Perception de l'affaire Enron par des étudiants français : vers une réflexion sur l'enseignement de la comptabilité pour les futurs managers ?

L'article propose une réflexion sur le contenu des programmes de formation des futurs managers, notamment des enseignements de comptabilité. Le point de départ, est une expérience pédagogique réalisée en collaboration avec des étudiants d'une école de commerce française, à qui on leur a demandé leur perception de l'affaire Enron. L'auteur montre que certains étudiants se retrouvent confrontés à des situations de dissonance cognitive pouvant être accentuées par le contenu de certains enseignements. Destinés à devenir des managers, les étudiants réagissent diversement à un système qu'ils accusent de les engager sur la voie de la dérive contre leur idéal, moral et éthique.Enron; perception; rhétorique; dissonance cognitive; enseignements; déconstruction; éthique.

Problematizing profit and profitability:Discussions

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to report the outcome of an interdisciplinary discussion, in this AAAJ special issue, on the concepts of profit and profitability and various ways in which we could potentially problematise these concepts. It is our hope that a much greater attention or reconsideration of the problematisation of profit and related accounting numbers will be fostered in part by the exchanges we include here.Design/methodology/approach: This paper adopts an interdisciplinary discussion approach. It also brings into conversation ideas and views of several scholars on problematising profit and profitability in various contexts and explores potential implications of such problematisation.Findings: An interdisciplinary approach to problematising profit and profitability has a lot to offer. While profit and profitability are stigmas that corporations need to address, they tend to make invisible the collective endeavour of people who work hard (mostly in backstage) to achieve a desired profit level for a division and/or an organisation. Profit tends to preclude the social process of debating about the potential contradictions of ends and indeed the means of collective activity. An inherent message that we can decipher from the contributions to this discussion is the increasing need to worry about how managers are socialised to think that critical theory and interpretive research have no lessons for them. It is the failure of positivist researchers and practitioners to learn from the lessons that are offered by critical research in contrast to the suffocating influence of neo-liberal economic ideas. The impact of a fixation with markets and associated neo-liberal ideas that has led to a situation where organisations are strongly distrusted and in instances reviled in their attempts to make profits, at times illicitly.Originality/value: In setting out a future research agenda, our paper fosters theoretical and methodological pluralism focussing on problematising profit and profitability in various settings. The discussion perspectives offered in this paper provides not only a basis for further research in this essential area of discourse and regulation on the role and status of profit and profitability, but also provides emancipatory potential for practitioners (to be reflective of their practices and the undesirable consequences of such practices) whose overarching focus is on these socially constructed accounting numbers.Impact: Problematising opens-up the potential for interesting and significant theoretical insights. A much greater pragmatic and theoretical reconsideration of profit and profitability will be fostered by the exchanges we include here.</div

Corporate Governance for Sustainability

The current model of corporate governance needs reform. There is mounting evidence that the practices of shareholder primacy drive company directors and executives to adopt the same short time horizon as financial markets. Pressure to meet the demands of the financial markets drives stock buybacks, excessive dividends and a failure to invest in productive capabilities. The result is a ‘tragedy of the horizon’, with corporations and their shareholders failing to consider environmental, social or even their own, long-term, economic sustainability. With less than a decade left to address the threat of climate change, and with consensus emerging that businesses need to be held accountable for their contribution, it is time to act and reform corporate governance in the EU. The statement puts forward specific recommendations to clarify the obligations of company boards and directors and make corporate governance practice significantly more sustainable and focused on the long term

Déconstruction du discours de l'école de Rochester : Utilisation de Jacques Derrida par le courant critique en comptabilité

National audienc

La dépréciation des actifs

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Editorial

Editorial du numéro 6 volume 16 de la revue "Critical perspectives on accounting".ou

Acteurs sociaux et normalisation comptable

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Tony Tinker : un comptable "radical"

International audienc

The Shareholder Era and the Changing Nature of the Corporation. A Comment on "Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-Shaped America" by G. Davis (OUP, 2009)

The book under review presents a valuable, timely and gripping analysis by Gerald F. Davis. The author purports that finance has shaped the transition from industrial to post-industrial society in the United States [U.S.] over the past three decades. He claims that the U.S. society that orbited around large corporations is increasingly shaped today by financial markets. Due to a Copernican revolution, finance became the new American religion with many adherents willing to accept it on faith. The author quotes Shakespeare who wrote: “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” He explains that the world today seems like a stock market, and all people are merely day traders, buying and selling various species of “capital” and hoping for the big score (p. vii). Davis’s book should be required reading for anyone, whether academic, practitioner, or policy maker, who needs to think critically about finance which, rather than a mechanistic set of transactions, is presented in the book as a social phenomenon that is invading our lives.