Search results

This paper advocates for critical accounting’s contribution to immigration deliberations as part of its agenda for advancing social justice. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate accounting as implicated in immigration policies of three advanced economies.

The authors suggest that neoliberal immigration policies are operationalized through the responsibilization of individuals, corporations and universities. By examining three immigration policies from the USA, Canada and the UK, the paper clarifies how accounting technologies facilitate responsibilization techniques, making immigration governable. Additionally, by employing immigrant narratives as counter accounts, the impacts of immigrant lived experiences can be witnessed.

Accounting upholds neoliberal principles of life by expanding market mentalities and governance, through technologies of measurement, reports, audits and surveillance. A neoliberal strategy of responsibilization contributes to divesting authority for immigration policy in an attempt to erase the social and moral agency of immigrants, with accounting integral to this process. However the social cannot be eradicated as the work illustrates in the narratives and counter accounts that immigrants create.

The work reveals the illusion of accounting as neutral. As no single story captures the nuances and complexities of immigration practices, further exploration is encouraged.

The work is a unique contribution to the underdeveloped study of immigration in critical accounting. By unmasking accounting’s role and revealing techniques underpinning immigration discourses, enhanced ways of researching immigration are possible.

This chapter draws on qualitative interviews to examine how Bhutanese refugees interact with norms around mothering and childbirth. Since these women have birthed and reared children in Bhutan and/or Nepal, as well as in the United States, their stories help to explore how the implications of medicalization differ for individuals by race, class, and nation, with a unique cross-comparative lens. In particular, the respondents uniquely identify epidurals as an important medical intervention, simultaneously increasing their autonomy while subscribing to neoliberal mothering. This research furthers our understanding of neoliberal mothering and medicalization by showing a nuanced script that illuminates social processes, resistance, and internalization through an intersectional and cross-cultural lens.

This paper interrogates the notion of “New Capital” in the context of the hegemony of neoliberal urbanism in the Arabcities in the Middle East from historical, socioeconomic, and spatial perspectives. It reviews the historical narratives of new centres and districts in Cairo, Beirut, and evolving capitalist urbanism and architecture in the Arabian Peninsula in search of the elitist dream of neoliberal urbanism. It offers a comprehensive analysis to the notions of neoliberal ideology and urban policies, neo-Capital city as catalyst for nation-building, and neo-Capitalist architecture as the reproduction of clone structures of western models. The paper focuses its critical analysis on the aspects of liveability in the contemporary Arab City and its socio-spatial structures and everyday urban reality. It reports on urban narratives based on archival records, urban projects, and investigations of governmental accounts to determine aspects of success and failure in projects of new capital cities and districts. It argues that cities are essentially social-spatial systems in which hierarchy is a fundamental element, the lack of which determines abject failure of their anticipated vision.

This study has two aims. It aims to analyse three essential pre-conditions of an authentic sustainability curriculum (ASC). The theoretical analysis involves the definition of authenticity through the learning outcomes (LOs) framework called authentic minimum (AM). This paper also aims to gauge students’ views on economic growth, sustainability and mindfulness.

The theoretical aim was accomplished by extensive study of and critical reflections on the relevant literature. The empirical research was qualitative using an online questionnaire as survey instrument consisting of predominantly open-ended questions involving students of two economic faculties. Directed content analysis and nonparametric quantitative methods were used to assess the answers.

Viable sustainability goals are in stark contrast with the promotion of sustainable economic growth in sustainable development goals 8 and the reigning neoliberal agenda. The empirical findings provide valuable insights into how undergraduate students view mindfulness, economic growth and aspects of sustainability.

The empirical research has some obvious limitations that warrant caution in generalizing the results. The authors used a sample of convenience and the base population of the survey consisted only in students of economics in two economic faculties of two Hungarian universities.

Practical implications of the present paper are many all sharing; however, the need for existential courage on the part of teachers, students and leaders of higher education institutions. Existential courage is required for profound personal transformation, for going against mainstream ideology and the possible confrontations with colleagues, leaders of institutions, students, friends or family members.

On the theoretical side, the concept of ASC was introduced with AM as its LOs framework. For the first time, an attempt was made to interpret authenticity in sustainability education as an integration of mindfulness, human and environmental ethics and a firm opposition to economic growth and neoliberal ideals. The analysis of qualitative data supported earlier research and also provided unique findings in the examined areas.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has provoked considerable debate. Initial expressions of CSR can be traced back to the seventeenth century. However, the ideal of socially responsible business was most evident after the depression of the 1930s and the post-war period in the 1950s. CSR was, by then, mainly influenced by values of philanthropy and principles of the welfare state, and mostly centred on corporations’ charitable donations which provided social welfare for materially deprived families and individuals. In the 1980s, there was a marked shift to the neoliberal ideals of profit maximisation and free regulation in corporate activities and this fed through into CSR practices. We argue that these conflicting ideals of CSR create divergent discourses where corporations on the one hand proclaim a lack of self-interest and a duty of care towards host societies, and on the other hand legitimise corporation’s self-interested preoccupation with profit. Divergent care versus profit discourses influence how legislators, CSR experts, corporations and NGOs understand and practise CSR in host societies. In this chapter, we examine how welfare and neoliberal ideologies contribute to divergent discourses of duty of care and profit, and how these discourses influence corporations’ decision-making about their social responsibility. The chapter concludes by proposing alternative ways for rethinking political and economic relationships between communities and corporations, in order to move beyond the limits of the current discourses of duty of care and profit.

