Critical Perspectives on Accounting最新文献

This paper compares the extent of engagement between the Ghanaian government and the nation’s oil and gas firms with the nature of the financial accountability offered by each of these parties to the citizenry. The findings indicate that whilst the Ghanaian government and the nation’s oil firms pay (at best) cursory regard to societal needs for information and engagement, when interacting with each other an effective and unapologetic form of discharge exists, suggesting the existence of an exclusionary hegemony. We mobilize elements of work by Jessop, 2003a, Jessop, 2003b, Joseph, 2002, Joseph, 2003 and Andrew and Baker (2020) to contextualise the evidence around recent theoretical debates on selectivity in information flows and accountability discharge in developing nation settings.

This article draws on the Foucauldian concept of “discursive formation” to conceptualize generative artificial intelligence (GAI)’s potential influence on management. It shows how ChatGPT, a typical GAI, can affect practices, decision-making responsibility and the management disciplines through a dual discourse. The first one emanates from technological solutionism, a belief that any problem can be solved with the assistance of technology (the technosolutionist discourse), and the second one concerns the utterances generated by ChatGPT itself, which are shaped by various algorithmic, epistemic and linguistic influences (the generative discourse). In simpler terms, what ChatGPT can do to management appears to depend on “what is said about it” and “what it says”. In contrast to the existing literature on ChatGPT’s potential influence on organizations, this article, through its discursive approach, takes a non-normative position, to reveal the subtler influences of generative artificial intelligence, and highlight the individual and organizational responsibilities of actors interacting with these two discourses. The conclusions may be of interest to management readers in general, and of more particular interest to the accounting profession, as the conceptualization is based more broadly on examples taken from accounting, given the close link between the accounting profession and information technologies.

The European Commission (EC) conducted a major reform of statutory audit between 2010 and 2014, with the primary aim of improving competition in the market. The Big 4, who were targeted by this reform, were strongly opposed to it. The present study employs the typology of Oliver (1991) and the “presentation of self” theory developed by Goffman (1956) to identify the strategic responses employed, frontstage and backstage, by the regulator (EC) and the regulatees (Big 4) to influence the outcome of the reform. The results reveal that passive strategic responses tend to take place frontstage, while active and aggressive strategies generally take place backstage. This work also reveals the incursion of the neoliberal model into the European regulatory arena, and allows us to characterize the Big 4 as cynical actors defending a commercial logic.

This article advances understanding of how tax administration influences social justice. Critical accounting research is paying increasing attention to social justice, but conceptualisations and empirical studies of tax administration are scarce. Drawing on Bourdieu’s social theory, we analyse how accounting technologies exercise relational power that reproduces or worsens socio-economic inequalities. Our critical ethnography of the Tax Credits (TC) system in the United Kingdom identifies four original practices through which claimants interact with accounting technologies. We reveal how claimants utilise certain types of capital to play the game of the TC system and reproduce their habitus and position of powerlessness in the field. While some claimants manage to play the game successfully and improve their position, most end up ‘giving in’ to living with financial and emotional hardship and accepting the relational power of the field. We conclude by developing a research and reform agenda for analysing and changing the relational power of accounting technologies in tax administration towards social justice.

Capitalizing on what we currently know about artificial intelligence (AI), the editorial of this special issue, entitled “Artificial Intelligence in the Spotlight”, adds our voice to a call to order in the face of the unbridled enthusiasm we often encounter regarding the benefits of AI. In short, we maintain that there is a crucial need for skepticism about the all-out colonization project vigorously pursued by AI and its sustaining infrastructure. We draw on our own analysis and that of the contributors to this special issue to consider what we see as a bold agenda for colonizing our communities, our ways of doing, and our minds – so that we become fundamentally dependent on technologies whose reliability is dubious and whose algorithms are secretly maintained behind the safety of corporate walls. Our thesis is that the cacophony of aberrations, disorder, and worries that emerge in the wake of AI can be meaningfully viewed as a juggernaut, an inexorable force that is ready to unsettle all things in its tedious path. The juggernaut metaphor constitutes our way of putting “artificial intelligence in the spotlight”. We call for researchers from all disciplines to engage in the study of the AI juggernaut and speak out as much as they can, in public and in academic spheres, about its dangers.

We build on previous literature regarding financial literacy in the home by turning our focus to financial literacy of the home and exploring the connection between housing and financial issues. We use a netnographic approach to investigate how tenants and landlords conceptualise their housing experiences on an online platform during the Covid-19 pandemic context. Drawing on Giddens’ concept of ontological security and the literature on financial literacy, we develop the notion of ‘housing literacy’ by examining the rental relationship between tenant and landlord. We show that tenants’ ontological insecurity is manifested via financial uncertainties and exacerbated when landlords seek to maintain their own ontological security. We also show that landlords’ ontological insecurity is manifested via financial instabilities while exacerbated by tenants’ behaviours. We posit that housing literacy is constructed at the intersection of tensions prompted by ontological (in)securities of both tenants and landlords. We also posit that housing literacy comprises developing the skills to maintain the home’s use value (tenants) and exchange value (landlords), and that these skills involve much more than budgeting, making rent payments, and collecting rents. We find that the ontological security of both parties is in a constant cycle of disruption and security, linked through financial precarity and learning to ‘trade-off’ elements of security. We demonstrate how both parties use anonymous advice received through their online interactions, to become housing literate. Their housing literacy is cultivated through experience, information seeking, and learning extra-legal norms in the rental market.

