Critical Perspectives on Accounting最新文献

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.

As our lives were suddenly transformed with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments had to act quickly to protect their populations, both in terms of health and economy. While we have seen states massively support civil society through social measures, one wonders what legacy this will leave, especially concerning the current dominant ideology of neoliberalism. In this essay, we want to contribute to this reflection by focusing on the phenomenon of public debts, since they are reaching record levels because of the COVID-19 crisis. We argue that massive public debts are, in fact, central and vital to neoliberalism and that state interventions (and central bank use of quantitative easing) that we have witnessed recently are in accordance with usual neoliberal practices and thus do not necessarily constitute a departure from the latter. We propose avenues of research to better understand public debt as a mechanism for redistributing wealth from the bottom to the top, which has thus far been understudied in the critical accounting literature, while opening avenues for political action related to the subject of this essay.

Sustainability has become a global trend to which Argentina is no stranger. This trend is materialised, among other things, in the surge of the social balance sheet (SBS). In this article, based on the theory of the “system of professions” developed by Abbott (1988), we will try to understand how the Argentinean accounting profession has tried to extend its jurisdiction to the preparation and verification of social balance sheets. We will see how, despite its intellectual, academic and political actions, the Argentinean accounting profession has not succeeded in expanding its jurisdiction to the SBS. Thus, attempts to legislate the preparation and verification of the SBS have not always been successful. Although many Argentinean firms prepare an SBS, very few use the SBS model proposed by this profession or have their SBS verified by accountants.

The background of our analysis is the evolution of the power structure in Argentina, illustrating the tension between a profession originally organised in a corporatist way, which was inherited from a former economic model, and the new global trends, which are linked to the expansion of financial markets and the rise of sustainability. This structural change creates difficulties for the profession that will ultimately impede its expansionist purpose. We use this case to illustrate certain limitations of the Abbottian approach when it is applied to a context outside the Anglo-Saxon world.

Over the last two decades, sustainability disclosure has become a well-established practice among large and medium-sized companies. Despite the increasing number of sustainability reports published annually, concerns have arisen regarding their credibility. Skeptics view sustainability reporting as a form of decoupling – a symbolic practice disconnected from the actual practices. The purpose of this study is to investigate the phenomenon of decoupling in corporate sustainability, exemplified by selective disclosure. Drawing on the counter-accounting approach and institutional theory, we identify forms of selective disclosure and their drivers. We test our hypotheses on a sample of 333 negative events derived from MSCI’s controversies database. The analysis reveals that 69 % of negative events were reported selectively indicating a prevalence of decoupling in sustainability reporting. Selective disclosure manifests in three forms: vague disclosure, avoidance, and hypocrisy. Our findings indicate a higher likelihood of selective disclosure in the areas of labor rights/supply chain and human rights/community. Additionally, companies that publish integrated reports are less likely to engage in selective disclosure. Strikingly, neither Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines nor assurance measures can effectively deter companies from engaging in selective disclosure. Our findings underscore the urgency of transitioning from a sustainability reporting practice primarily driven by business-case considerations to a more dialogic accounting approach.