Getting management accounting off the ground: post-colonial neoliberalism in healthcare budgets

Taking Sven Modell’s (2014, pp. 83–103) “societal relevance of management accounting” agenda forward, and based on a cost accounting initiative in a Sri Lankan hospital, this paper examines how management accounting is implicated in societal relevance. It reports on a postcolonial neoliberal state’s use of cost-saving experiments and the resultant emancipation of the individuals involved. It runs a bottom-up analysis, from micro events in the hospital to policymaking at the level of the Provincial Council. This analysis suggests that cost accounting acts as a mediating instrument: it begins to loosen the old Keynesian postcolonial bureaucratic budget confinements, creates a social space for individuals to consider cost-saving experiments, and addresses wider policy concerns about hospital resource management. The story is illuminated by Gilles Deleuze’s and Zigmund Bauman’s ideas on post-panoptic societies: old confinements are being problematized and new flexible, “liquid” spaces created, in which individuals are emancipated in terms of their ability to influence resource management within and beyond the organizational constituency

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

Microaccountability and biopolitics : Microfinance in a Sri Lankan village

Peer reviewedPostprin

Pushing the limits of accountability: big-data analytics containing and controlling COVID-19 in South Korea

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how big data analytics pushed the limits of individuals' accountability as South Korea tried to control and contain coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Design/methodology/approach: The authors draw upon Deleuzo-Guattarian framework elaborating how a surveillant assemblage was rhizomatically created and operated to monitor a segment of the population holding them accountable. Publicly available secondary data, such as press release from the government and media coverage, were used. Findings: A COVID-19 Smart Management System and a Self-Quarantine Safety Protection App constituted a surveillance assemblage operating in a “state-form”. This comprises the central government departments, local councils, policing systems, providers of telecommunication and financial services, and independent groups of people. This assemblage pushed the limits of accountability as individuals who tested positive or might bear possible future risks of the infection and transmission were held accountable for their locations and health conditions. Practical implications: Policymakers may consider constructing this type of state-form for containing and controlling pandemics, such as COVID-19, while dealing with the issue of undermined privacy. Social implications: The mass may consider to what extent individuals' personal information should be protected and how to hold the governments accountable for the legitimate use of such information. Originality/value: While accountability studies have largely focussed on formal organisations, the authors illustrated how a broader context of a state-form, harnessing big data analytics, pushes the limits of accountability

Unveiling a postcolonial neoliberalism: hybridised controls and emancipatory potentials for tea-plucking women in Sri Lanka

Purpose: Drawing on the ideas of postcolonial hybridity and postcolonial feminism, the purpose of this paper is to explore a contextual variant of neoliberalism, which the authors call postcolonial neoliberalism. It unpacks the peculiarities of hybridised practices of management controls therein to reflect on its construction and consequences. Design/methodology/approach: A seven-month ethnographic study was carried out in a Sri Lankan tea estate to understand both the nature and the practices of these controls. Findings: Postcolonial neoliberalism has been animated by a hybrid form of management controls encompassing colonial action controls, postcolonial cultural controls and neoliberal results controls. This created an emancipatory space for female workers to engage in some confrontations to attain some compromises. Originality/value: The message is that the hybridised controls are central to the construction of this form of postcolonial neoliberalism and to its reproduction. However, as these controls accompany a gendered form, female workers find a condition of possibility for some emancipatory potentials within the neoliberal development policy

Corporate governance, critical junctures and ethnic politics: Ownership and boards in Malaysia

Quotas and affirmative policies are often implicated in debates on corporate governance. This paper examines critical junctures and the role of willful actors in mobilizing their ethnic and political positions to affect governance reforms in Malaysia since independence. We trace the trajectory of Bumiputera affirmative policy in shaping equity ownership and composition of boards of directors using historical institutionalism as a lens. We find ethnic politics has been an endogenous force resulting in Malay share of equity ownership rising from negligible levels to over 20 percent and almost half of the boards of directors of listed companies comprising of Malays. Our analysis shows that governance is a representation, as well as a manifestation, of how ownership and board structures are institutionally reproduced rather than a mere response to global isomorphic pressures

Another development challenge: gaining emancipation from a functional hegemony in accounting and management control research

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to reflectively narrate the methodological journey of the authors in penetrating the positivitic hegemony of accounting and management control research in their native countries, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Design/methodology/approach: This paper offers an auto-ethnography to demonstrate the lack of diversity in accounting, accountability and management control research. Findings: Global developments in accounting and accountability reforms entail not only about how developing countries being governed through these reforms but also about how accounting research itself can be pursued alternatively. In the past several decades, a camp of British accounting researchers initiated a programme of research in this direction. Inspired by post-positivistic traditions, they aimed to explore how these reforms are predicated upon cultural-political milieus in developing countries. However, the academia in most accounting and management researchers from local universities in these countries are blindly bombarded with positivistic traditions. Originality/value: The authors unpack how this hegemony formed and how attempts were made towards some emancipatory potentials

From critical accounting to an account of critique: The case of cultural emancipators

Drawing on the Boltanski’s sociology of critique, this paper examines how critique contributes to debates in accounting research. Our analysis reveals two responses to critique: (1) reality critiques, uncovering how a research programme is diffused and accepted; and (2) truth critiques questioning object justness and legitimacy. Reality critiques occur before truth critiques but after isolated attempts at emancipation from the dominant perspective. Once the reality critique is articulated, emancipation commences. Truth critiques are not changing events but theorize the rise of isolated attempts at doing differently. In fostering and accelerating emancipation, a critique does not need to be explicitly referenced

Towards being critical in accounting research within LDCs

In developed countries, since the 1990s, accounting researchers have begun exploring issues in developing countries. The trajectory has now been established as a critical and interpretive project. However, in developing countries, local researchers face a perennial problem of getting this approach institutionalised as quantitative approaches constitute ‘the methodology’ which dominate their research activities. This paper reveals this issue of lack of methodological diversity in order to promote critical and interpretive approaches to accounting research. This would inspire those local researchers to conduct more qualitative and ethnographic studies on local issues in accounting and their complexities in relation to global ramifications

Power of accounting and power over accounting

No abstract available