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Through a feminist lens, this study aims to provide insight into the ability of KPMG’s true value approach to include “the other” in the corporate value creation process and into its potential to introduce a more “multiple” form of accounting. Additionally, this study seeks to set up the true value approach within its broader social, economic and political context.

The study uses an interpretative analysis of KPMG’s document “A New Vision of Value; Connecting corporate and societal value creation”.

The KPMG document uses a language of fear of an external threat to promote its true value approach. It is suggested in this study that the concern of the KPMG approach is to include “the other” in their valuation model if it has an impact on corporate earnings. However, stakeholder actions or governmental regulations could be problematically attenuat by the document’s use of a language which suggests integration of “the other” and which might be perceived as socially progressive. It is argue that the increase in societal or environmental value set out in the KPMG document depends upon “excessive” commodity production which uses up scarce environmental resources.

The implication of this research is that the daunting problems of inequality and environmental destruction cannot be solved by initiatives such as the KMPG true value technology.

The paper argues that a feminine management or reporting framework would not need to fulfil the aim of managing the other in the sense of measurement and control, as it is not based on the fear of loss. It would instead be an approach of giving and caring. A feminine alternative, however, is difficult to express in phallogo-centric language. The ability to bring about change requires the capacity to understand the prevalent symbolic order and the willingness to challenge it.

The feminist perspective used in this paper to critically reflect on KPMG’s true value approach and the neo-liberal economy in which it is embedded aims to create public awareness of the prevalent phallocentric symbolic order. Recognising the invisible power of the symbolic order is essential to be able to see how the new “integrative” management and reporting approaches are only slight modifications of the existing management and reporting tools. The paper highlights that these “alternatives” create the impression that business is dealing with the greatest global threats and can potentially be used to silence critics.

This paper contributes to existing critiques of integrated or shared value approaches by taking a feminist view. Even though corporate claims of “win-win situations” (in which environmental degradation and inequality can be solved as business opportunities) have been critiqued in the literature, this study adopts a rather unusual perspective (in accounting). This approach argues that initiatives grounded in the phallogo-centric symbolic order are incapable of overcoming the current problems of our society; but they bear the risk of making the situation worse by creating a public impression that “someone is dealing appropriately with serious social and environmental issues”.

This paper aims to investigate the prevalence of corruption in Ghana to understand how and why it has turned public procurement into a mere money-making scheme instead of a means to provide needed public goods and services.

The study focuses on Ghana as a case study and mobilizes the monetization of politics lenses. Data are collected via interviews with key officials across the procurement sector (including the government, donors and civil society), documents, documentaries and news articles.

The findings suggest that the increasing costs of elections and political financing coupled with the costs of vote-buying, which has become informally institutionalized, intensify corruption practices and, consequently, turns public procurement into a mere source of cash for political ends. Political appointments and legalized loopholes facilitate this by helping to nullify the safeguard accounting and other control institutions are designed to provide. Likewise, enduring poverty and rising inequality “force” citizens into a vote-buying culture which distorts democratic premises that may drive out unscrupulous politicians; thus, perpetuating capture schemes. Civil society's efforts to remedy these have had little success, and corruption and inequality remain rife.

The main practical implication of the study lies in the need for a gradual demonetization of elections, and the consideration of the fundamental function of public procurement as a policy instrument embedded in economic, social, cultural and environmental plans. Additionally, given the connectedness of the various corruption issues raised, a comprehensive system-based approach in dealing with them would be more effective than a piecemeal approach targeting each issue/problem in isolation.

While extant literature has examined the issue of endemic corruption in developing countries using state capture, few have attempted to explain why it remains enduring, particularly in public procurement. This study, therefore, contributes to the literature on corruption and state capture theoretically and empirically by drawing on monetization of politics from political science to explain why corruption and state capture endure in certain contexts (with Ghana as an illustrative example) which reduce public procurement to a cash-milking scheme.