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1 – 10 of 948Telecommunications comprises a vital component of information infrastructures and services, with a historically strong public interest dimension. For the best part of 30 years…
Abstract
Purpose
Telecommunications comprises a vital component of information infrastructures and services, with a historically strong public interest dimension. For the best part of 30 years, the telecommunications sector in Europe has been the subject of a radical reorganisation in structural and operational terms along the lines of neo‐liberalism. This paper aims to analyse the significance of the neo‐liberal project in telecommunications in respect of the related dimensions of ideology and practice.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper presents a public policy critique of the manifestation of neo‐liberalism in the telecommunications sector in the European Union, employing desk‐based research on relevant primary and secondary source documentation.
Findings
The paper finds that proponents of neo‐liberalism have been able to secure the broad acceptance of neo‐liberalism as a “view of the world” for telecommunications. It shows that in practice, however, the neo‐liberal model in telecommunications provides evidence of a less than efficacious adoption process in three respects: neo‐liberalism requires an elaborately managed system the regulatory burden of which has been under‐emphasised; the normative success of neo‐liberalism has masked how difficult it has actually proven to be to create competition; the preoccupation with markets and competition has resulted in de‐emphasis of public interest issues in telecommunications.
Originality/value
This paper contributes up‐to‐date knowledge of the nature and effects of neo‐liberalism in the European telecommunication sector. It provides a challenge and counterweight to the “received wisdom” that neo‐liberalism has been an overwhelmingly successful approach to the re‐ordering of European telecommunications.
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Haseeb Shabbir, Michael R. Hyman and Alena Kostyk
This special issue explores how marketing thought and practice have contributed to systemic racism but could alleviate racially insensitive and biased practices. An introductory…
Abstract
Purpose
This special issue explores how marketing thought and practice have contributed to systemic racism but could alleviate racially insensitive and biased practices. An introductory historical overview briefly discusses coloniality, capitalism, eugenics, modernism, transhumanism, neo-liberalism, and liquid racism. Then, the special issue articles on colonial-based commodity racism, racial beauty imagery, implicit racial bias, linguistic racism and racial imagery in ads are introduced.
Design/methodology/approach
The historical introduction is grounded in a review of relevant literature.
Findings
Anti-racism efforts must tackle the intersection between neo-liberalism and racial injustice, the “raceless state” myth should be re-addressed, and cultural pedagogy’s role in normalizing racism should be investigated.
Practical implications
To stop perpetuating raced markets, educators should mainstream anti-racism and marketing. Commodity racism provides a historical and contemporary window into university-taught marketing skills.
Social implications
Anti-racism efforts must recognize neo-liberalism’s pervasive role in normalizing raced markets and reject conventional wisdom about a raceless cultural pedagogy, especially with the emergence of platform economies.
Originality/value
Little previous research has tackled the history of commodity racism, white privilege, white ideology, and instituting teaching practices sensitive to minority group experiences.
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Allen Douglas King, Jim Barry and Elisabeth Berg
The purpose of this paper is to focus on the attitudes of women and men in relation to gender‐appropriate domestic responsibilities and equal opportunities in the changing context…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to focus on the attitudes of women and men in relation to gender‐appropriate domestic responsibilities and equal opportunities in the changing context of neo‐liberalism.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors draw on results from an empirical investigation involving 1,731 questionnaires investigating the attitudes of women and men in a town in the north of Sweden.
Findings
The tentative conclusions suggest that even if they appear to co‐exist in contradictory ways, ideas of gender‐appropriate domestic responsibilities and equality of opportunity are in the respondents' minds, alongside neo‐liberal notions of individualisation. The prevailing attitudes in respect of gender suggest that women and men make apparently free “choices”; the influence of age on attitudes to gender issues is also considered.
Originality/value
This paper considers neo‐liberalisation and its impact on gender equity in Sweden, a country with a strong reputation for gender equity and a tradition of collective, inclusive social democracy, somewhere we would be unlikely to find its embedded presence. Using a quantitative self‐reporting approach to attitudes relevant to the choices made by men and women, the study raises questions about gender‐appropriate domestic responsibilities and equality of opportunity in a country that has been and continues to be regarded as one of the most gender‐friendly in the world and likely to be resistant to the influence of neo‐liberalism. The implications are explored, with the evidence indicating the presence of neo‐liberalism co‐existing, albeit perhaps uneasily, with traditions of equality of opportunity and attitudes to gender.
