Critical Perspectives on Accounting最新文献

Revolt(ing) rituals: Critical accounting and the honesty we owe 反抗仪式：关键会计和我们所欠的诚实

IF 5.7 2区管理学

Critical Perspectives on Accounting Pub Date : 2026-06-01 Epub Date: 2026-01-27 DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2026.102845

Erin J. Twyford

{"title":"Revolt(ing) rituals: Critical accounting and the honesty we owe","authors":"Erin J. Twyford","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2026.102845","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2026.102845","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper interrogates the condition of critical accounting scholarship through Albert Camus’s notion of the absurd: the clash between our longing for meaning and the institutional indifference that greets it. I argue that we have become Sisyphean academics, pushing the boulder of emancipatory critique up the mountain of academic legitimacy, only to see it roll back down through metrics, rankings, and performative rituals. This absurdity is structured by impact factors, careerism, and a research economy that both demands critique and disarms it. Drawing on debates within the field, I suggest that critical accounting risks devolving into an ouroboros, endlessly consuming its own critique while retreating into narcissism and ritualised lament. Against this, I propose we engage in ‘lucid revolt’, a posture of honesty grounded in the refusal to look away. In an era where truth has become contested terrain, honesty becomes a form of resistance. This means naming what power seeks to obscure and recognising that even small acts of resistance matter. Revolt here is less about the promise of transformation than about learning to love the boulder. To persist with care and solidarity, to carry its weight together, and to find meaning in the act of pushing even when the summit will never be reached.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 102845"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146076972","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

A ‘Utopia of the present’: MacIntyrean thought as critical accounting theory 一个“现在的乌托邦”：麦金太尔思想作为关键的会计理论

IF 5.7 2区管理学

Critical Perspectives on Accounting Pub Date : 2026-06-01 Epub Date: 2025-11-24 DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102824

Andrew West

{"title":"A ‘Utopia of the present’: MacIntyrean thought as critical accounting theory","authors":"Andrew West","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102824","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102824","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper develops a critical accounting theory based on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, that goes beyond his well-known scheme of practices, institutions, internal goods and virtues to incorporate his hostility towards managerial capitalism and his ‘revolutionary Aristotelianism’. It proposes that two distinctive aspects of MacIntyrean thought provide the conceptual apparatus for a critical accounting that can move beyond critique of the status quo and the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, towards flourishing human communities. These aspects include, firstly, his support for a politics of local communities characterised by Aristotelian questioning and secondly, his commitment to an objective morality associated with human flourishing, that finds expression within well-ordered practices. The paper develops these by asking what the goods of accounting are, and what we can expect from good accountants. Postulating the common good of accounting as ‘transparency aiding understanding’, the paper explores how accounting can contribute by, for example, supporting a distributist political economy and serving the internal goods of other practices. It also draws attention to the very real possibility that our desires may be misdirected and that this may underpin many problematic contemporary accounting practices. The deleterious effects of contemporary compartmentalisation are also considered as a hindrance to the development of accountants as capable moral agents. The paper highlights ways in which these possibilities can be developed through further research.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 102824"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145584503","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Independent directors in family PLCs in the majority world − insights from a Middle Eastern country 多数国家家族plc的独立董事——来自一个中东国家的见解

IF 5.7 2区管理学

Critical Perspectives on Accounting Pub Date : 2026-06-01 Epub Date: 2025-11-25 DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102827

Souod Alazemi , Shahzad Uddin

{"title":"Independent directors in family PLCs in the majority world − insights from a Middle Eastern country","authors":"Souod Alazemi , Shahzad Uddin","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102827","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102827","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper critically examines the concept of board member ‘independence’ by drawing on Max Weber’s notion of traditionalism to theorise its practice in non-Western or Majority World contexts. Using family-owned public limited companies (PLCs) in Kuwait as a case study, we explore how cultural norms, political-economic histories, and kinship-based authority structures shape the recruitment, roles, and influence of supposedly independent committee members.</div><div>Based on qualitative data − including interviews, archival materials, and field observations − we find that independence is largely symbolic. Independent members are often selected through Diwaniya-based social networks and valued more for their loyalty and discretion than for providing impartial oversight. The relationship between family owners and independent members reflects Weber’s chief–subject model, with board processes grounded in personalist logics rather than the institutional rationalities of Western capitalist governance.</div><div>This study contributes to the corporate governance literature by rethinking independence through a cultural-political lens and calls for policies and research that promote context-sensitive, decolonial approaches to governance in the Majority World.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 102827"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145584504","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Reorienting critical accounting scholarship in the era of collapse 在崩溃的时代重新定位关键的会计学术

IF 5.7 2区管理学

Critical Perspectives on Accounting Pub Date : 2026-06-01 Epub Date: 2026-02-10 DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2026.102846