This paper examines the role of accounting in a public social housing organisation, joining a conversation on how accounting participates in the stigmatisation of poverty. We draw upon the structural stigma approach, which considers stigmatisation within its broader political structures and temporal perspectives, to analyse the role accounting plays in the stigmatisation of the poorest applicants. Drawing upon Tyler’s approach, we conduct an upward and backward analysis of this stigmatisation, with the role of the Performance Measurement and Management Accounting Systems (PMS and MAS) as a central phenomenon. The analysis shows the importance of institutional housing policies (funding schemes, social mix, and social housing sector governance) in shaping the MAS, entrenching the poorest’s structural stigmatisation. It also reveals how the operations surrounding the PMS led to a classification of applicants, negatively labelling the poorest and thus denying them access to dwellings. This research contributes to the accounting literature on stigma by outlining the role of accounting in the structural stigmatisation of the poorest applicants, shedding light on the fact that accounting reproduces the stigmatisation of the poorest and is part of the machinery of inequality. We also contribute to the stigma literature by adopting a backward temporal perspective on the stigmatisation of the poorest. We finally add to the limited accounting literature on social housing by showing the impact (and negative outcomes) of New Public Management (NPM)-related PMS on the poorest beneficiaries.

To incentivise active engagement with investments and the development of a diversified asset portfolio for retirement, the government has introduced subsidized, tax-efficient financial products. Drawing on the narratives of 60 UK individuals, this paper reveals the unintended outcomes of financial products being employed as governmental technology. Whereas performativity studies have explored how institutional changes, discourses and devices impact financial practices, they concentrate on devices employed within institutions such as calculative tools, models and rankings rather than everyday financial products and their accompanying constraints. This study responds to this gap by centring the characteristics of financial products within a layered performativity framework and incorporating inequalities inherent in a capitalist welfare state. By unravelling the interaction between the characteristics of financial products and income and work constraints, this paper extends understandings of overflows within a performativity framework. Government-supported financial products inadvertently construct the conditions for passive financial practices, being utilized as savings tools instead of as a stepping stone for active engagement with investments. Yet, these mis- or backfires of financial products nevertheless conform to norms of self-reliance, showcasing how seemingly contrasting elements of performativity can be present at the same time.

This editorial discusses how the hegemony of the English language in academic research shapes and perpetuates specific forms of power. This is a matter of both equity and justice—the additional effort faced by researchers to integrate themselves into the dominant language and the racial, economic, and social hierarchies that are often expressed and acknowledged through language. The aim of this special issue is to give the Spanish language a central position and in so doing, foster a space for contemplation that presents diverse viewpoints, research focuses, themes, and styles that have previously been overshadowed by the dominance of English. The special issue features five articles showcasing the diversity of critical accounting research in Spanish-speaking contexts. This editorial concludes with a note from the journal’s co-editors, reaffirming Critical Perspective on Accounting’s commitment to promoting multilingualism. This initiative aims to enrich academic dialogue and ensure that local contexts and perspectives are adequately represented in global discussions.

This article seeks to understand the effects produced by a gender equality measure founded on a career-advancement approach to equality, by scrutinising a managerial control process introduced by the women’s network of a large SBF120 firm to promote women’s representation in leadership positions. Through a qualitative study, and drawing on the work of Acker, we uncover the mechanisms through which action designed to bring more women into leadership positions sustains, and masks, the perpetuation of the surrounding inegalitarian structure. We show that the assumptions underlying such processes – approaching equality through the ideas of career advancement and a better work/life balance for women, and as good for financial performance – reflect patriarchal arrangements – the male worker pursuing self-maximisation, women as complementary to men, women as the principal subjects of reproductive work. Those patriarchal arrangements are then perpetuated through the effects of the related managerial control process. We highlight how it is difficult for the women heading this process to escape the career-advancement view of equality, because it is entrenched in organisational and societal structures that place constraints on the design of the control system. We thus contribute to the accounting literature on gender equality measures 1/ by underlining that the measure studied cannot challenge the status quo because it is constructed by, and locked into, a patriarchal, elitist arrangement; 2/ by arguing that a managerial control process intended to advance women’s representation in leadership positions creates a “blind spot” in the gender equality measure; 3/ by uncovering the “destructive power” of a managerial control process, which lies in its tendency to sap any possibility of understanding the problem structurally, but also in its propensity to wipe out the ability to imagine alternative ways of living and working that differ from the patriarchal arrangements on which our social order is founded.