Against new humanitarian management: Prefigurative accounting in the humanitarian field

IF 8.3 2区 管理学 Q1 BUSINESS, FINANCE
Bruno Cazenave , Jeremy Morales
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

This paper studies one large humanitarian NGO, Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières). We argue that its accounting practices can act as a ‘prefiguration’ of the organisational practices it wants to promote more widely. Precisely, the organisation is critical of what we call a ‘new humanitarian management’, which we characterise through three interconnected dimensions – a performance model that promotes efficiency and standardised projects, increasingly financial, upward accountability, and managerialised norms and values. We therefore detail how MSF responds to this trend with a performance model that rejects commensurability and disembeddedness, an alternative form of accountability framed around (self-)criticism, and strong normative controls aiming at encouraging humanitarian entrepreneurship. These alternative practices suggest that organisations promoting emancipation externally should start by shaping their internal processes and controls to offer ‘moments of prefiguration’. We therefore contribute to the literature on alternative accounts and emancipatory accounting by discussing the possibilities of what we call ‘prefigurative accounting’.

反对新的人道主义管理:人道主义领域的预示性会计
本文研究一个大型人道主义非政府组织--无国界医生组织。我们认为,无国界医生组织的会计实践可以作为其希望更广泛推广的组织实践的 "预示"。确切地说,无国界医生组织对我们所称的 "新人道主义管理 "持批评态度,我们通过三个相互关联的方面来描述这种管理的特点--促进效率和标准化项目的绩效模式,日益增长的财务和向上问责,以及管理规范和价值观。因此,我们详细介绍了无国界医生组织如何应对这一趋势,其绩效模式摒弃了可比性和脱节性,采用了一种以(自我)批评为框架的替代问责形式,以及旨在鼓励人道主义创业精神的强有力的规范控制。这些替代性做法表明,促进外部解放的组织应首先调整其内部流程和控制措施,以提供 "预示性时刻"。因此,我们通过讨论我们所称的 "预示性会计 "的可能性,为有关替代性会计和解放性会计的文献做出了贡献。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
9.40
自引率
7.80%
发文量
91
期刊介绍: Critical Perspectives on Accounting aims to provide a forum for the growing number of accounting researchers and practitioners who realize that conventional theory and practice is ill-suited to the challenges of the modern environment, and that accounting practices and corporate behavior are inextricably connected with many allocative, distributive, social, and ecological problems of our era. From such concerns, a new literature is emerging that seeks to reformulate corporate, social, and political activity, and the theoretical and practical means by which we apprehend and affect that activity. Research Areas Include: • Studies involving the political economy of accounting, critical accounting, radical accounting, and accounting''s implication in the exercise of power • Financial accounting''s role in the processes of international capital formation, including its impact on stock market stability and international banking activities • Management accounting''s role in organizing the labor process • The relationship between accounting and the state in various social formations • Studies of accounting''s historical role, as a means of "remembering" the subject''s social and conflictual character • The role of accounting in establishing "real" democracy at work and other domains of life • Accounting''s adjudicative function in international exchanges, such as that of the Third World debt • Antagonisms between the social and private character of accounting, such as conflicts of interest in the audit process • The identification of new constituencies for radical and critical accounting information • Accounting''s involvement in gender and class conflicts in the workplace • The interplay between accounting, social conflict, industrialization, bureaucracy, and technocracy • Reappraisals of the role of accounting as a science and technology • Critical reviews of "useful" scientific knowledge about organizations
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