Susan O’Leary

{"title":"Reorienting critical accounting scholarship in the era of collapse","authors":"Susan O’Leary","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2026.102846","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2026.102846","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper proposes that as climate collapse accelerates, the normative horizons underpinning critical accounting scholarship – reform, transformation and hope – are increasingly out of step with planetary and political realities. As a result, it argues for a reorientation of critical accounting scholarship in light of systemic breakdown. Drawing on recent interdisciplinary literature in environmental collapse, decolonial theory and climate activism, including those from the Global South and Indigenous perspectives, the paper proposes a collapse-aware framework to rethink the purpose of critique. Through this lens, existing concerns in the accounting literature – for example, those focused on institutional reform/critique or the construction of alternatives to prevailing dominant systems of power – appear in a different light. Rather than being underpinned by temporal assumptions that presume a still-recoverable future, a collapse-aware perspective reframes the purpose of critique, not as a pathway to systemic change but as a form of ethical engagement amidst unravelling. The paper outlines a set of practices for collapse-aware scholarship, arguing that if the task is no longer to save the system, we must remain accountable within its disintegration. This is not a call for despair or disengagement but a proposal to inhabit our scholarship differently: to stay with the trouble, hold space for grief, amplify refusal and act in solidarity with those bearing the weight of collapse. In doing so, the paper offers a renewed vision of critical accounting – one not grounded in hope for transformation but in responsibility to the world as it is.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 102846"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146173309","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Normalising individual responsibility? A gendered study of retirement planning in a financialised system 使个人责任正常化？金融化体系中退休计划的性别研究

IF 5.7 2区管理学

Critical Perspectives on Accounting Pub Date : 2026-06-01 Epub Date: 2025-12-12 DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102839

Roberta Adami , Liam Foster

{"title":"Normalising individual responsibility? A gendered study of retirement planning in a financialised system","authors":"Roberta Adami , Liam Foster","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102839","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102839","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The individualisation of risk and responsibility for retirement planning, with the requirement to make ‘good saving decisions’, is an essential feature of the financialisation of pensions. Individuals are encouraged to become active financial subjects to ensure their own economic welfare. Additionally, concepts such as individual responsibility, risk management and financial planning are presented as moral obligations. This narrative has become an intrinsic part of neoliberal policies implemented over the last four decades in the UK, aimed at further privatising retirement. This paper examines the views and attitudes of young women towards individual responsibility and risk, within the context of retirement planning in the UK. The study presents a gendered analysis of financialisation of the pension system. It draws from the concept of ‘individual investor’ to critically discuss its shortcomings, using interviews and a focus group with young British women. The findings show how deep-rooted the idea of personal responsibility is amongst respondents, but also that the concept of managing risk and uncertainty is not adequately recognised, despite its centrality to investment practices.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 102839"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145737279","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Dynamics of territorialization: calculable spaces and the “coloniality of dwelling” within Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting (1984–2006) 领土化的动态：阿雷格里港参与式预算中的可计算空间和“居住的殖民地性”（1984-2006）

IF 5.7 2区管理学

Critical Perspectives on Accounting Pub Date : 2026-06-01 Epub Date: 2025-11-29 DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102826

Luis Emilio Cuenca Botey , Luis Adrián Mora Rodríguez , Isabel Pedraza Acosta

{"title":"Dynamics of territorialization: calculable spaces and the “coloniality of dwelling” within Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting (1984–2006)","authors":"Luis Emilio Cuenca Botey , Luis Adrián Mora Rodríguez , Isabel Pedraza Acosta","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102826","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102826","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article examines how accounting devices can emerge from popular political struggles and serve as tools for emancipation in a setting characterized by colonial spatial domination. Based on the concept of <em>coloniality of dwelling</em> (Mansilla et al., 2019), we explore how Porto Alegre’s Participatory Budgeting (1989–2006) enabled social movements to confront the territorial logics imposed by coloniality and thus to produce an accounting territorialisation from below, thereby strengthening their capacities for emancipation. This work complements studies on accounting territorialisation by showing how the spread of calculable spaces can arise from popular struggle and is not solely due to the influence of actors with regulatory authority and expert knowledge (<span><span>Mennicken and Miller, 2012</span></span>, <span><span>Miller, 1992</span></span>, <span><span>Miller and Power, 2013</span></span>, <span><span>Free et al., 2019</span></span>, <span><span>Martinez et al., 2022</span></span>). Furthermore, we show how, in this case, accounting tools became instruments of collective territorial vindication and transformation. Our analysis relies on archival materials and historical data that demonstrate how accounting helped build political territories and reshape geographic space. By situating this case within decolonial thinking and critical accounting studies, we reflect on the conditions of possibility for accounting to participate in emancipatory projects when it is appropriated by social movements that resist colonial patterns of space and power.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 102826"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145617323","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Accounting for the cartel 贩毒集团的账目

IF 5.7 2区管理学

Critical Perspectives on Accounting Pub Date : 2026-06-01 Epub Date: 2025-12-02 DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102835

Miguel Gil

引用次数: 0

Risking it all: Consumer vulnerability and the credit rating panopticon 冒着一切风险：消费者脆弱性和信用评级的监狱

IF 5.7 2区管理学

Critical Perspectives on Accounting Pub Date : 2026-06-01 Epub Date: 2026-01-31 DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2026.102844