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Malin Tillmar, Helene Ahl, Karin Berglund and Katarina Pettersson
Contrasting two countries with different gender regimes and welfare states, Sweden and Tanzania, this paper aims to analyse how the institutional context affects the ways in which…
Abstract
Purpose
Contrasting two countries with different gender regimes and welfare states, Sweden and Tanzania, this paper aims to analyse how the institutional context affects the ways in which a neo-liberal reform agenda is translated into institutional changes and propose how such changes impact the preconditions for women’s entrepreneurship.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses document analysis and previous studies to describe and analyse the institutions and the institutional changes. This paper uses Scandinavian institutional theory as the interpretative framework.
Findings
This study proposes that: in well-developed welfare states with a high level of gender equality, consequences of neo-liberal agenda for the preconditions for women entrepreneurs are more likely to be negative than positive. In less developed states with a low level of gender equality, the gendered consequences of neo-liberal reforms may be mixed and the preconditions for women’s entrepreneurship more positive than negative. How neo-liberalism impacts preconditions for women entrepreneurs depend on the institutional framework in terms of a trustworthy women-friendly state and level of gender equality.
Research limitations/implications
The study calls for bringing the effects on the gender of the neo-liberal primacy of market solutions out of the black box. Studying how women entrepreneurs perceive these effects necessitates qualitative ethnographic data.
Originality/value
This paper demonstrates why any discussion of the impact of political or economic reforms on women’s entrepreneurship must take a country’s specific institutional context into account. Further, previous studies on neo-liberalism have rarely taken an interest in Africa.
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The purpose of this paper is to problematise the concept of corruption as it is used in the African context by exposing the weaknesses in the business model used to define…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to problematise the concept of corruption as it is used in the African context by exposing the weaknesses in the business model used to define corruption and resource the massive yet incompetent anti‐corruption effort. The paper then aims to follow this critique by considering an alternative way of dealing with the awesome dimensions of African corruption.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper utilises in‐depth secondary source analysis, applying critical theory.
Findings
Corruption's main interpretive framework, neo‐liberalism, is exposed as dominating, business‐centric and non‐utilitarian. A new paradigm with a strong ethnographic texture is presented.
Originality/value
The paper for the first time co‐analyses two contending paradigms for the construction of African corruption in the context of the global economic crisis.
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Transforming gender research in accounting is possible, desirable, and promising: the past few decades have included prescient work and expansive theories. The purpose of this…
Abstract
Purpose
Transforming gender research in accounting is possible, desirable, and promising: the past few decades have included prescient work and expansive theories. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the legacy of the 1992 special issue “Fe[men]ists' account” and urge new linkages and contexts for a continuation of visionary inquiries.
Design/methodology/approach
By reviewing pioneering feminist research in various disciplines, the author opens the margins and boundaries of gender‐in‐accounting research. Innovative multidisciplinary works from different regions of the globe reveal methods for challenging entrenched premises and recasting new meanings.
Findings
Reflecting on our embedded ideas, expanding boundaries, and imagining new areas of inquiry are not only plausible, they are essential, for contesting repression and discrimination and advancing social justice.
Research limitations/implications
Tying the current rhetoric of global neo‐liberalism to contemporary feminist struggles, the paper illustrates the significant consequences of economic globalization on women, and accounting's connection. As there is no single story regarding gender, research exploring the unexplored has precedent in accounting literature, providing a foundation for new insights and enhanced possibilities for advancing and transforming the field.
Originality/value
The paper re‐imagines the accounting‐gender dilemma, offering practical yet expansive research concepts regarding values, class, the construction of gender, and the impositions of economic structures.
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Bradley Bowden and Peta Stevenson-Clarke
Postmodernist ideas – most particularly those of Foucault but also those of Latour, Derrida and Barthes – have had a much longer presence in accounting research than in other…
Abstract
Purpose
Postmodernist ideas – most particularly those of Foucault but also those of Latour, Derrida and Barthes – have had a much longer presence in accounting research than in other business disciplines. However, in large part, the debates in accounting history and management history, have moved in parallel but separate universes. The purpose of this study is therefore one of exploring not only critical accounting understandings that are significant for management history but also one of highlighting conceptual flaws that are common to the postmodernist literature in both accounting and management history.
Design/methodology/approach
Foucault has been seminal to the critical traditions that have emerged in both accounting research and management history. In exploring the usage of Foucault’s ideas, this paper argues that an over-reliance on a set of Foucauldian concepts – governmentality, “disciplinary society,” neo-liberalism – that were never conceived with an eye to the problems of accounting and management has resulted in not only in the drawing of some very longbows from Foucault’s formulations but also misrepresentations of the French philosophers’ ideas.
