Critical Perspectives on Accounting最新文献

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.

In this essay, we contribute to the limited literature that has critically examined the potential implications of generative AI on the accounting academy and accounting education (AE). We argue that the recent accelerated growth of AI, especially large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, raises significant issues and challenges that the accounting academy needs to urgently address to survive in the long term. Developments in AI have, we suggest, created a ‘change-inducing crisis’, presenting a unique opportunity for accounting academics to address the uncritical and problematic functionalist view of the discipline and the technical reductionism of accounting. Our arguments represent a call for action to embrace AI in learning and teaching practices in a way that brings about a renewed focus on the human dimension of accounting, incorporating broader social and critical perspectives, thereby addressing longstanding calls for change in AE to move beyond the technical, managerial, and financial focus (core of the AE curriculum) that has dominated the discipline for many decades. Accounting academics have a fundamental role to play in recognising the nature of the threats and the associated challenge of AI and to seize the opportunities available in ways that bring both critique and being critical to the fore. However, to bring about the sort of change we argue for in this essay, the accounting academy has to lead to ‘take education back from the market’ and provide the impetus that can make accounting education more relevant to our students and the needs of contemporary society.

This paper presents an in-depth contextual analysis of the rise and recent demise of the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC). The IIRC entered its ‘Breakthrough Phase’ for Integrated Reporting (<IR>) in 2013 and progressed to its ‘Momentum Phase’ in late 2018. The ‘Global Adoption Phase’ of <IR> was expected to commence in 2021 and conclude in 2026. However, by the middle of 2023, the IIRC ceased to exist as a separate entity and the future adoption of its much vaunted <IR> Framework was fundamentally uncertain. Drawing on a comprehensive examination of documentary evidence and a series of 34 in-depth interviews with key players associated with the IIRC’s development, this paper studies how and why the IIRC went so rapidly from being a notable ‘is’ to a definitive ‘was’ in less than a decade. Our analysis traces the IIRC’s shifting strategic priorities in pursuit of a new corporate reporting norm and illustrates how these priorities underpinned a concerted effort at institutional integration in the corporate reporting field. We show how the nature of this attempted integration eventually led to the IIRC’s demise. In seeking to understand the IIRC’s strategic choices and actions we pinpoint the interrelated significance of ‘invisibilities and exclusions’, ‘the dance of agency’, and ‘conceptual promiscuity’. We conclude that the IIRC’s ultimate legacy may not be what it integrated in terms of corporate reporting but what it chose or was required to exclude or forget.

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.