Resistance, hegemony, and critical accounting interventions: Lessons from debates over government debt

Abstract

Reflecting on how critical academics intervene in the public sphere, this paper explores how accounting is mobilized to reinforce and counter neoliberal hegemony in a public-policy debate over the role and size of government debt. The paper draws on the work of Gramsci, Laclau, and Mouffe to analyze case-data derived from three decades of media articles, research reports, and government financial documents in the Canadian province of Québec. The study finds that hegemonic actors seek consent from the population by exciting emotions (esp. fear and guilt), referencing the common sense, and aligning their arguments with people’s everyday experiences. While counter-hegemonic actors initially relied on conceptual reason and logic in their arguments, positioning accounting as an ‘ammunition machine’, they too came to adopt an approach aimed at exciting emotions, translating accounting concepts into non-economic fields, and rearticulating hegemonic signifiers, in an effort to refine and reshape the common sense. Highlighting the limitations of purely rational modes of argumentation, the study has implications for the manner in which accounting academics intervene in the public sphere and how they need to be skilled translators and re-articulators of hegemonic discourse.