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11 – 20 of 860Trevor Hopper, Mathew Tsamenyi, Shahzad Uddin and Danture Wickramasinghe
The purpose of this paper is to evaluate management accounting research in developing countries and formulate suggestions for its progression.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to evaluate management accounting research in developing countries and formulate suggestions for its progression.
Design/methodology/approach
This is a desk based study of existing literature analysed through a framework of management control transformation in developing countries derived from the authors' research.
Findings
Research is growing, especially on accounting in state‐owned and privatised enterprises but more is needed on small and micro enterprises, agriculture, non‐governmental organisations, and transnational institutions.
Originality/value
This is the first review of this area and thus should help intending and existing scholars.
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Chandana Alawattage and Danture Wickramasinghe
This paper aims to report on subalterns' emancipatory accounting (SEA) embedded in transformation of governance and accountability structures (GAS) in Ceylon Tea.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to report on subalterns' emancipatory accounting (SEA) embedded in transformation of governance and accountability structures (GAS) in Ceylon Tea.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper draws on James Scott's political anthropology to examine how subalterns' resistance and emancipatory accounting triggers structural transformations.
Findings
An attempt is made to theorise subaltern resistance as a form of emancipatory accounting. Concerning the commentaries that accounting has been to suppress or hegemonise the subalterns and appreciating the analysis of indigenous resistance implicated in emancipatory potential, this paper examines how a distinct subaltern group in Ceylon Tea deployed their own weapons towards the changes in GAS.
Originality/value
The accounting literature neglects how subalterns reconstruct governance and accountability structures: this paper introduces a social accounting perspective on resistance, control and structural transformations. Also, it introduces to accounting researchers James Scott's political anthropology as an alternative framework.
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The purpose of the paper is to highlight key issues for the social enterprise field in Bangladesh, which are not sufficiently addressed in current social enterprise debates and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of the paper is to highlight key issues for the social enterprise field in Bangladesh, which are not sufficiently addressed in current social enterprise debates and discourse.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper reviews key economic and political debates in the current social enterprise literature. It then attempts to demonstrate how these are insufficient for critical analysis of social enterprise in Bangladesh. The paper draws on field research and literature on the Grameen social enterprises to inform this argument.
Findings
The paper finds that this review of the main debates in a Bangladeshi context raises many pertinent and urgent questions about the role of social enterprise in addressing: complex market failures; the boundaries of the field in the informal and formal sectors; the conflicts caused by contending political objectives and donor/creditor expectations; and broader development issues.
Research limitations/implications
The paper focuses on the economic and political factors, which differ between Western and developing world environments. It does this with the specific example of the Grameen Energy and Grameen Bank social enterprises from Bangladesh. Whilst this is sufficient to support the paper's aim, it limits the scope of the findings.
Originality/value
This paper highlights a gap in the literature which has had little attention in academic or practitioner fields of social enterprise.
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Conventional shopping-scapes are designed to promote a linear form of consumption. Products are moved from production systems through consumer distribution nodal points. The…
Abstract
Conventional shopping-scapes are designed to promote a linear form of consumption. Products are moved from production systems through consumer distribution nodal points. The consumption of commodities through these points is promoted as the main, if not only, legitimate activity of shopping centres. A circular economic (CE) paradigm offers an alternative to the current model of linear consumption so that there are restorative processes to ensure products, components and materials are valued at all stages of product life (Ellen Macarthur Foundation, 2013). However, this model, like its contemporary linear model, overlooks the opportunities for more socially rewarding consumption that could particularly be addressed through the shopping scape. The ByeBuy! Shop was conceived to test ideas on an alternative shopping scape to increase social engagement and reduced consumption without the use of money for exchange. Accordingly, it is used here to exemplify a CE paradigm.
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Maria Daskalaki and Marianna Fotaki
Radical feminist theory and practice has actively questioned power relationships between men, women and people of color as a cornerstone of capitalist development since the 1970s…
Abstract
Radical feminist theory and practice has actively questioned power relationships between men, women and people of color as a cornerstone of capitalist development since the 1970s while demonstrating the differential impact of such inequality generating structures and relationships on lives and bodies. Their argument about the process of social reproduction and, especially, the reproduction of labor-power both achieved through the dispossession of the female and (colonial) body and the expropriation of their work (Federici, 2004) is acutely relevant to the analysis of the consequences of the unfolding Global Financial Crisis. Yet, the crisis can be a motivating force for changing the established power relations. Using three different case studies of female initiatives aiming to counteract the imposition of neoliberal attack on their livelihoods in crisis-stricken Greece, the chapter examines how the existing experience of feminist thinking and activism from within and outside of academia, can contribute to the cultivation of affective embodied relations, and building upon the idea of “feminist solidarity” (Mohanty, 2003), in addressing the challenges of the crisis and post-crisis policies.
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Jo Barraket, Heather Douglas, Robyn Eversole, Chris Mason, Joanne McNeill and Bronwen Morgan
This paper aims to document the nature of social enterprise models in Australia, their evolution and institutional drivers.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to document the nature of social enterprise models in Australia, their evolution and institutional drivers.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper draws on secondary analysis of source materials and the existing literature on social enterprise in Australia. Analysis was verified through consultation with key actors in the social enterprise ecosystem.
