Critical Perspectives on Accounting最新文献

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.

While extant literature on decoupling tends to focus on for-profit organizations, this paper examines the non-profit context, where donors are the most salient stakeholders and accountability to donors is paramount. Specifically, this research explores why management accounting in some non-profit contexts may be both decoupled and coupled from other accounting in the same context. Based on data from three large case study organizations, the findings indicate that donors’ demands for compliance-based financial accounting information, rather than for performance information, limits the availability and use of management accounting information; in essence, leaving it decoupled and coupled in different aspects. This is potentially to the detriment of organizational performance, and by association to beneficiaries and donors.

This study examines the role of ‘accounting artifacts’ in the reformation of a country’s healthcare system. Focusing on a single hospital and four decades of policy reform in the African nation of Ghana, and starting from Pierre Bourdieu’s Logic of Practice, the study shows how different forms, constructions, and classifications of accounting information—or accounting artifacts—shape policy regimes and facilitate particular patterns of activity and interaction. The study demonstrates how these regimes and patterns, in conjunction with the embedded social memory or habitus of individual actors, in turn lead to the construction and use of new artifacts. Finally, the study highlights how hospital staff and patients use various tactics to work with and around these artifacts, resulting in at times unintended consequences and the need to pursue new policy directions. In so doing, the study furthers our understanding of why policy-reform processes in the field of healthcare are so often sequential, if not perpetual, in nature.

This paper seeks to characterize and understand the role of counter accounts in organizing the 2018 university student movement in Colombia. Through the political process model (PPM), we show how counter accounts can participate in the organization of social movements and the cognitive liberation process to achieve collective action. Adopting the methodological perspective of participatory action research (PAR), we studied the case of the university student movement that surfaced due to the structural crisis caused by the underfunding of Colombian public universities. We provide evidence of how counter accounts supported the processes of organization, education and legitimization of the student movement, which facilitated the sustained mobilization and led the national government to agree on public policy actions and increase the sector’s budget.

The increased prevalence of fair value initiated important changes in accounting standards, one of the most contentious being the appearance of other comprehensive income (OCI). Despite the importance of conceptual grounds for the legitimacy of the profession, OCI is not conceptually defined. Our study examines the process by which OCI was integrated into IFRS on an ad hoc basis, without clear conceptual grounds. Through a documentary analysis of 12 OCI-related standard-setting projects, we examine how the IASB gave sense to, and auditors made sense of, OCI, and how these consultation interactions have contributed to the consolidation of an ad hoc approach to OCI. Our study reveals that the construction of meaning of OCI was a restricted process where the IASB only attempted to give limited meaning to the use of specific OCI items while refraining from providing an understanding for its existence conceptually. We show that auditors, generally depicted as influential actors in the development of accounting standards, made limited attempts to make sense of both the existence and use of OCI. Ultimately, OCI-related standard-setting processes led auditors to tolerate the absence of conceptual principles for OCI and accommodate the standard setter’s ad hoc approach. This progressive accommodation is indicative of the power standard setters can exercise over constituencies within consultation processes, resulting in a paradoxical use of the conceptual framework to endorse ad hoc approaches in standard development. In the end, what our study makes evident regarding OCI is that, if each component makes sense, the whole does not.

This paper seeks to re-frame the importance of a diachronic understanding of accounting’s centrality (i.e., focusing on a sense of history) to modern modes of managing as a precondition for considering how it contributes to management change initiatives synchronically (i.e., focusing on the present). It offers a re-appraisal of how a Foucault-inspired approach may enable understandings of how the diachronic is implicated in what goes on in the synchronic episodes so well studied in recent critical research into accounting, management and strategy. It then offers a reading of how a change initiative undertaken in a Portuguese bank, Iberian Bank, takes place at three levels of development and involving different sets of protagonists. It thereby seeks to open out, within accounting research, the kind of historically-informed research of ‘the present’ recommended within the strategy field by Robert Chia (2004).

Professional bodies usually pursue domination objectives in their contexts of reference, by activating political, cultural, relational, and symbolic instruments to acquire and ensure economic or social benefits for their members. The current paper examines the role played by the national accounting professional body (Consiglio Nazionale dei Dottori Commercialisti e degli Esperti Contabili) in the field of statutory auditing for small and medium-sized enterprises in Italy.

This paper is based on interviews held with the presidents of the Consiglio Nazionale dei Dottori Commercialisti e degli Esperti Contabili and a selection of presidents of the local branches, as well as on several primary and secondary documentary sources. It combines ‘closure theory’ with a Bourdieusian approach, by interpreting the profession as a field in which various forms of capital are arranged and a habitus is consolidated at the level of individual professionals. This study shows the strategy followed by the Consiglio Nazionale dei Dottori Commercialisti e degli Esperti Contabili in the period 2009–2021, through the accumulation of symbolic and social capital and the production of objectified and then institutionalised cultural capital, to achieve a condition of professional closure.

This paper studies one large humanitarian NGO, Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières). We argue that its accounting practices can act as a ‘prefiguration’ of the organisational practices it wants to promote more widely. Precisely, the organisation is critical of what we call a ‘new humanitarian management’, which we characterise through three interconnected dimensions – a performance model that promotes efficiency and standardised projects, increasingly financial, upward accountability, and managerialised norms and values. We therefore detail how MSF responds to this trend with a performance model that rejects commensurability and disembeddedness, an alternative form of accountability framed around (self-)criticism, and strong normative controls aiming at encouraging humanitarian entrepreneurship. These alternative practices suggest that organisations promoting emancipation externally should start by shaping their internal processes and controls to offer ‘moments of prefiguration’. We therefore contribute to the literature on alternative accounts and emancipatory accounting by discussing the possibilities of what we call ‘prefigurative accounting’.

This paper investigates the extent and the strategies of human rights due diligence (HRDD) disclosure by the largest 100 EU-listed firms. Our work is performed at a key point in time when institutional expectations to conduct HRDD are building, allowing us to assess firms’ readiness for emerging and forthcoming legally binding regulation in the EU. To analyse corporate disclosures, we develop a scoring tool based on the United Nations’ Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). We interpret our findings building on Oliver’s (1991) theoretical framework of firms’ strategic responses to institutional pressures, as adopted in the context of social and environmental accounting and integrated with concepts from the literature on substantive and symbolic disclosure approaches. Our contributions advance the understanding of the ways that firms are engaging with the HRDD issue and the state or level of their engagement. We reveal three key HRDD disclosure strategies: dismissal, concealment, and compliance. The presence of the dismissal category is particularly significant, implying weak engagement with HRDD for many firms in our sample. Furthermore, we find that while many firms have a talk-orientation, where they communicate a commitment to protect human rights, the extent to which disclosures are action-oriented and detail the key practice of HRDD is significantly neglected. Important implications also follow for policymakers as our results can enhance the capability of new regulation to better enforce a strategic engagement outcome.