Findings
Many, if not most, of the intellectual positions associated with the “Historic Turn” and ANTi-History – that knowledge is inherently subjective, that management involves exercising power at distance, that history is a social construct that is used to legitimate capitalism and management – were argued in the critical accounting literature long before Clark and Rowlinson’s (2004) oft cited call. Indeed, the “call” for a “New Accounting History” issued by Miller et al. (1991) played a remarkably similar role to that made by Clark and Rowlinson in management and organizational studies more than a decade later.
Originality/value
This is the first study to explore the marked similarities between the critical accounting literature, most particularly that related to the “New Accounting History” and that associated with the “Historic Turn” and ANTi-History in management and organizational studies.
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The purpose of this paper is to identify and evaluate the role and influence played by the discipline of accounting through its association with the multiple logics of government…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to identify and evaluate the role and influence played by the discipline of accounting through its association with the multiple logics of government reforms to transform the public tertiary education sector in New Zealand.
Design/methodology/approach
The study adopts a case study approach utilising multiple data collection methods. Neo-institutional theory provides an insightful complement to neo-liberalism and enhances the understanding of institutional logics driving government reforms and the transformation of public tertiary institutions.
Findings
The findings reveal that accounting has become a powerful conduit for the exercise of the neo-liberalism reforms by government and implemented by managerial control over public tertiary education institutions.
Research limitations/implications
By addressing a gap in the literature, the paper shows how political and economic neo-liberal policies have been implemented in tertiary education with the discipline of accounting being adopted as a prime driver of these reforms. The paper has significant implications for educational management, academics and learners in understanding how and why the inherent nature, objectives and processes of the overall educational experience have undergone a radical reformation.
Originality/value
New Zealand is one of the first countries to implement these educational reforms and adopted “accounting technologies” to reduce costs and improve performance. But the reality has often been very different. Most of the government’s original objectives have not been fulfilled and the reforms have been costly for the academic profession. This paper provides a valuable source of learning for academics, managers and politicians.
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This paper aims to examine corporate governance and consequences of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act (SOX) in the US from a socio‐political perspective.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to examine corporate governance and consequences of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act (SOX) in the US from a socio‐political perspective.
Design/methodology/approach
The author employs neo‐liberalism and its related mentality of governmentality to develop an analysis of how corporate governance and reforms such as SOX are socially constructed through autonomous agents, including managers and accountants, and various power relationships that comprise government.
Findings
This paper theorizes that legislative reform, such as SOX, represents pervasive mechanisms of disclosure, surveillance and power, and an insurance rationality designed to manage the new and significant risks of corporate governance. A framework is established which conceptualizes SOX as the intersection of neo‐liberalism, political rationalities and governmental techniques, and accounting practices which lead to the elements of security, quantification and shareholder value. Through this framework a model of risk as governance is developed that examines SOX through technologies of the self, calculation and insurance, designed to act upon managers using knowledge about control or financial statement weaknesses. Such mechanisms identify corporate governance risks, which can be acted upon by outside experts, such as accountants.
Originality/value
The major inference from this paper is that corporate governance research in accounting should pursue new lines of inquiry, which will permit the more profitable extension of existing research. Such inquiry should focus less on empirical corporate governance factors and more on the relationships, and power constructs of corporate governance, as well as how legislative reforms employ tactics to normalize the behaviour of not only managers, but also accountants.
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David Collison, Colin Dey, Gwen Hannah and Lorna Stevenson
This paper seeks to consider the impact and potential impact of social accounting at the macro level. It aims to explore the potential for “silent” or “shadow” social accounting…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper seeks to consider the impact and potential impact of social accounting at the macro level. It aims to explore the potential for “silent” or “shadow” social accounting to hold Anglo‐American capitalism to account for its social outcomes relative to other “varieties of capitalism”.
Design/methodology/approach
The role of accounting in spreading Anglo‐American capitalist values is outlined. This is followed by a discussion of macro social indicators and their potential to problematise social outcomes. In particular the paper reports on, and updates, an investigation of comparative child mortality figures in wealthy countries that appeared in the medical literature. This evidence is used both as an exemplar and as a substantive issue in its own right.
Findings
The specific empirical evidence reported, based on a cross‐sectional and longitudinal analysis of child mortality and its relationship to income inequality, exemplifies the consistently poor and relatively worsening performance of the Anglo‐American capitalist model. A rationale, and evidence, is also presented for the potential of such social reporting to act as an accountability mechanism.
Originality/value
The paper introduces to the accounting literature specific evidence of poor social outcomes associated with Anglo‐American capitalism. It considers the wider potential role of social indicators, as a component of silent and shadow reporting at a macro‐level, in problematising dominant forms of economic and social organisation.
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