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1 – 10 of 56Saiful 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.
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Danture Wickramasinghe, Christine Cooper and Chandana Alawattage
The purpose of this paper is to introduce the themes and aims of this Accounting, Auditing & Accountability (AAAJ) special issue and comments on the papers included in the issue…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to introduce the themes and aims of this Accounting, Auditing & Accountability (AAAJ) special issue and comments on the papers included in the issue. The paper provides a thematic outline along which the future researchers can undertake more empirical research examining how neoliberalism shapes, and shaped by, management accounting.
Design/methodology/approach
This entails a brief review of the previous critical accounting works that refer to liberalism and neoliberalism to identify and highlight the specific themes and trajectories of neoliberal implications of management accounting has been and can be explored. This is followed by a brief commentary on the papers the authors have included in this special issue; these commentaries explain how these papers capture various dimensions of enabling and enacting neoliberal governmentality.
Findings
The authors found that management accounting is now entering new territories beyond its conventional disciplinary enclosures of confinement, reconfiguring its functionalities to enable and enact a circulatory mode of neoliberal governmentality. These new functionalities then produce and reproduce entrepreneurial selves in myriad forms of social connections, networks and platforms within and beyond formal organizational settings, amid plethora of conducts, counter-conducts and resistances and new forms of identities and subjectivities.
Research limitations/implications
This review can be read in relation to the papers included in the special issue as the whole issue will inspire more ideas, frameworks and methodologies for further studies.
Originality/value
There is little research reviewing and commenting how management accounting now being enacted and enabled with new functionalities operating new territories and reconfiguring forms of governmentality. This paper inspires a new agenda on this project.
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Vassili Joannides De Lautour, Zahirul Hoque and Danture Wickramasinghe
This paper explores how ethnicity is implicated in an etic–emic understanding through day-to-day practices and how such practices meet external accountability demands. Addressing…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper explores how ethnicity is implicated in an etic–emic understanding through day-to-day practices and how such practices meet external accountability demands. Addressing the broader question of how ethnicity presents in an accounting situation, it examines the mundane level responses to those accountability demands manifesting an operationalisation of the ethnicity of the people who make those responses.
Design/methodology/approach
The study followed ethnomethodology principles whereby one of the researchers acted both as an active member and as a researcher within a Salvation Army congregation in Manchester (UK), while the others acted as post-fieldwork reflectors.
Findings
The conceivers and guardians of an accountability system relating to the Zimbabwean-Mancunian Salvationist congregation see account giving practices as they appear (etic), not as they are thought and interiorised (emic). An etic–emic misunderstanding on both sides occurs in the situation of a practice variation in a formal accountability system. This is due to the collision of one ethnic group's emics with the emics of conceivers. Such day-to-day practices are thus shaped by ethnic orientations of the participants who operationalise the meeting of accountability demands. Hence, while ethnicity is operationalised in emic terms, accounting is seen as an etic construct. Possible variations between etic requirements and emic practices can realise this operationalisation.
Research limitations/implications
The authors’ findings were based on one ethnic group's emic construction of accountability. Further research may extend this to multi-ethnic settings with multiple etic/emic combinations.
Originality/value
This study contributed to the debate on both epistemological and methodological issues in accountability. As it is ill-defined or neglected in the literature, the authors offer a working conceptualisation of ethnicity – an operating cultural unit being implicated in both accounting and accountability.
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Seuwandhi Buddhika Ranasinghe and Danture Wickramasinghe
Drawing on the ideas of postcolonial hybridity and postcolonial feminism, the purpose of this paper is to explore a contextual variant of neoliberalism, which the authors call…
Abstract
Purpose
Drawing on the ideas of postcolonial hybridity and postcolonial feminism, the purpose of this paper is to explore a contextual variant of neoliberalism, which the authors call postcolonial neoliberalism. It unpacks the peculiarities of hybridised practices of management controls therein to reflect on its construction and consequences.
Design/methodology/approach
A seven-month ethnographic study was carried out in a Sri Lankan tea estate to understand both the nature and the practices of these controls.
Findings
Postcolonial neoliberalism has been animated by a hybrid form of management controls encompassing colonial action controls, postcolonial cultural controls and neoliberal results controls. This created an emancipatory space for female workers to engage in some confrontations to attain some compromises.
Originality/value
The message is that the hybridised controls are central to the construction of this form of postcolonial neoliberalism and to its reproduction. However, as these controls accompany a gendered form, female workers find a condition of possibility for some emancipatory potentials within the neoliberal development policy.
