Critical Perspectives on Accounting最新文献

The discussions on the relationship of the development of capitalism with double-entry bookkeeping (DEB) and single-entry bookkeeping (SEB), initiated by Sombart and Yami, gained a new quality after Bryer's research. During these discussions, the parties repeatedly referred to the comparative advantages of DEB and SEB. But these advantages were only mentioned, and their detailed analysis was not carried out. This article is devoted to filling this gap. The analysis showed that both systems completely coincided at the basic level: they were intended for capital accounting, formed the same balance sheets, and used the same methods and registers. The differences were only in the smaller nomenclature of accounts formed by various stages of the SEB in the General Ledger and, accordingly, in lower costs for its maintenance. Therefore, DEB can be interpreted as an advanced version of SEB. Both systems, mistakenly perceived as competitors, complemented each other well, contributing to the development of capitalism in the entire spectrum of its transitional forms.

Over the last 30 years, Critical Perspectives on Accounting has published work placing tax as the central object of study. While this literature offers insights into the social, economic, environmental, and political importance of corporate tax, few focus on the individual. In placing the individual at the centre of this essay, we argue for a wealth tax targeting the super-rich to restore equality, decency, and the social contract. While there has been much discussion of wealth taxes, building popular support for a tax on the rich is extraordinarily difficult. Here we make the case for a tax on wealth, drawing on both consequentialist and non-consequentialist notions of justice, suggesting that a wealth tax may offer a crucial antidote to the social inequalities that have intensified as a result of COVID-19. At the very least, a wealth tax needs to be considered as a means to recalibrate the financial gains made by a handful of individuals during the pandemic. If the state is to be an effective actor in the post-COVID future, we must build on the empirical evidence around us to make the case that sustained public wealth will always be essential to our collective survival.

This paper analyzes the links between accounting, race, and labor control from a critical perspective. For this purpose, a decolonial perspective is adopted. In particular, the colonial matrix of power is used to analyze a case of labor precarization in a sugar mill in the geographic valley of the Cauca River in Colombia. The study assumes that the precarization of individuals/peoples in contexts with a colonial legacy is fundamentally associated to classification/hierarchization processes based on race, knowledge, being, and territory (Quijano, 2000; Walsh, 2008; Segato, 2014). This paper contributes to a better understanding of the role of accounting in labor precarization in environments with a colonial legacy, showing that, unlike previous literature has proposed, accounting exercises multiple roles in the same organizational time and space, with these roles not necessarily being subordinated to whether the geopolitical realities of the Global South or the Global North are analyzed. Considering the case analyzed, when accounting wishes to control the labor of salaried and non-racialized people, it predominantly exercises its constitutive and transformative role in order to make labor more efficient-profitable, while at the same time it can exercise a reproductive and representative role by (re)creating over-exploitation mechanisms on non-salaried and racialized people to maintain an unequal-racist-discriminatory social order.

In capitalist economies, residences that have value as homes are also commodities. Use of Gramsci’s concept of historic bloc highlights how in the current, neoliberal period, governments’ increasing perception of houses as commodities has affected allocation of social housing and contrasts with the earlier social democratic period when social housing’s use as homes was a more prominent consideration. Policy changes in the neoliberal period reduced social housing stock, increased rents and the precarity of income of many people dependent on social housing, particularly in London. Such policies created a trap of eviction if tenants accrued rent arrears. Empirical research reports one credit union’s initiatives to ameliorate the threat of tenants’ eviction. Marxist interpretations of social accounts are used to understand the eviction trap and evaluate the credit union’s initiatives.

This paper explores the governmental rationales underlying China’s recent decision to adopt accrual accounting in its public sector. It aims to illustrate an extended role of accrual accounting in facilitating a relationship between the state and its market. Whilst neoliberal ideas of efficiency are seen to weaken state institutions under the logic of the market - with the widespread adoption of accrual accounting in public sectors being a model case, such rationalities have, on the contrary, been deployed to refine an understanding of a stronger state in China. Rather than being a mere effect of ideological reception around the idea of market efficiency, accrual accounting methods have been used to support particular possibilities for statecraft and government in China. Here, accounting offers a mechanism through which the Chinese state can strengthen governing efficiency, overcoming its major institutional weakness: the enduring conflict between political centralisation and effective local-level governance. Attesting to the diverse rather than monolithic conditions and processes of global NPM accounting reform, this paper highlights the power of accounting in facilitating the state’s different enactment of neoliberal ideas and governmental technologies, as shown in both China and beyond.

