The calculative reproduction of social structures : The field of gem mining in Sri Lanka

Peer reviewedPostprin

Accounting decoupled : A case study of accounting regime change in a Malaysian company

Peer reviewedPreprin

Postcoloniality in corporate social and environmental accountability

Using a discourse analysis of interviews with corporate managers and their published corporate sustainability information, this paper argues that corporate social and environmental accountability (CSEA) in a postcolonial context (Sri Lanka) is a textual space wherein local managers create a hybrid cultural identity through mimicking. It examines how local managers embrace and appropriate global discourses to reimagine their local managerial circumstances. They deploy a set of textual strategies – imitation, redefinition, innovation, and codification – to translate CSEA into a hybrid ‘textual(real)ity’ (i.e., interspace and duality between accounting text - textuality - and material practices - reality) whereby the global context is textualized as local and the local is contextualised as global. Nationalism, cultural ethics, and poverty enter this textual(real)ity as discursive elements that reactivate locality. A cultural notion of philanthropic giving, dana, gives local cultural authenticity to this textual(real)ity while the national politico-economic identity of poverty textualizes CSEA as a national development strategy. The paper also critiques whether these postcolonial dynamics can promote agonistic accountabilities. It contributes to the accounting literature on postcolonialism, imperialism, and globalization discourses

Neoliberalism and management accounting:Reconfiguring governmentality and extending territories

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to introduce the themes and aims of this Accounting, Auditing & Accountability (AAAJ) special issue and comments on the papers included in the issue. The paper provides a thematic outline along which the future researchers can undertake more empirical research examining how neoliberalism shapes, and shaped by, management accounting. Design/methodology/approach: This entails a brief review of the previous critical accounting works that refer to liberalism and neoliberalism to identify and highlight the specific themes and trajectories of neoliberal implications of management accounting has been and can be explored. This is followed by a brief commentary on the papers the authors have included in this special issue; these commentaries explain how these papers capture various dimensions of enabling and enacting neoliberal governmentality. Findings: The authors found that management accounting is now entering new territories beyond its conventional disciplinary enclosures of confinement, reconfiguring its functionalities to enable and enact a circulatory mode of neoliberal governmentality. These new functionalities then produce and reproduce entrepreneurial selves in myriad forms of social connections, networks and platforms within and beyond formal organizational settings, amid plethora of conducts, counter-conducts and resistances and new forms of identities and subjectivities. Research limitations/implications: This review can be read in relation to the papers included in the special issue as the whole issue will inspire more ideas, frameworks and methodologies for further studies. Originality/value: There is little research reviewing and commenting how management accounting now being enacted and enabled with new functionalities operating new territories and reconfiguring forms of governmentality. This paper inspires a new agenda on this project

Exploring the quality of corporate environmental reporting : Surveying Preparers’ and Users’ Perceptions

The authors would like to thank the editor (Professor Lee Parker) and the anonymous reviewers of the journal for their constructive comments and valuable suggestions on earlier versions of the paper. The first author also acknowledges the financial support of Damanhour University, Egypt.Peer reviewedPostprin

Microaccountability and biopolitics : Microfinance in a Sri Lankan village

Peer reviewedPostprin

Postcoloniality in corporate social and environmental accountability

Peer reviewedPostprin

Theorising the ‘African problem’ with governmentality and counter conduct

The ‘African Question’ - why Africa remains trapped in poverty despite its vast natural resources - has been a subject of enduring scholarship of critical accounting. Therein, dynamics of neopatrimonialism, crony capitalism, patronage politics and articulation of two publics have been used as theoretical bases to explore the multitude of accounting and accountability issues through which the African problem has manifested. The dominating role of the World Bank and alike has also been discussed in exploring the ways in which this problem has been attempted through neoliberal economic policies that favour market-oriented solutions and various technomanagerial packages of accounting and good governance. We approach this question from theoretical angles of governmentality and counter-conduct. We argue that the accounting implications of the African problem can be better theorised by contextualising, historicising, and particularising them within the theoretical parameters of governmentality and counter conduct

Behind the World Bank’s ringing declarations of “social accountability”: Ghana’s public financial management reform

Accountability has become integral to many African development reforms and permeated the World Bank’s (WB) policy discourses, with “social accountability” as a major plank in its development orthodoxy. Since the 2004 Word Development Report, the Bank’s leadership has been declaring its commitment to social accountability. This paper excavates what lies behind ringing declarations of commitment to social accountability in the context of Ghana’s Public Financial Management Reform Programme. Empirically, it draws on four months’ fieldwork into the accountability practices this programme brought about and an extensive analysis of WB discourses on public sector reforms and social accountability. Theoretically, the paper draws on Foucault’s governmentality and the notion of agonistic democracy central to the recent democratic accountability debate in critical accounting circles. The paper argues that WB’s social accountability crusade hinges on the neoliberal concerns of efficiency and fiscal discipline rather than creating a democratic social order, which then questions the very notion of social accountability that WB is propagating, especially its discursive and ideological “short-circuiting” of democratic processes. The paper finds that the dominant and dominating accountability forms that facilitate WB’s financial hegemony are privileged over potentially emancipatory ones. The findings highlight that as the local governments become responsible to international development agencies through the “social accountabilities” that WB is promoting they become less socially and democratically accountable to their own populace – the very place where social accountability should truly rest