The mountains are still there: Accounting academics and the bearings of intellectuals (original) (raw)
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Revisiting the roles of accounting in society
Accounting, Organizations and Society, 2016
In order to facilitate the development of new research agendas, pioneering authors in AOS embarked on difficult journeys in search of the interconnections between accounting and the social. Contributions such as Burchell et al (1980) located a number of roles of accounting in society and inspired agenda-shifting historical investigations. However, as Hopwood (1985) recognised, the participation of historians in this project requires reinvestments in theoretical and epistemological thinking. This paper encourages renewed explorations of the concepts that might guide accounting history research seeking to probe the social. Such investments are especially pressing given that notions of 'society' and the 'social' have shifted since the early years of AOS. The study charts the problems of connecting accounting and the social, indicates how social historians have addressed similar issues, and reveals the scope for drawing on other notions of the 'social' that have the potential to extend historical understandings of the roles of accounting in society. The latter is illustrated through a discussion of the interactions between accounting and social control.
PRACTISING CRITICAL ACCOUNTING
Critical accounting academics are increasingly being urged to enter public debates and disseminate competing discourses to a wider audience. In collaboration with the late Tony Puxty , for some time we have sought to engage with the UK accounting establishment through articles in the popular press , public meetings , meetings with of ficials , issuing counterpamphlets and encouraging politicians and journalists to question conventional accounting wisdom. In this paper , we briefly reflect upon our experiences of engaging with the accounting establishment in the UK .
Accounting Forum, 2002
The changes in public sectors of many western democracies, particularly as applied in public funded universities, have led to an environment where students have been redefined as customers, organisations and their programs have been redefined as fee generating and services have been reconstituted as commercialised competitive activities in the open marketplace. Work in this 'new' Higher Education Sector (HES) environment has been construed as fee generating and cost incurring, subject to financial control and evaluated for its tangible, measured outputs. This paper considers the contemporary attitudes in accounting and management academia to what constitutes research and scholarship, using Australia and the UK as case examples. From this perspective, it is argued that the changing HES environment is transforming and commodifying research into a homogenised, measured and traded commodity. This commodity is then traded in the new academic marketplace in forms such as departmental research rankings, appointability of candidates for professorial positions, departmental and individual academic competitiveness for research grants, and university eligibility for government research funding. In addition, we contend that this commodification is exhibiting a convergent tendency, in that the tradable currency shows signs of reductionism to a common form of measurement, that is, to refereed research journal articles. This paper seeks to further open up discussion and debate on these issues from both acad-emic and general community perspectives and to offer some tentative suggestions about how we, as a community of scholars, might seek to counter this process.
Intellectual engagements of accounting academics: The ‘forecasted losses' intervention
Critical Perspectives on Accounting
This paper explores the social and political potential of accounting scholarship, presenting and discussing an intellectual intervention challenging a legislative reform that significantly affected Spanish industrial relations. In this reform, an accounting artifact (forecasted losses) played an unexpected role and was misrepresented, prompting a sizeable number of scholars to sign two manifestos in 2010 and 2012 against the use of forecasted losses made by the new legislation. As promoters of this manifesto, we perform in this paper a collaborative autoethnography to reflect on the context, events, reactions, and significance of this intervention for both the academic and the industrial relations fields. We mobilize Pierre Bourdieu's ideas on the public intellectual to think more generally about academic engagements in the interplay between accounting, policymaking, and social issues. This intervention illustrates the different manners in which administrative and economic powers interfered in the Spanish accounting academic field, limiting the disposition of Spanish scholars to engage in public debates. We also interpret our engagement as mobilizing intellectual capital to expose how the notion of forecasted losses was used to produce a form of symbolic violence and how this capital is more effective as it produces messages addressed to the producers, i.e., policymakers and the judicature in this specific case.
The withering of tolerance and communication in interdisciplinary accounting studies
Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, 2005
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Accounting, Organizations and Society, 1994
The interplay between the ideology of the profession that seeks to legitimise accounting's regulatory regime and the practices of accountants in expanding the scope of the markets for their labour is critical to understanding the changing 'professional' ideology of accountants. This interplay forms the core of each of three recent episodes in the history of the UK accountancy profession examined in this paper, which are (i) negotiations over the scope and impact of the 8th EC Directive, (ii) the positioning of the profession in relation to the Financial Services Act (1986) and (iii) the effort of the professional bodies to secure their powers of self-regulation conferred upon them by the state.