Findings
With its historical roots in an enterprising non-profit sector and the presence of cooperative and mutual businesses, the practice of social enterprise in Australia is relatively mature. Yet, the language of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship remains marginal and contested. The nature of social enterprise activity in Australia reflects the role of an internally diverse civil society within an economically privileged society and in response to an increasingly residualised welfare state. Australia’s geography and demography have also played determining roles in the function and presence of social enterprise, particularly in rural and remote communities.
Originality/value
The paper contributes to comparative understandings of social enterprise and provides the first detailed account of social enterprise development in Australia.
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Duncan Green and Cameron Graham
In Canada, companies are focusing on corporate governance as an ethical response to accounting scandals and the resulting crisis of confidence. Although, many aspects of corporate…
Abstract
In Canada, companies are focusing on corporate governance as an ethical response to accounting scandals and the resulting crisis of confidence. Although, many aspects of corporate governance remain free from strict regulation, we examine the voluntary changes in the disclosures of the largest Canadian companies. We attempt to understand, through disclosure theory, discourse analysis, and structuration theory, the quality of these corporate governance disclosures. We recognize that much of the disclosure is opportunistic as companies state that they have not only complied with the non-compulsory Canadian guidelines, but have also met and exceeded the requirements of U.S. regulators. This is an important finding that supports the notion that Canadian companies do not need rules and regulations. Instead, a culture of governance is developing at the boards of large companies that encourages voluntary change. Whether this is enough to prevent future accounting scandals is a question for future research.
To expand one's understanding about how accounting helps to shape, mediate and constitute the public interest, the private interest, and their relationships.
Abstract
Purpose
To expand one's understanding about how accounting helps to shape, mediate and constitute the public interest, the private interest, and their relationships.
Design/methodology/approach
An interpretive approach is utilized to analyze the documents that have both informed and legitimized the Japanese financial regulatory changes since the end of 1970s.
Findings
The paper finds that the concepts of private and public interest, and their relationships have been mutable in the deployment of accounting rhetoric. The concept of private interest was given more concrete shape as the market‐oriented reform advanced in the name of public interest.
Originality/value
This paper sheds light on the constructing role of accounting in society, which in turn helps to understand changing conceptualizations of the public interest, the private interest, and their relationships.
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Seeks to explore the interplay of accounting and the broad social roles and contexts in which it is manifested.
Abstract
Purpose
Seeks to explore the interplay of accounting and the broad social roles and contexts in which it is manifested.
Design/methodology/approach
By mapping the origins of our current place in the world, a cacophony of ideas and philosophies emerge, and thus many possible trajectories for our future. Why (for example) are we witnessing “corporate” crime, environmental degradation, and mal‐distributions of wealth? As these are the complicated acts of individual people while simultaneously the interactions of broad social histories, we see two pieces of this puzzle – one “grand,” one “small,” and view accounting as a part of these social practices creating relationships, collaborations, and conflicts. The micro piece of the puzzle is the inner psyche of each person, while the macro aspect appeals to the legacy of critical theory * we are socially constructed and inexorably linked to our social environment. In this paper, we link these two pieces of our puzzle illustrating with examples that the personal is political.
Findings
Concludes that “Like the salt in the stew, you cannot separate the two” aspects of who we are (from the song “Salt” by Lizz Wright 2003). Psychologically and socially we are presented with impressions, discourses, beliefs and interpretations; we act upon these, and we are mediated by “private” and “public” social practices.
Practical implications
As part of the environment, we re‐create the world, offering new forms of signification and through this humans can re‐conceive new social realties and negotiate “the public interest.”
Originality/value
The use of psychology to reflect on accounting's origins in “personae” and the illustrations of broader social conscience illuminates the connectedness of individual and social values, the complexities of “who we are” and “why we are,” and the power in creating alternative social constructions.
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Kelum Jayasinghe and Dennis Thomas
The paper aims to examine how indigenous accounting practices are mobilised in the daily life of a subaltern community, and how and why the members of that community have managed…
Abstract
Purpose
The paper aims to examine how indigenous accounting practices are mobilised in the daily life of a subaltern community, and how and why the members of that community have managed to preserve such practices over time despite external pressures for change.
Design/methodology/approach
An ethno‐methodological field study is employed to produce a text that informs readers about the ways in which people engage in social accounting practices. It uses the concepts of structuration theory to understand how indigenous accounting systems are shaped by the interplay between the actions of agents and social structures.
Findings
The case study suggests that it is the strongly prevailing patronage based political system, as mobilised into the subaltern social structure, which makes individuals unable to change and exercise their agencies, and tends to “preserve” and “sustain” indigenous accounting systems. Social accounting is seen as the common language of the inhabitants in their everyday life, as sanctioned by the unique form of autonomy‐dependency relationship shaped by patronage politics.
Research limitations/implications
The findings imply that any form of rational transformations in indigenous accounting systems in local subaltern communities requires a phenomenological analysis of any prevailing and dominant patronage political systems.
Originality/value
This is the first empirical study that focuses on how and why local subaltern communities preserve their indigenous accounting practices over time. This contrasts with previous work that has focused on the presence or absence of accounting beyond work organisations.
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