Critical Perspectives on Accounting最新文献

{"title":"Accounting for migration: An inquiry into a research conversation in the margins","authors":"Amanda Curry ,&nbsp;Johan Sandström ,&nbsp;Stig Westerdahl","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102813","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102813","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article provides an assessment of previous research on the nexus between accounting and migration. Despite ideas of accounting and migration interlinking in many ways, and with migration as one of the most important global challenges, the research conversation is limited and sprawling. Four different streams are discerned in the nexus between accounting and migration: i) historizing the migrant, ii) controlling migrants at the border, iii) constructing the employable migrant, and iv) listening to the voices of migrants. Based on a cross-stream analysis, five interrelated roles of accounting in the making of migrants and migration are highlighted, roles that also serve as springboards to suggestions for future research.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"102 ","pages":"Article 102813"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144922553","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}

{"title":"Boundaries of transformation: Race, compliance, and identity work in South Africa’s Big Four accounting firms","authors":"Gizelle D Willows ,&nbsp;Michael Harber","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102815","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102815","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Employing a conceptualization of identity work as ‘boundary work’ from organizational theory, this paper contributes to research examining how the Big Four audit firms attempt to legitimize their behavior, preserve their reputation, and grow their influence in capital markets. The South African post-apartheid socio-political context, together with recent regulatory pressures placed on the Big Four to demonstrate ‘true’ and ‘genuine’ racial transformation, provides an opportune setting to explore the behavior of the Big Four. On matters of race and racism, research is limited by the highly contested nature of the topic and the fact that dialogue surrounding race is usually guarded, informal, and thereby opaque. Yet, in South Africa, the government has refined over the years an intricate legislated ‘scorecard’ for organizations (especially corporates) to ‘measure’ their racial equity performance. This system is given considerable prominence in public and corporate affairs; indeed, it is ‘an accounting mechanism’ for establishing social legitimacy in matters of race. Through a discourse analysis of parliamentary debate and regulatory communications, we showcase the ‘institutional entrepreneurialism’ of the Big Four. Applying Critical Race Theory, our interpretation highlights unintended consequences and paradoxes which are created when race equity is ‘measured’ and ‘performance’ is determined by what is effectively a compliance-based accounting system. We argue that such a system hinders rather than promotes constructive conversation and hides, intentionally or unintentionally, the perspectives needed to achieve a truly transformed ‘culture’ of inclusive opportunity, trust, and respect. We also provide a further example of the Big Four representing themselves as paragons of virtue, ‘agents of transformational change’, in such a manner as to convey the idea that racial equity cannot be achieved in the local profession without their valiant efforts. Such rhetoric again shows how the Big Four represent the two dominant institutional logics of commercialism and professionalism as complementary, not conflicting, or contradictory.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"102 ","pages":"Article 102815"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145104564","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}

{"title":"(E)valuated by the market: The challenges of evaluating the individual performance of sell-side analysts in the quest for narrative authority","authors":"Pierre Lescoat ,&nbsp;Pénélope Van den Bussche","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102795","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102795","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The concept of narrative authority has recently been mobilised to understand the work of financial analysts, focusing less on the technical content of their recommendations than on how they construct their legitimacy and discourse. Drawing on the sociology of evaluation, we look at systems used to evaluate the individual performance of sell-side analysts in order to understand their role in the construction of narrative authority. This study is based on 33 interviews with 13 financial market professionals. It examines in detail the representations of sell-side analysts’ performance the system conveys, as well as the analysts’ own perceptions of it. We show how they need to reach out to other financial professions in order to build their narrative authority, particularly internally. To make sense of the dynamics we unveil, we propose the idea of an accounting system—a performance evaluation system—which embodies and ‘performs’ the market, maintaining a circularity between narrative authority and stock market valuations and evaluations. The study shows just how difficult it is to construct a narrative authority and how fragile it is. We contribute to the literature on commodification and marketisation (Çalışkan &amp; Callon, 2009) by showing how the evaluation of financial analysts’ performance positions them on the market as assets. Ultimately, our study shows how an accounting system plays a key role in understanding economic phenomena when these are constructed by performative narratives.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"102 ","pages":"Article 102795"},"PeriodicalIF":8.3,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144491955","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}