From 2014 the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) joined global accounting and business leaders to advocate a more ‘inclusive capitalism’ and claim Integrating Reporting (IR) enables this goal. Yet what inclusive capitalism means, and how IR might help achieve this goal, remains unclear. This paper interrogates the IIRC’s inclusive capitalism campaign at two levels. First, qua reporting framework, the paper asks to what extent the IR Framework can enable more inclusive societies, thereby assessing a novel purpose for nonfinancial reporting. Second, qua accounting institution, the paper interrogates the IIRC’s ideology of inclusive capitalism as a distinctive case of a mainstream accounting organisation overtly criticising the present economic system and legitimating an alternative. The paper’s methodology is critical genealogy, which interrogates the IIRC’s inclusive capitalism ideal by reconstructing this concept’s history and which interests it serves. Drawing also on Boltanski and Chiapello, and Richard Sennett, the paper argues that the IR Framework and IIRC paradoxically mobilise precisely those reporting and normative principles inclusive capitalism purports to challenge. The findings extend nonfinancial reporting research by clarifying the political implications of core principles of the IR Framework. The paper also extends research into accounting’s ideological relation to capitalism by analysing how the IIRC adapts capitalism’s legitimating norms without proposing substantive reform. This more dynamic perspective highlights how critical scholars need to not only scrutinise accounting’s role in deep economic structures, but also in the more rapid transitions in capitalism’s ideologies that the IIRC’s inclusive capitalism campaign brings to light.

Neoliberalism is marked by fiscal austerity. Yet, in response to the COVID-19 crisis states again, briefly, began to exercise fiscal discretion. We reflect on the potential for a more enduring shift in fiscal politics beyond neoliberalism by placing recent developments in the historical context of the ‘tax state’. We make two claims. First, we argue that different phases of capitalism are reflected in, and can be understood through, changes in fiscal accounting practices that demarcate public and private, and mark turning points for the role of the state within capitalism. Charting the unravelling of the Keynesian welfare state, we propose a fiscal understanding of neoliberalism in which asymmetric applications of capital accounting practices facilitated the financialisation of the state. Second, we argue democratic pressures are giving rise to forms of ‘fiscal hybridity’ that reassert accounting symmetries between public and private wealth to potentially create ‘fiscal space'. We examine how the fiscal actions taken by states in response to COVID-19 express hybridity, reflecting contestation over neoliberal policy models that was emerging prior to the pandemic, as fiscal politics shifts the state’s focus to its role as creditor, underwriter and investor.

This paper centers on the role that a material artefact—KPMG Netherlands’ head office—has played in the Dutch media’s attempt to hold the audit profession to account. It employs the literatures on news framing and the media’s social control function, to analyze how the press mobilized the building as a perceived space that epitomized extant professional conduct. Using a strategy of temporal bracketing, the paper traces how an initially weak claim against KPMG amplified and expanded after successive revelations, which ultimately triggered a criminal investigation into charges of fraud, tax evasion, and forgery. The paper shows the media’s ability to construct and enact reporting frames that suppress voices from the audit field and that set a reform agenda for both firm and profession. It also reveals the contrast between the values that audit firm offices seek to convey and those they come to embody in the eyes of the public.

Big Four accounting firms increasingly focus on non-audit services. Failures in these services may impair the accounting firm’s reputation as an auditor. They may negatively affect the Big Four, its clients, and client stakeholders. From the perspective of critical scholarship, it is vital to understand whether potentially marginalized actors that auditors are meant to protect (e.g., the general public) bear adverse consequences from non-audit failures. Low litigation settings, such as Germany, are of particular interest in this context because they rely on reputation risks to motivate Big Four auditors to provide high-quality services. Accordingly, we analyze two events of observable non-audit service deficiencies of KPMG Germany. We first use an event study and show that KPMG’s audit clients suffer negative capital market reactions after the NAS failure events. We then ask whether KPMG, having caused the events, also faces adverse consequences. Moreover, we explore theoretical mechanisms behind the observed capital market reactions. Using the Eisenhardt Method, we deeply engage with extensive quantitative data sets and explore auditor switches, audit pricing, and clients’ earnings management. The analyses do not reveal significant negative consequences for KPMG. Earnings management data provides some limited indication that KPMG allows clients more opportunistic accounting choices. Overall, our analysis suggests that reputation may be insufficient to discipline Big Four auditors from acting opportunistically at the cost of less powerful actors in low litigation settings.

This essay questions the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models like ChatGPT to enable academics to work in multiple languages. ChatGPT has the potential to dismantle the dominance of English in research communication. Adapting Te Eni's model of communication complexity, I explore the implications of using ChatGPT for non-native English speakers in the development, inputs, process, and impact of research communication. I then relate these technological changes to broader reflections on the relationship between machines and humans and the implications for the future of academic research. I argue that far from democratizing research communication, the proliferation of AI models like ChatGPT is creating new power imbalances and hegemonic positions that raise important ethical concerns for the academic community.