Hussan Aslam , Sally Dibb , Lindsey Appleyard , John Morris

{"title":"Risking it all: Consumer vulnerability and the credit rating panopticon","authors":"Hussan Aslam , Sally Dibb , Lindsey Appleyard , John Morris","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2026.102844","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2026.102844","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>With access to consumer credit normalised in contemporary financial life, lenders use credit ratings to assess the risk of lending to potential borrowers and to determine appropriate rates of interest. Informed by the related themes of financial literacy, financial vulnerability, and financial resilience, this paper explores the dynamics of consumer engagement with opaque credit rating systems. To access affordable credit, consumers need to be disciplined in managing their finances so that they can build a good credit rating. However, the opaqueness of credit rating algorithms and the surveillant aspects of the credit system can lead to panopticism, with consumers required to navigate between controlling their credit ratings, while sometimes lacking the information to do so effectively. Using a Foucauldian lens, ideas from folk theory and drawing on data from 79 in-depth interviews, the implications of this panoptic tension and of governmentality for consumers’ financial wellbeing are revealed. A theoretical contribution is made to understanding how consumers develop the practical knowledge needed to manage their credit rating, leading to implications for policy and practice regarding the need for transparency in the credit rating system and credit decision-making.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 102844"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146076973","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Affects as the rhythm of governance – An autoethnography of being controlled 影响作为治理的节奏-被控制的自我民族志

IF 5.7 2区管理学

Critical Perspectives on Accounting Pub Date : 2026-06-01 Epub Date: 2026-01-26 DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2026.102843

Bino Catasús

{"title":"Affects as the rhythm of governance – An autoethnography of being controlled","authors":"Bino Catasús","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2026.102843","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2026.102843","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper explores how frustration emerges, accumulates, and lingers in everyday work under contemporary regimes of control. I show how contradictory approaches to governing intersect and clash in subtle and often unnoticed ways. Drawing on reflexive autoethnographic vignettes from a Swedish university, I approach the frustrations of being controlled as an affective condition produced by the layered and paradoxical structure of control. This frustration is not spectacular or rebellious; it is mundane, embodied, and continuous, showing that affects such as frustration are central to understanding what it means to be governed. The paper also shows how frustration is bound up with the impossibility of meeting three simultaneous pressures: professional ambition, performance expectations, and procedural requirements.</div><div>The paper contributes to the literature in three ways. First, it conceptualizes governance as a socio-technical and affective practice. Multiple and contradictory ambitions embedded in control systems create a recurring rhythm through which governance is felt, with frustration forming its affective pulse. Second, it shows how frustration builds through the structural incompatibility of ambition, performance, and procedure, generating a steady, low-intensity sense of falling short even when work is carried out with care and commitment. Third, the paper reframes frustration as inwardly directed work rather than a precursor to resistance. Instead of mobilizing opposition, frustration produces self-adjustment, workaround practices, and affective depletion, becoming an internal mode through which governance operates. Frustration is not a reaction to failed control but a recurring rhythm of governance – a repeated pulse through which governance endures.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 102843"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146077617","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Morality as performance: Studying the rise of performance measurement in citizen governance through the case of Chinese Social Credit System 道德即绩效：以中国社会信用体系为例研究绩效衡量在公民治理中的兴起

IF 5.7 2区管理学

Critical Perspectives on Accounting Pub Date : 2026-06-01 Epub Date: 2025-12-17 DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102837

Afshin Mehrpouya , Julien Malaurent

{"title":"Morality as performance: Studying the rise of performance measurement in citizen governance through the case of Chinese Social Credit System","authors":"Afshin Mehrpouya , Julien Malaurent","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102837","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102837","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this paper, relying on a qualitative study of the Chinese Social Credit System (SCS), we explore how performance measurement is being mobilized to enact a moral regime to guide citizens’ behavior. Basing our analysis on governmentality studies in general but also studies of governmentality regimes in post-reform China, we conceptualize the techniques of government mobilized in SCS to normalize traditional civic value of trust (Chengxin) amalgamated with market value of creditworthiness. We discuss how under SCS, three visual regimes are at work, the Panoptic, the Synoptic and what we term the Alloptic. The first, the Panoptic gaze involves algorithmic and diffuse surveillance of citizens’ behavior backed by a regime of reward and punishment, the second, the Synoptic gaze is about guiding the gaze of citizens to the stories and images of model citizens, and the third, what we term the ‘Alloptic’ gaze others the “untrustworthy” citizens under the shaming gaze of the mobile, unknown community shadowing them in their physical movements and online. We discuss how algorithmic governance enables such a coming together of the three gazes in a dynamic and highly uncertain nexus of visibility wherein the contours of the regime, and the purveyor of the othering/shaming gaze are changing and unknown. We discuss the implications of our study for analysis of governance in other settings – especially considering the rise of illiberalism in conjunction with new technologies or what has been termed “techno-fascism” particularly in the US, but also throughout the world.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 102837"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145790697","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0