{"title":"Political scandals, media bias and the moral ambiguity of fraud and corruption","authors":"Annette Quayle,&nbsp;Andrew West","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102819","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102819","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Although there is wide acknowledgement that the media play a significant role in the construction of scandals involving fraud and corruption, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the issue of morality. As scandals are <em>prima facie</em> dependent upon wrongdoing, an adequate understanding of their construction requires examining whether and how they are framed in moral terms. This paper explores the potential moral framing of wrongdoing in the context of an ongoing political scandal involving two mayors at a local government municipality, through both initial media allegations and subsequent trial proceedings. Drawing on key perspectives from ethics and moral philosophy, we examine how prominent media newspapers frame wrongdoing in terms of adverse outcomes (utilitarian), a violation of duties (deontological), and character (virtue ethics). Our investigation extends the literature by showing how the moral and ethical dimensions of fraud and corruption are either emphasised or silenced due to intentional and unintentional media bias, and highlight the frequent conflation between legal and ethical wrongdoing in media narratives. Our analysis also shows how media often frame fraud and corruption in terms of a breach of legality yet frequently fails to articulate why this behaviour is non-compliant with moral or ethical norms, despite evidence that these moral dimensions are present. Finally, we highlight a difference between ethics and governance, demonstrating how employee behaviour may contravene principles of good governance without necessarily breaching ethical standards or the law.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"102 ","pages":"Article 102819"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145265783","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}

{"title":"Are low-income workers financially irresponsible? Analysing financial literacy and over-indebtedness in Nairobi","authors":"Thereza Balliester Reis ,&nbsp;Vincent Mugo Kamau","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102823","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102823","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Studies on financial inclusion place a strong emphasis on financial literacy and individual financial responsibility. Over-spending and over-indebtedness are often thought to be consequences of a lack of understanding of prudent budgeting, saving, and investment. Building on the critical accounting and everyday financialisation frameworks, this study challenges those claims. Using the FinAccess 2021 survey and interviewing 30 low-income workers in Nairobi, Kenya, we find indications that many are financially literate. In fact, participants report several strategic techniques to save on costs, such as splitting transactions on M-Pesa to avoid fees. Yet, as their income is low, these individuals often find themselves indebted for sustained periods, particularly for basic needs such as food and transportation. Furthermore, where individuals show signs of over-indebtedness, these seem to be consequences of structural and income constraints rather than a lack of understanding of money management practices. Our article critiques established understandings of financial knowledge by presenting new evidence on everyday financial practices in Nairobi. Our results suggest that financialisation of everyday life has spread to countries beyond the Global North and might have severe consequences for development goals.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"102 ","pages":"Article 102823"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145474113","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}

{"title":"(In)visibilization, silencing and diversity washing: an intersectional analysis of diversity discourses","authors":"Julie Gauneau,&nbsp;Caroline Lambert","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102816","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102816","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Reporting conveys discourses of power and may give rise to forms of “washing” (greenwashing, diversity washing, etc.). This article analyzes the evolution of textual, quantitative, and visual discourses on diversity in the annual reports of a multinational organization (LVMH) between 2002 and 2019. By adopting an intersectional approach and combining different methods of discourse analysis, we uncover a new modality of diversity washing. We show that this does not take the form of a dissonance between diversity-related discourse and actions, but rather of a rhetorical antinomy between an explicit and an implicit discourse in the annual reports. We show that the implicit discourse sustains a subtext of intersectional oppression that manifests through phenomena of (in)visibilization, othering, exoticization, and silencing. Indeed, this discourse—through the sexual objectification of women, racial exclusion, and the hegemony of white heterosexual masculinity—performs identities by assigning women and individuals at the intersection of several minoritized identities to a defined and subordinate position. Our results also show that the visual (over)representation of women in annual reports does not necessarily indicate progress towards equality but may, on the contrary, perpetuate gender stereotypes.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"102 ","pages":"Article 102816"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145157072","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}

{"title":"The translucence of transparency: Extractive industry beneficial ownership disclosure as an emerging transparency regime","authors":"Amanze Ejiogu ,&nbsp;Mercy Denedo ,&nbsp;Osamuyimen Egbon ,&nbsp;Sarah Lauwo","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102806","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102806","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study explores the nature and limits of transparency in the context of the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative’s beneficial ownership regime. To do this, we draw on <span><span>Ball’s (2009)</span></span> three transparency metaphors – public value or norm of behaviour, openness, and complexity – to frame our study and conceptualise transparency as an ambiguous and ambivalent concept connoting light and darkness, clarity and opacity. Empirically, we draw on diverse country-level data (supplemented by company-level data to highlight exemplars) from the period between 2013 and 2021. Our findings show how the beneficial ownership regime’s intersection with the wider political culture provides a space wherein the nature of transparency and the resultant visibilities and invisibilities are negotiated and contested and eventually compromised. We conceptualise this space as a zone of in-betweenness, or translucence, and represent it as an opacity–transparency continuum. As such, what is revealed is the social construction of translucence – a state in which there is neither full transparency nor complete opaqueness but, rather, something in-between. Our findings also highlight how resistance – in both subtle and confrontational forms –influences placement within this zone of in-betweenness (translucence).</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"102 ","pages":"Article 102806"},"PeriodicalIF":8.3,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144291422","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}

