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1 – 10 of over 2000
Article
Publication date: 15 June 2015

Sven Modell

The purpose of this paper is to review extant accounting research combining institutional and critical theories to examine whether the paradigmatic tensions associated with such…

2469

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to review extant accounting research combining institutional and critical theories to examine whether the paradigmatic tensions associated with such research can be alleviated whilst engendering politically engaged scholarship aimed at facilitating processes of emancipation in organisational fields.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper provides a review of relevant accounting research and offers recommendations for how to combine institutional and critical research approaches in a paradigmatically consistent way.

Findings

Extant accounting research combining institutional and critical theories has not dealt effectively with the partly inter-related problems of ontological drift (i.e. misalignment of ontological assumptions and epistemological commitments) and the conflation of notions of agency and structure. If such problems remain unaddressed institutional research aimed at generating politically engaged scholarship and human emancipation is unlikely to progress in a paradigmatically consistent direction. Recommendations for how to address these issues, grounded in recent advances in critical realism, are elaborated upon. This results in a contingent view of the ontological possibilities of emancipation in organisational fields as well as the epistemological premises that need to be filled to engender processes of emancipation.

Originality/value

The paper reviews an emerging body of research seeking to radicalise institutional accounting research and enhance its contributions to democratic debate in organisations and society. It also outlines how some pertinent paradigmatic tensions associated with such research may be addressed.

Details

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, vol. 28 no. 5
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0951-3574

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 30 December 2004

Sonja Gallhofer and Jim Haslam

According to Best (1995, p. 270), ours “is an age devoid of emancipatory vision” (cited in Gallhofer & Haslam, 2003, p. ix). In Accounting and Emancipation we aim to impact upon…

Abstract

According to Best (1995, p. 270), ours “is an age devoid of emancipatory vision” (cited in Gallhofer & Haslam, 2003, p. ix). In Accounting and Emancipation we aim to impact upon the present in that our concern is to explore how accounting may be positively aligned with a (positive) notion of emancipation. In the process of exploration, we draw upon and intervene in debates from the social sciences and humanities (especially debates pertaining to emancipation), radically question existing practices and ways of seeing and engage with multiple accountings and agencies in various modern contexts. Aside from the motivating concern to search out an emancipatory vision vis-à-vis accounting, we hold that the relation between accounting and emancipation and how it may constitute a positive alignment are matters that are complex, multifariously shaped and notably fluid. Thus, another factor motivating our study is the need to keep such matters under review.

Details

Re-Inventing Realities
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-84950-307-5

Article
Publication date: 15 June 2015

Sonja Gallhofer, Jim Haslam and Akira Yonekura

The purpose of this paper is to add to efforts to treat the relationship between accounting, democracy and emancipation more seriously, giving recognition to difference in this…

7413

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to add to efforts to treat the relationship between accounting, democracy and emancipation more seriously, giving recognition to difference in this context. To open up space for emancipatory praxis vis-à-vis accounting, the authors articulate a delineation of accounting as a differentiated universal and emphasise the significance of an appreciation of accounting as contextually situated. The authors outline implications of a reading of new pragmatism for emancipatory praxis in relation to accounting that takes democracy and difference seriously.

Design/methodology/approach

Critical and analytical argument reflecting upon previous literature in the humanities and social sciences (e.g. Laclau and Mouffe, 2001) and in accounting (e.g. Gallhofer and Haslam, 2003; Bebbington et al., 2007; Brown, 2009, 2010; Blackburn et al., 2014; Brown and Dillard, 2013a, b; Dillard and Yuthas, 2013) to consider further accounting’s alignment to an emancipatory praxis taking democracy and difference seriously.

Findings

A vision and framing of emancipatory praxis vis-à-vis accounting is put forward as a contribution that the authors hope stimulates further discussion.