While past research has explored how opting-out enables mothers to break free from masculinist organizational cultures, less attention has been given to how they resist disciplinary power that constitutes and governs their subjectivities. This paper aims to add to the discussion of opting-out as a site of power and resistance by proposing the concept of “constructive resistance” as a productive vantage point for investigating opted-out mothers' subversive practices of self-making.

This Malaysian case study brings together the notion of constructive resistance, critical narrative analysis and APPRAISAL theory to examine the reflective stories of eighteen mothers who exited formal employment. These accounts were collected through an open-ended questionnaire and semi-structured email interviews.

The mothers in the sample tend to construct themselves in two main ways, as (1) valuable mothers (capable, tireless, caring mothers who are key figures in their children's lives) and (2) competent professionals. These subjectivities are parasitic on gendered and neoliberal ideals but allow the mothers to undermine neoliberal capitalist work arrangements that were incongruent with their personal values and adversely impacted their well-being, as well as refuse organizational narratives that positioned them as “failed” workers.

Whereas power is primarily seen in previous opting-out scholarship as centralized and constraining, this case study illustrates how the lens of constructive resistance can be beneficial for examining opted-out mothers' struggles against a less direct form of power that governs through the production of truths and subjectivities.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the causes of failure of the neoliberal model of capitalism and rise of state capitalism. The arguments that efficient market economy can thrive under autocracy are refuted.

Both western neoliberal capitalism and state capitalism in China and Russia are juxtaposed and critically analyzed.

Neoliberalism is a conceptual model of enthusiastic true believers who never succeed in developing a workable economic system but rather a travesty of its own ideal. The USA instead of an efficient, competitive market economy became a playground for lobbyists and a corporate autocracy fraught with deep imbalances. Yet due to the rule of law and inherent freedoms the post‐neoliberal USA will be capable of “self repair” which is not possible in state capitalism.

The connections between politics and economics are inherently complex and difficult to be presented as predicable dependences. An interdisciplinary approach is necessary and revealing but it has obvious analytical limitations because of inadequate tools.

The proclamation of the end of the democratic capitalism is unfounded. The neoliberal ideologues are hardly to blame for the failures of the western market economy because they have merely created a pretext for corporate America to reduce the regulatory power of the government. The solution is in returning to the model of interventionist government mindful of the nation's long‐term wellbeing.

The author creates unique functional characteristics of western market capitalism and state capitalism and points out clear advantages of democratic western market capitalism often forgotten in the heat of the post‐crises debates.

The Latin American region experienced an electoral shift to the political left during the 2000s but this leftist shift did not radically alter the political economy of the region. Following Jessop’s (2008) strategic-relational approach to theorizing about the state, this paper focuses on the perspective that the structure of the state is both an outcome of prior social struggles and a structuring mechanism for the social actors that attempt to enact political and economic reforms.

After demonstrating what this has historically meant for the types of state that have existed in Latin America during the past century by reviewing some of the literature on the corporatist and bureaucratic-authoritarian states and clientelism, this paper argues that the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 1990s constituted a new type of state – the Latin American neoliberal state. This analysis is then focused on the literature that seeks to describe the new lefts in the region, while continuing to focus on the role of the neoliberal state in structuring these new lefts’ terrain of struggle.

Understanding the new lefts in Latin America and the types of reforms that they are capable of making requires that we better understand this new type of state. Due to the structural limitations imposed by the neoliberal state, the lefts are not able to radically alter the region’s political economy.

The paper aims to investigate how accounting techniques, when embedded within data-driven public-sector management systems, mask and intensify the neoliberal ideological commitments of powerful state and corporate actors. The authors explore the role of accounting in the operationalisation of “instrumentarian power” (Zuboff, 2019) – a new form of power that mobilises ubiquitous digital instrumentation to ensure that algorithmic architectures can tune, herd and modify behaviour.

The authors employ a qualitative archival analysis of publicly available data related to the automation of welfare-policing systems to explore the role of accounting in advancing instrumentarian power.

In exploring the automation of Australia's welfare debt recovery system (Robodebt), this paper examines a new algorithmic accountability that has emerged at the interface of government, technology and accounting. The authors show that accounting supports both the rise of instrumentarian power and the intensification of neoliberal ideals when buried within algorithms. In focusing on Robodebt, the authors show how the algorithmic reconfiguration of accountability within the welfare system intensified the inequalities that welfare recipients experienced. Furthermore, the authors show that, despite its apparent failure, it worked to modify welfare recipients' behaviour to align with the neoliberal ideals of “self-management” and “individual responsibility”.

This paper addresses Agostino, Saliterer and Steccolini's (2021) call to investigate the relationship between accounting, digital innovations and the lived experience of vulnerable people. To anchor this, the authors show how algorithms work to mask the accounting assumptions that underpin them and assert that this, in turn, recasts accountability relationships. When accounting is embedded in algorithms, the ideological potency of calculations can be obscured, and when applied within technologies that affect vulnerable people, they can intensify already substantial inequalities.