Search results

This chapter explores the multiple levels of authenticity involved in son et lumière and projection mapping. Light shows are increasingly staged at historic sites, using monumental buildings as canvases. The use of light allows the buildings to communicate, giving them a performative, additional dimension, generating multiplicity, where the same architectural structure or place is encountered simultaneously in both its light and physical forms. The effect is hyperreal, transforming buildings into simulacra, versions of distorted reality, where no original exists. As the building appears to move, the mind simultaneously informs the viewer that it is static, evoking a co-created tourist experience. Light shows, arguably staged by “imagineers”, reflect the increasing move toward the spectacle essential for creative and experience economies.

Facebook has become a phenomenon – used by millions all over the world. Supposedly its purpose is to enable us to keep in touch with our friends, although for some there is a competitive element in collecting as many friends as possible. It is however difficult to believe that anyone has 900 genuine friends! So it is time to question the purpose of Facebook and the socially responsible purpose that it may or may not be fulfilling.

A consideration of what is written by many people in their Facebook accounts shows that entries are often like personal musings. So we say things for ourselves – to express our feeling in mottos and references to songs, etc.

It seems that we are like Schrodingers cat and that we do not exist unless we are observed. So we put ourselves on Facebook to simulate existence. Thus, Facebook seems to have become a Baudrillardian simulacrum – more real than the real.

According to Jacques Lacan, the world is a mirror on which we express ourselves to ourselves. We use the Lacanian perspective to argue that social media has become the new mirror – easier and less threatening as we do not need interaction, only approval through the like function. This is arguably less challenging – to have a virtual life instead of a real one.

This is problematic, according to Lacanian theory but is a comment on modern society and the problem being caused. The relationship to social responsibility is explained in this chapter.

This chapter takes a critical perspective on the conventional wisdom that more advanced cost allocation methods have the potential to provide a more accurate picture of “true” cost, inevitably leading to optimal product mix and pricing decisions, and ultimately to greater profitability.

Two concrete examples of the growing divergence between cost accounting theory and practice – the failures of activity-based costing and the reciprocal method of service department cost allocation to take root in practice – are examined through the lens of post-structuralist literary theory.

The findings suggest that economic truth has been devoured in an accounting simulation. The accounting model no longer reflects any profound economic reality; it precedes reality.

Much of the mainstream management accounting literature remains theoretically grounded in the belief that ‘true’ cost exists, as an object, which is revealed through our cost accounting systems. This chapter raises serious questions about this foundation, and therefore the practical applicability of a great deal of research.

Society has granted the accounting profession a great deal of responsibility and autonomy, largely on the confidence that it has historically provided an objective and truthful model of economic reality. The findings in this chapter suggest that the basis for the accounting profession’s preferential charter in society ought to be critically examined.

At a time where research has advanced toward an ever-narrower focus on self-referential tautologies and ever more complex modeling techniques, this chapter provides a new and stimulating, albeit provocative, perspective to yet unresolved issues in management accounting research and practice.

In organizations that have to meet demands from multiple sponsors, and that mix missions from different spheres, such as “civic,” “market,” “family,” how do participants orient themselves, so they can interact appropriately? Do participants’ practical navigation techniques have unintended consequences? To address these two questions, the authors draw on an ethnography of US youth programs whose sponsors required multiple, conflicting logics, speed, and precise documentation. The authors develop a concept, navigation techniques: participants’ shared unspoken methods of orienting themselves and appearing to meet demands from multiple logics, in institutionally complex projects that require frequent documentation. These techniques’ often have unintended consequences.

Textuality within the Western tradition has functioned in Derrida's analysis as the essential, yet disavowed supplement of a logos that perpetually sets itself against the necessary interventions of writing. Derrida compares textuality to a pharmakon, an ambivalent substance that has the capacity to act as both poison and cure. The ‘cure’ that textuality offers to the law pertains to the law's inability to establish its own permanence, or presence, without some literary intervention: only once it is ‘put into writing’ does the law remain ‘on record’, its permanence ‘ensured [by the text] with the vigilance of a guardian’ (Derrida, 2000b, p. 113). At the same time, however, textuality could be said to commit a kind of crime against the logos: it improperly appropriates the ‘presence’ of the law, steals it and substitutes itself for it. Writing is, as Maurice Blanchot puts it, ‘the enemy of all relationships of presence, of all legality’ (Blanchot, 1987, p. 156). The law's ‘presence’ nevertheless depends upon this criminal narrativity. In particular, the emergence of law requires the emergence of a narrative capable of resolving the trauma that attends the inception of communal and individual subjectivity: the law acquires its ‘presence’ only after a certain violent communal fantasy has established a vital untruth about the law's origins. The founding moment of Western law is a representation of a fictive transgression that serves to account for the terrifying, symbolically unrepresentable rupture that separates the individual and the community from the pre-symbolic void. In order for the law to take its place, it is necessary to stage a ‘crime’ and then to re-present it as the law's sure foundation. This crime is parricide and Derrida links it explicitly to the advent of narrativity as the law's uncanny, necessary condition of being:[…] this quasi-event bears the marks of fictive narrativity (fiction of narration as well as fiction as narration: fictive narration as the simulacrum of narration and not only as the narration of an imaginary history). It is the origin of literature as well as the origin of law – like the dead father, a story told, a spreading rumour, without author or end, but an ineluctable and unforgettable story. (Derrida, 1992, p. 199)

This exploratory paper discusses the undemocratic agenda setting of elites in Britain and how it has changed politics within a form of capitalism where much is left undisclosed in terms of mechanism and methods. It argues for a more radical exploratory strategy using C. Wright Mills’ understanding that what is left undisclosed is crucially important to elite existence and power, while recognising the limits on democratic accountability when debate, decision and action in complex capitalist societies can be frustrated or hijacked by small groups. Have British business elites, through their relation with political elites, used their power to constrain democratic citizenship? Our hypothesis is that the power of business elites is most likely conjuncturally specific and geographically bounded with distinct national differences. In the United Kingdom, the outcomes are often contingent and unstable as business elites try to manage democracy; moreover, the composition and organisation of business elites have changed through successive conjunctures.