Originality/value

The authors extend and bolster previous literature seeking to align accounting and emancipation through further reflection upon new pragmatist perspectives on democracy and difference. In the articulations and emphases here, the authors make some particular contributions including notably the following. The accounting delineation, which includes appreciation of accounting as a differentiated universal, and a considered approach to appreciation of accounting as contextually situated help to open up further space for praxis vis-à-vis accounting. The authors offer a general outline of accounting’s positioning vis-à-vis a reading of a new pragmatist perspective on emancipatory praxis. The authors articulate the perspective in terms of key principles of design for emancipatory praxis vis-à-vis accounting: take seriously an accounting delineation freeing accounting from unnecessary constraints; engage with all accountings in accord with a principle of prioritisation; engage with accounting in a way appreciative of its properties, dimensions and contextual situatedness; engage more generally in a new pragmatist praxis. This adds support to and extends prior literature. The authors elaborate in this context how appreciation of a new pragmatist continuum thinking that helps to highlight and bring out emancipatory and repressive dimensions of accounting can properly inform interaction with existing as well as new envisaged accountings, including what the authors term here “official” accountings.

Details

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, vol. 28 no. 5
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0951-3574

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 30 October 2023

Nathalie Clavijo, Ludivine Perray-Redslob and Emmanouela Mandalaki

This paper aims to examine how an alternative accounting system developed by a marginalised group of women enables them to counter oppressive systems built at the intersections of…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to examine how an alternative accounting system developed by a marginalised group of women enables them to counter oppressive systems built at the intersections of gender, class and race.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors draw on diary notes taken over a period of 13 years in France and Senegal in the context of the first author's family interactions with a community of ten Black immigrant women. The paper relies on Black feminist perspectives, namely, Lorde's work on difference and survival to illuminate how this community of women uses the creative power of its “self-defined differences” to build its own accounting system – a tontine – and work towards its emancipation.

Findings

The authors find that to fight oppressive marginalising structures, the women develop a tontine, an autonomous, self-managed, women-made banking system providing them with cash and working on the basis of trust. This alternative accounting scheme endeavours to fulfil their “situated needs”: to build a home of their own in Senegal. The authors conceptualise the tontine as a “situated accounting” scheme built on the women's own terms, on the basis of sisterhood and opacity. This accounting system enables the women to work towards their “situated emancipation”, alleviating the burden of their marginalisation.

Research limitations/implications

This paper gives visibility to vulnerable women's agentic capacities through accounting. As no single story captures the nuances and complexities of accounting, further exploration is encouraged.

Originality/value

This paper contributes to the counter-accounting literature that engages with vulnerable, “othered” populations, shedding light on the counter-practices of accounting within a community of ten Black precarious women. In so doing, this study problematises these counter-practices as intersectional and built on “survival skills”. The paper further outlines the emancipatory potential of alternative systems of accounting. It ends with some reflections on doing research through activist curiosity and the need to rethink academic research and knowledge in opposition to dominant epistemic standards of knowledge creation.

Details

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, vol. ahead-of-print no. ahead-of-print
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0951-3574

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 19 January 2021

Laurence Ferry and Richard Slack

Hybrid organising faces a fundamental challenge in managing multiple and conflicting logics. Prior studies have evidenced the performative role of accounting within such a context…

1124

Abstract

Purpose

Hybrid organising faces a fundamental challenge in managing multiple and conflicting logics. Prior studies have evidenced the performative role of accounting within such a context largely in support of neoliberal hegemony and economic logic. Mindful of such conflict and the support towards economic logic, drawing on universal accountings, this study provides insights from counter accounting and its potential to serve pluralism and the emancipation of marginalised constituencies.

Design/methodology/approach

The research examined The Great Exhibition of the North (GEOTN), England's largest event in 2018, which utilised themes of art, design and innovation to support a regeneration and economic growth agenda. This was led by NewcastleGateshead Initiative (NGI) a hybrid organisation combining logics for economic and social legacies, whose accounts are contrasted to counter accounts from a social movement; The Other Great Exhibition of the North, “OtherGEN”. The study involved 30 in-depth semi-structured interviews, detailed observation and documentation review providing account and counter account of the event.