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Chandana Alawattage and Danture Wickramasinghe
This paper draws on the concepts of biopolitics and neoliberal governmentality to provide a sociological analysis of the strategic turn in management accounting.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper draws on the concepts of biopolitics and neoliberal governmentality to provide a sociological analysis of the strategic turn in management accounting.
Design/methodology/approach
This conceptual and review paper addresses four interrelated questions: How can the early history of management accounting be revisited from a biopolitical angle? How has strategising been linked to the neoliberal evolution of capitalism? How has this neoliberal connection transformed management accounting into its new form of strategising? What are the implications of this transformation for future research and pedagogical practices in management accounting?
Findings
Management accounting is strategised in four interrelated directions: by absorbing the jurisdictional and veridictional roles of the market into the calculative practices of management accounting; by transforming management accounting's centripetal hierarchical order of calculations to a centrifugal order the neoliberal governmentality demanded; by re-calculating the point of production as a site in which labour now takes the form of entrepreneurs of the self, performing not only material but also immaterial elements of managerial labour; and by rescoping management accounting to address issues the “fourth or the global age of security” brought, including the social and the environmental ones.
Research limitations/implications
The research expands the existing frames of reference for exploring contemporary calculative practices in neoliberal governmentality.
Social implications
Strategic turn in management accounting implicates in issues of security, governance and ethics and offers “new opportunities” for expanding management accounting's relevance beyond economic enterprises to various civil society and political constituencies.
Originality/value
This paper makes a theoretical contribution to management accounting's contemporary developments by demonstrating how it moves into biopolitical circulation.
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Paul D. Ahn and Danture Wickramasinghe
The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how big data analytics pushed the limits of individuals' accountability as South Korea tried to control and contain coronavirus disease…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how big data analytics pushed the limits of individuals' accountability as South Korea tried to control and contain coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).
Design/methodology/approach
The authors draw upon Deleuzo-Guattarian framework elaborating how a surveillant assemblage was rhizomatically created and operated to monitor a segment of the population holding them accountable. Publicly available secondary data, such as press release from the government and media coverage, were used.
Findings
A COVID-19 Smart Management System and a Self-Quarantine Safety Protection App constituted a surveillance assemblage operating in a “state-form”. This comprises the central government departments, local councils, policing systems, providers of telecommunication and financial services, and independent groups of people. This assemblage pushed the limits of accountability as individuals who tested positive or might bear possible future risks of the infection and transmission were held accountable for their locations and health conditions.
Practical implications
Policymakers may consider constructing this type of state-form for containing and controlling pandemics, such as COVID-19, while dealing with the issue of undermined privacy.
Social implications
The mass may consider to what extent individuals' personal information should be protected and how to hold the governments accountable for the legitimate use of such information.
Originality/value
While accountability studies have largely focussed on formal organisations, the authors illustrated how a broader context of a state-form, harnessing big data analytics, pushes the limits of accountability.
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Trevor 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, Trevor Hopper and Danture Wickramasinghe
This paper seeks to introduce, summarise, and reflect on the key themes and findings raised by the seven papers selected for this special issue devoted to management accounting in…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper seeks to introduce, summarise, and reflect on the key themes and findings raised by the seven papers selected for this special issue devoted to management accounting in less developed countries (LDCs).
Design/methodology/approach
The conclusions are drawn from desk research generally and the articles contained in this collection.
Findings
This paper finds that accounting research in LDCs needs to address issues of poverty reduction, corruption, community involvement, history, culture, and politics, and examine a wider spectrum of organisations ranging from households to non‐governmental organisations.
Practical implications
Effective management accounting in LDCs may require broader, simpler, open and transparent, sometimes informal systems developed locally.
Originality/value
This paper presents a collection of mainly empirical papers on an important but neglected topic, namely how management accounting might aid economic development in poor countries.
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Kelum Jayasinghe and Danture Wickramasinghe
The purpose of this paper is to present empirical evidence on how and why a poor rural community is engaged in certain calculative practices, and how these are embedded in a…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present empirical evidence on how and why a poor rural community is engaged in certain calculative practices, and how these are embedded in a “total institution” defined in terms of “relations of production” and “relations in production”.
Design/methodology/approach
Focusing on the traditional fishing industry in the Sri Lankan village of Kalamatiya, this study employs a qualitative, ethnographic methodology to collect and analyse data.
Findings
The underlying calculative practices are shown to resemble an articulated mode of production fabricated with some heterogeneous complexities, especially patronage relations, village cultures, and local capital and political power, rather than mere economic rationalities.
Originality/value
The paper argues that the notions of the “total institution” and the “articulated MOP” can inform accounting researchers to conceptualise research sites beyond the organisation as a novel “field” for empirical studies.
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