Critical Perspectives on Accounting最新文献

Existing theorizations on how the proliferation of market-based technologies within universities come to foster so-called academic performer subjectivities have mainly drawn attention to their coercive and seductive powers. However, while these theorizations help explain why researchers either unwillingly adapt to, or identify with and cherish, their neoliberal ideals, they are less useful to explain recent empirical results showing that many researchers willingly comply yet are very critical of the very same ideals. Drawing upon an interview study of Swedish researchers, we address this theoretical gap in the literature by analytically disentangling three important qualities of the technologies per se, in terms of them producing performance numbers characterized by Specificness, Ongoingness, and Emptiness (SOE). These three qualities do not only have the dual power to interchangeably provoke bitter and sweet feelings, but also to foster the adoption of an academic performer subjectivity. In fact, it is precisely by provoking bittersweet feelings that these qualities break the sharp edges of pure coercion and seduction, thereby fostering a type of low-affective, yet highly persuasive form of reasoning about pros and cons of market-based technologies, which make their neoliberal ideals seem acceptable and reasonable at the end of the day.

This study examines the ‘letters to the editor’ section of the practitioner accounting journal and its role in the process of accounting professionalization. Data for the study are derived from the AICPA periodical Journal of Accountancy. The theoretical framing for the study draws on the linguistic theory of Mikhail Bakhtin. The study’s analysis relies on latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling. The study finds that the letters forum helps to construct a believable and useful image of the professional accountant. The forum also provides a means for practicing accountants to intervene in, impact, and, at times, challenge the activities of the field’s authorities. Besides contributing to our understanding of accounting professionalization and the field’s competing institutional logics—professional, commercial, and bureaucratic—the study offers a methodological contribution, building on a first wave of topic-modeling research and demonstrating the usefulness of a theoretically-informed, but not theoretically-determined, approach to the study of textual accounting materials.

In this article, we investigate the influence of remote working on social bonding in Big Four audit firms. Through analysis of 42 interviews, we show that remote working places less demand on auditors to get involved in their firms’ collectives, in addition to individualizing their experience of work and reducing spontaneous mutual support mechanisms. While remote working is sometimes perceived as a way to achieve a better work-life balance in these firms, our results suggest that the potential gain in wellbeing may be achieved to the detriment of social bonding between auditors. Our results contribute to auditing research in two ways. They reveal the collective dimension of auditors’ identity construction by confirming that the place of work is not just a setting, but one of the chief mechanisms of social bonding at work. Additionally, they highlight remote working’s ambivalent impact on the attractiveness of Big Four audit firms.

Research on housing financialization argues that property assets are important stores of value that collateralise global systems of financial accumulation. Yet remarkably little is known about how those assets are constructed, valued and generate returns. This paper draws on the assetization literature to unpack how investment properties are constructed as ‘assets’, applying an accounting lens to locate their growing importance within the move towards a fair value accounting regime. We argue that property investors benefit from a generous 'distributional apparatus' - that is, a collection of rules, norms, reporting technologies and market-orienting devices that act as both a resource and an incentive to engage in practices of valuation that maximise potential distributions. In the case of property assets, accounting rule IAS40 determines how housing assets should be recognised in an annual statement; the RICS Red Book acts as a market device which articulates with IAS40, providing rules and principles on the techniques of valuation and revaluation; and the ICAEW provides guidance on whether revaluations amount to a ‘realised profit’ which can be distributed to shareholders legally. Together these three features underpin the assetization process in investment property. We use two case studies to show that this apparatus acts as a flexible resource as companies build different valuation and distribution strategies around the RICS Red Book revaluation process, with different risk implications. Our findings contribute to financialization, assetization and accounting scholarship.

Democracy is a contestable concept. Variants have been mobilised/appraised in critical discourse. Concurrently, in efforts to operationalise democracy, accountability is demanded, and thus accounting, relying on a notion of trust. Advocating more studies into ‘democracy’ and ‘accountability’ in practice, we focus on the UK’s parliamentary democracy, entailing the UK legislature’s scrutiny of the executive, in turn entailing an accounting that in reasonable terms can be trusted vis-à-vis this role. We analyse hearings before the UK’s Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee (PACAC) over 2017–19, encompassing a Parliamentary Inquiry into the role of Government accounts. We construct an immanent critique, seeking to uncover deficiencies in ‘democratic’ practices in the terms by which they are justified. Here, a working of Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman (1995) conceptualisation of trust (considered integral to official discourse on Government accounting’s support role vis-à-vis democracy/accountability), informing analysis of PACAC’s discourse, help build critique. PACAC probed the Government’s annual reports and accounts, finding them deficient in terms of their promised integrity, benevolence and competence, entailing diminished trust: gaps in democratic purpose, accountability for democracy and competence were indicated. Elaborating, we suggest implied ways forward. We expand to consider further insights vis-à-vis radical orientation towards the democracy-accounting nexus.

