concern is the epistemological shift from traditional deductive approaches to an inductive approach brought about by AI technologies. The paper elaborates on shifts related to the forms, practices, and infrastructures of management control, discussing new avenues for research in social studies of accounting. The discussion outlines how the integration of AI in accounting not only changes accounting practice but also fuels the relevance of some of the prior insights about social aspects of calculative practices. On a final note, the paper also suggests that, given the speed and scope at which new calculative technology is being introduced in virtually all parts of society, accounting scholars may draw upon prior insights and contribute to wider debates about the social impact of AI in society.

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.

Accounting practices were essential to Spain’s transformation into a liberal State. The process began in 1835 as the properties and assets controlled by the Catholic Church and Town Councils were confiscated across the country, culminating in the 1855 seizure process. Informed by Foucault’s concept of governmentality, this paper identifies the role and importance of accounting in the enactment of the seizure process in 1855. The seizure was designed to address a worsening national debt and to replace the values and relationships of the Ancien Regime’s absolute monarchy with the political principles of liberalism. The intended outcome of the confiscation was to lay the foundations of a modern capitalist State at a time of great political, social, and economic turmoil. Ultimately, rather than supporting the liberal aims of the seizure process, accounting practices helped the dominant political classes to further promote their interests. Most properties were sold to people who were already large landowners and this confirmed the true aim of the seizure process: to increase their wealth and, thus, their political power.

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.

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 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.