{"title":"Accounting and biopolitics for a new society: Italian colonialism in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya and Somalia (1922–1941)","authors":"Michele Bigoni ,&nbsp;Valerio Antonelli ,&nbsp;Warwick Funnell ,&nbsp;Emanuela Mattia Cafaro","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102803","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102803","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Intervention in Africa by the Italian Fascists was not justified only by economic motives but sought to re-engineer the Indigenous population and settlers in the creation of a new society shaped by Fascist ideology. Accounting tools in the form of budgets, censuses and reports from the colonies of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya and Somalia between 1922 and 1941 were essential means to gather information which would inform policies that would control the way in which both the Indigenous population and Italian settlers conducted themselves. Ultimately this was meant to change their motives and actions to create the conditions that would lead to significant political and economic gains for the colonising power. Informed by the work of Arendt and Foucault on biopolitics and totalitarianism, this study investigates the way in which Fascist accounting in the colonies, rather than being solely a means to promote the efficient expropriation of local resources, was to be used to build a new generation of strong, ruthless Italians and develop a highly racialised society. In unseen ways the biopolitical properties of accounting can allow interventions in the lives of individuals which can modify an individual’s lifestyle and priorities and even promote discrimination and racism that enable control.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"102 ","pages":"Article 102803"},"PeriodicalIF":8.3,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144221767","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}

{"title":"Accountability-based accounting in the blame game for post-disaster aid","authors":"Tiziana Di Cimbrini ,&nbsp;Francesco Paolone","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102818","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102818","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The paper compares two accountability systems concerning the aid provided after the Marsica earthquake occurred in Italy in 1915. The two account givers, the Government and a private Committee, face a hostile and favourable accountability environment respectively, because the media and public opinion severely criticized the response by the public authorities and praised the private initiative. The accounting systems adopted to operationalize the accountability systems are read in the light of the different dispositions of the accountability forums. While the Committee displays the full range of accounting practices available, discursive, calculative, and visual, the Government mainly relies on discursive practices and only exhibits a selection of calculative practices directing the audience towards specific blame-avoidance evaluation standards. By providing an example of an ‘attacking’ and defensive use of accounting, the study contributes to our understanding of the nexus between accounting, accountability, and blame avoidance in a post-natural disaster scenario.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"102 ","pages":"Article 102818"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145265782","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}

{"title":"Accounting for higher education: Calculative practices in curricular administration","authors":"Keith Dixon","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102805","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102805","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Calculative practices resembling conventional accounting and sometimes termed ‘audit culture’ have materialised in higher education to account for learning and related activities. I posit these practices as <em>curricular accounting</em>, thus contributing an unrecognised but very real form of accounting to our discipline. Comparable with other accountings, the processes and practices this one comprises are potentially constituting the people, activities and organisations it involves (i.e., scholars and administrators, teaching and learning, disciplines and universities) as economic actors and entities, with the potential inadequacies and consequences that entails. Thus, my purpose is to increase and distribute knowledge and understanding about curricular accounting to students and academics, among others, to give them agency to allay the inadequacies it holds for them. The paper involves insider research: it reflects my observing and participating in the development and ubiquitous expansion of this accounting from within universities in Britain and Aotearoa New Zealand. Framing the study historically and critically, I treat curricular accounting as a form of accounting, define and configure its aspects, explain its functioning and show that this is another accounting which never simply began. I find that its development connects with student growth, because of demand increasing for university-educated labour, wider access to universities becoming a social policy imperative, and knowledge, discipline-diversification and modularisation expanding. I also find that its recent development and current practice connect with neoliberalism and managerialism taking hold in government, public policy and higher education. Among the critical matters I raise are whether curricular accounting is serving to emancipate society; or whether it is enabling the business of higher education to fabricate products which consumers find compelling, resulting in exploitation of students and constraint of academics.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"102 ","pages":"Article 102805"},"PeriodicalIF":8.3,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144279561","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}