Despite an apparently promising start, the decentralization of property tax in Jamaica has never really progressed, nor yet been abandoned. Why is this? This paper adopts a discourse theory perspective to answer these questions. It primarily takes cues from a case study of the Portmore Municipality Council, which was tasked by Jamaica’s central government to implement fiscal decentralization. The initiative was intended to pave the way for further local government reforms in the country in line with new public management (NPM) principles, but something different happened. We conclude that several influential signifiers and signifieds were linked with fiscal decentralization. Mobilized in various politically motivated and overlapping discourses, these served different interests and attracted shifting groups of supporters and contenders, and gradually halted fiscal decentralization. The signifiers and signifieds pertained to NPM, participation, local and central government commitment, entrenchment,¹ councilors’ lack of skills, nepotism, corruption, and the need for a “fix” for decentralization to progress. They were part of a larger palette of discourses relating to central government power, globalization, and societal and economic progress. The discourses in question made it impossible to abandon fiscal decentralization entirely, because they continued to be in line with the Jamaican political elite’s professed take on NPM, and helped to attract IMF funding.

It has been argued that masculinity in the field of accounting is in flux and that new gendered expectations may be emerging. This study takes an important step toward a discussion on management accountants’ gendered image and broadens understanding of masculinity in the field of management accounting. The question it raises is whether the notion of hegemonic masculinity is dominant in the image and whether the image might be expanding. A qualitative case study of a global technology company was conducted, drawing on 100 of its job advertisements for management accountants and 31 semi-structured interviews with its management accountants and operational managers. The findings revealed that even though some caring attributes, such as empathy, were constructed as important, causing the hegemonic masculinity to seem softer, the image of the ideal management accountant predominantly aligns with hegemonic masculinity, more specifically with transnational business masculinity and entrepreneurialism, which emphasize business performance and maximization of the self. The dominance of hegemonic masculinity leads to the colonization of “othered” bodies, namely women in management accounting. The results critique mainstream management accounting research, which considerably lacks gender analysis.

New large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have the potential to change qualitative research by contributing to every stage of the research process from generating interview questions to structuring research publications. However, it is far from clear whether such ‘assistance’ will enable or deskill and eventually displace the qualitative researcher. This paper sets out to explore the implications for qualitative research of the recently emerged capabilities of LLMs; how they have acquired their seemingly ‘human-like’ capabilities to ‘converse’ with us humans, and in what ways these capabilities are deceptive or misleading. Building on a comparison of the different ‘trainings’ of humans and LLMs, the paper first traces the seemingly human-like qualities of the LLM to the human proclivity to project communicative intent into or onto LLMs’ purely imitative capacity to predict the structure of human communication. It then goes on to detail the ways in which such human-like communication is deceptive and misleading in relation to the absolute ‘certainty’ with which LLMs ‘converse’, their intrinsic tendencies to ‘hallucination’ and ‘sycophancy’, the narrow conception of ‘artificial intelligence’, LLMs’ complete lack of ethical sensibility or capacity for responsibility, and finally the feared danger of an ‘emergence’ of ‘human-competitive’ or ‘superhuman’ LLM capabilities. The paper concludes by noting the potential dangers of the widespread use of LLMs as ‘mediators’ of human self-understanding and culture. A postscript offers a brief reflection on what only humans can do as qualitative researchers.

In this essay, we characterize three paradoxical imaginaries that structure the development of generative artificial intelligence (genAI). At the institutional level, these technologies develop in a context that celebrates openness and liberality. Yet, both in the US and in Europe, they serve to centralize power and resources. At the organizational level, while the imaginary is that these technologies make work more interesting, we show that they rather produce anxiety and a new class of precarious workers. At the epistemic level, generative artificial intelligence promises access to unlimited knowledge. This knowledge may appear robust, as these technologies become performative. However, the knowledge they produce is doubtful. Overall, these technologies centralize power and exclude, they standardize knowledge, and they produce, reproduce, amplify and extend various structures of domination.

Many stakeholders require some form of post-crisis sensemaking to help them better understand what happened, and why. Through this lens, we review public inquiry oral evidence sessions with the incriminated company leaders from three major business failures in the UK. While the stated objective of these public inquiries was to ‘learn lessons’, we mobilize Harold Garfinkel’s writings on ceremonies of degradation to offer an alternative perspective. We identify and discuss the strategies employed by the denouncers intended to lower the targets’ identities in the social order. We find that the denouncers frequently rely on accounting-oriented challenges. Following this, we explore the company leaders’ responses as they attempt to resist the denunciation. We identify four key resistance strategies: reframing, recalibration, refocusing, and blame-shifting/-sharing. As part of their response, the denounced provide their own accounting-oriented counter-explanations, emphasising that their choices were consistent with professional norms. We discuss the implications of these findings and what they mean for the management and maintenance of social order in the wake of a financial scandal. Specifically, we point to the inherent ambiguity built into established accounting norms which become a key battleground in the fight for the preservation (or ritual destruction) of the target’s identity.