Changing control and accounting regimes in an african gold mine: emergence of new despotic control

Purpose – To examine whether the framework of management accounting transformations in Hopper et al. (2009) applies to accounting changes in the Ashanti Gold Corporation (AGC) in Ghana over 120 years from pre-colonialism to recent times. Design/methodology/approach – Mixed data sources are used, namely interviews, observations of practices, historical documentation, company reports, and research papers and theses. The results are categorized within the periods and contextual factors in the Hopper et al. framework. Findings –The Hopper et al. model was robust. Despotic controls with minimal management accounting but stewardship accounting to the head office in London prevailed under colonialism. Upon independence state capitalist policies descended into politicized state capitalism. Under nationalization the performance of mines deteriorated and accounting became decoupled from operations. However, AGC remained privately owned, it embraced profit centres and budgeting, and was relatively successful commercially. In the early 1980s fiscal crises forced Ghana’s government to turn to the World Bank and IMF for loans. Their conditions precipitated market capitalism embracing widespread privatisations. This marked a gradual transformation of AGC into a foreign multinational, organized along divisional lines that today exercises despotic control through supply chain management that renders labour precarious, and neglects corporate social accounting. Practical implications – The work challenges neo-classical economic prescriptions and analyses of accounting in developing countries by indicating its neglect of the interests of other stakeholders, especially labour and civil society. Originality/value – The paper tests and extends the Hopper et al. framework with respect to a large private multinational in the commodity sector over an extended period

Hierarchy of influences on transitional journalism – Corrupting relationships between political, economic and media elites

In this article, we use the hierarchy-of-influences model as a framework for examining the ways in which media owners, managers and journalists perceive the influence exerted on their work during 12-year democratic transition in Serbia. We aim to explain how factors perceived as influential at the highest system level gradually transfer and relate to the factors on the subsumed levels. Using the concepts such as corruption and the culture of corruption to interpret hierarchy between different levels of influence on transitional journalism, we argue that coupling extra-media actors at the system level can be considered corruption – understood as abuse of power for personal gain or benefit of the aligned group – which translates to all other levels of influence