{"title":"Against new humanitarian management: Prefigurative accounting in the humanitarian field","authors":"Bruno Cazenave , Jeremy Morales","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2024.102718","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>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’.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":8.3000,"publicationDate":"2024-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1045235424000170/pdfft?md5=72fe173474001b991826982ee4328fc9&pid=1-s2.0-S1045235424000170-main.pdf","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1045235424000170","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"BUSINESS, FINANCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
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’.
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