Critical Perspectives on Accounting最新文献

This paper examines the spread of financial logic and reasoning into the valuation practices by which living beings are valued. The purpose is two-fold. First, by conducting a literature review, the paper aims to connect critical accounting studies and other disciplines that address the financialization of living beings. The second purpose is cross-disciplinary as the aim is to problematize the disparate treatment of living beings in the previous financialization literature. In contrast to the previous financialization literature, this paper takes a multispecies approach by acknowledging the complex interdependences between all living beings. The research method used is a problematizing review, which enables the researcher to rethink and deconstruct dominant assumptions in the existing literature on the financialization of living beings. According to the findings, the financialization of living beings has been studied mainly from the perspective of three different theoretical traditions: 1) Foucauldian-inspired tradition of biopolitics and governmentality 2) ANT-inspired performativity and 3) financialization as a mode of Marxist capital accumulation. In addition, this paper identifies factors that enable and hamper the financialization process. By reviewing different disciplines, this paper suggests new and more holistic ways to study the financialization of living beings in critical accounting research.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.