Findings

The findings reveal that GEOTN promoted an agenda offering a duality of economic and social logics through the arts and culture delivering a lasting economic and social legacy. This employed traditional accountings and associated performance targets and measurement through a formal evaluation framework. Emergent tensions were apparent evidencing a more dominant economic logic. The purported use of culture was portrayed as artwashing by a counter account narrative enmeshed in a backdrop of austerity. This wider accounting highlights the need for reflection on logic plurality and enables challenge to the performative role of traditional accounting in hybrid organising.

Originality/value

Universal accountings, such as counter accounting, can be advanced to unpack “faked” logics duality in hybrid organising. This reveals the emancipatory potential of accountings and the need for dialogic reflection. Hybrid organising requires careful consideration of accounting as a universal praxis to support social and economic pluralism and democratic ideals.

Details

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, vol. 35 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0951-3574

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 9 February 2021

Sujoko Efferin and Christopher Christian Hutomo

This study attempts to explore the meaning and implication of spirituality in an accounting firm by using a Buddhist perspective of interbeing. It explains how the happiness of…

1141

Abstract

Purpose

This study attempts to explore the meaning and implication of spirituality in an accounting firm by using a Buddhist perspective of interbeing. It explains how the happiness of individuals (auditors, partners, clients and auditor family members); organisational performance and growth and auditors' commitment are interconnected and impermanent.

Design/methodology/approach

This study employed an interpretive case study in an Indonesian accounting firm. The researchers explored the collective and individual feelings, thoughts, actions and experiences of the firm's actors. The data collection methods were interviews, participant observations and documentary analysis.

Findings

Leadership plays a major role in cultivating spirituality in an accounting firm. The spirituality increases auditors' commitment, (conditional) happiness and performance resulting in client satisfaction and the firm's growth. From an interbeing perspective, partners, auditors and clients are interconnected and impermanent. A firm's growth creates a growing sense of unhappiness due to the diminishing of auditors' comfort zone. Spirituality in the workplace can only engender conditional happiness and organisational commitment that offset the importance of material rewards and career prospects. To reach ultimate (unconditional) happiness, one requires a continuous spiritual development.

Research limitations/implications

The insights gained from this study need enrichment from cases in different contexts, e.g. multinational firms with members from different countries and cultures.

Originality/value

This study develops the discourse of emancipation in the accounting literature by taking into account spirituality and happiness.

Details

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, vol. 34 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0951-3574

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 15 September 2022

Tehmina Khan

Purpose: Online gaming (OG) has become an increasing societal phenomenon during the current Pandemic times. This is due to lockdowns and people being confined to home…

Abstract

Purpose: Online gaming (OG) has become an increasing societal phenomenon during the current Pandemic times. This is due to lockdowns and people being confined to home environments. This chapter sheds light on the attraction of OG, from the perspective of it being a virtual immersion tool of emancipation. There has been an increasing amount of working from home arrangements during Pandemic times and more time is being spent in virtual immersion. As discussed in the article, there is a potential conflict between individual accountabilities, for example, to attain a certain degree of work-related performance and the hedonistic pleasure attained from OG (which is the type of focus of virtual immersion in this chapter). OG bears personal, business and societal costs, which are discussed in this chapter.

Need for this study: This study provides a picture of the implications of an individual’s virtual reality immersion for the purpose of OG, from the perspectives of personal and social accountabilities in the virtual and physical worlds in the current Pandemic environment.

Methodology: This is a concise overview of the theoretical underpinnings, impacts on accountabilities and implications relating to OG. The chapter provides a survey and discussion of the literature on increasing trends of OG, profit-making potential of OG and the related accountability perspectives.

Findings: This chapter has extended on the Internet accounting and accountability research literature by considering OG accountabilities and costs and benefits. OG supports an individual’s emancipation. From the perspective of OG, there are numerous forms of emancipations that can be achieved and that may result in ‘sacrifices’ by others including other online gamers. There is a substantial risk of a lack of accountability towards the others in the online and real-life environment on behalf of the one who is emancipated through escape.

Details

The New Digital Era: Digitalisation, Emerging Risks and Opportunities
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80382-980-7

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 29 July 2020

Da Yang, John Dumay and Dale Tweedie

This paper examines how accounting either contributes to or undermines worker resistance to unfair pay, thereby enhancing our current understanding of the emancipatory potential…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper examines how accounting either contributes to or undermines worker resistance to unfair pay, thereby enhancing our current understanding of the emancipatory potential of accounting.

Design/methodology/approach

We apply Jacques Rancière's concept of politics and build on recent calls to introduce Rancière's work to accounting by analysing a case based on workers in an Australian supermarket chain who challenged their employer Coles over wage underpayments.

Findings

We find that in this case, accounting is, in part, a means to politics and a part of the police in Rancière's sense. More specifically, accounting operated within the established order to constrain the workers, but also provided workers with a resource for their political acts that enabled change.

Originality/value

This empirical research adds to Li and McKernan (2016) and Brown and Tregidga (2017) conceptual work on Rancière. It also contributes more broadly to emancipatory accounting research by identifying radical possibilities for workers' accounting to bring about change.

Details

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, vol. 33 no. 7
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0951-3574

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 15 June 2015

Laure Célérier and Luis Emilio Cuenca Botey

– The purpose of this paper is to explore how accountability practices can enable sociopolitical emancipation.

1938

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explore how accountability practices can enable sociopolitical emancipation.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors explore the emancipatory potential of accountability from a Bourdieusian perspective. The study is informed by a two-month socio-ethnographic study of the participatory budgeting (PB) process in Porto Alegre (Brazil). The field study enabled us to observe accountability and participatory practices, conduct 18 semi-structured interviews with councillors, and analyze survey data gathered from budgeting participants.

Findings

The paper demonstrates how PB both strengthened the dominants in the Porto Alegrense political field and changed the game played in this field; was characterized by accountability practices favouring the election of councillors with distinctive capitals, who were “dominated-dominants dominating the dominated”; brought emancipatory perspectives to councillors and, by doing so, opened the path to social change but also widened the gap with ordinary participants.

Research limitations/implications

The research supports Shenkin and Coulson’s (2007) thesis by demonstrating that accountability, when associated with participative democracy, can create substantial social change. Significantly, by investigating the emancipatory potential of accountability, the authors challenge the often taken-for-granted assumption in critical research that accountability reinforces asymmetrical power relations, and the authors explore alternative accountability practices. Doing so enables us to rethink the possibilities of accountability and their practical implications.

Originality/value

The authors study the most emblematic example of participatory democracy in South America; and the authors use Bourdieu’s theoretical framework to approach accountability at a community level.

Details

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, vol. 28 no. 5
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0951-3574

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 5 November 2020

Saiful Alam, Seuwandhi B. Ranasinghe and Danture Wickramasinghe

The purpose of this paper is to reflectively narrate the methodological journey of the authors in penetrating the positivitic hegemony of accounting and management control…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to reflectively narrate the methodological journey of the authors in penetrating the positivitic hegemony of accounting and management control research in their native countries, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper offers an auto-ethnography to demonstrate the lack of diversity in accounting, accountability and management control research.

Findings

Global developments in accounting and accountability reforms entail not only about how developing countries being governed through these reforms but also about how accounting research itself can be pursued alternatively. In the past several decades, a camp of British accounting researchers initiated a programme of research in this direction. Inspired by post-positivistic traditions, they aimed to explore how these reforms are predicated upon cultural-political milieus in developing countries. However, the academia in most accounting and management researchers from local universities in these countries are blindly bombarded with positivistic traditions.

Originality/value

The authors unpack how this hegemony formed and how attempts were made towards some emancipatory potentials.

Details

Journal of Accounting in Emerging Economies, vol. 11 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2042-1168

Keywords

1 – 10 of over 2000