Viewpoint on Pacific odyssey

Citation

Dixon, K. and Gaffikin, M. (2009), "Viewpoint on Pacific odyssey", Pacific Accounting Review, Vol. 21 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/par.2009.34221caa.001

Viewpoint on Pacific odyssey

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Pacific Accounting Review, Volume 21, Issue 3

This Viewpoint aims to introduce a special issue of Pacific Accounting Review that consists of research papers examining the application of finance, accounting, auditing, tax and associated technologies in Pacific contexts, including in their construction of Pacific populations and economies; and of viewpoint papers intending to inform and provoke constructive thought and further research.

We were commissioned to co-edit this themed issue of PAR on a “Pacific odyssey”, and sought papers on the application of finance, accounting, auditing, tax and associated technologies in Pacific contexts, including in their construction of Pacific populations and economies. We said in the call we made for papers that the populations and economies in question are as widely strewn as Alaska and Aotearoa (New Zealand), Guangdong and Guatemala, Indonesia and California, and Tasmania and Tierra del Fuego, not overlooking Nonouti. This Viewpoint piece deals with two matters. First, it reviews the work included in the issue. And second, it reflects on work that might be included in future issues of Pacific Accounting Review, either in another themed issue or in issues of a general nature.

The issue comprises five papers and two invited think pieces. The five papers have been ordered deliberately, although we realise that many people who read at least one of them will, in these days of electronic collections, do so as separate articles and not as a collection (and may never read what we are writing here to go alongside them!). Our dilemma in deciding on this ordering was whether to work from the periphery inwards, or the centre outwards. We chose the latter, and so the first paper is by Alistair Brown, who spent some time in the outer island (or rural) villages of Nacamaki and Nabuna located on Koro Island in eastern Fiji. Experiencing what many readers of this journal would regard as tough conditions, Alistair was able to take a “view from the centre” and report about how two types of reporting (labelled Western-Narrow and Traditional) offer relevant persons extensive opportunities to discharge responsibilities of stewardship, accountability and accounts of their activities in an agrarian setting, no matter whether the activities are subsistence or cash-based (Brown, 2009). His study shows that despite similarities of location, etc. the two village communities differ in their reporting for social, economic and political reasons, demonstrating as far as research design is concerned how important it is to consider carefully the focus of study, and where appropriate and feasible to concentrate on local events and circumstances, not to mention to use oral and vernacular sources, and use them ethically, within appropriate local protocols. Macdonald (1996), in discussing the foci of research about locations and identities in and around the Pacific, notes a trend towards such designs, which have advantages, provided their limitations are also recognised. Brown’s (2009), paper is important to his subjects and to people on the periphery for illuminating that, “by considering villagers’ own reporting through internal points of reference, an intrinsic notion of development may be gleaned, complementing as well as contrasting with insights provided by the outside benchmarks and values generated by the view from ‘the periphery’” (pp. 0-00).

The Solomon Islands are the focus of the next paper in order, which is by Abraham Hauriasi and Howard Davey. This focus takes us on from the local and sub-national, as exemplified by Brown (2009) to the national, the Solomon Islands being a constitutional monarchy whose official head of state is Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, better known as Queen Elizabeth II, which indicates how this country came about, a subject that Hauriasi and Davey (2009) refer to in clarifying just how much diversity exists among the half million or so people who inhabit the nearly 1,000 islands in question. It is this diversity and that between the many traditional Solomon Islands cultural values and the values underlying Western accounting systems that the authors analyse, naturally taking a sociological view of accounting and, in similar style to Brown using in-depth interviews and participant observation, except that Abraham Hauriasi had the advantage over Alistair Brown in being from one of the Solomon Islands’ many ethnic groups. Hauriasi and Davey found several areas of conflict between the accounting themes from the periphery and traditional local values, including ones relating to the alleged objectivity and neutrality of the accounting, time-based accounting controls and the accounting being based on notions of competition in order to improve efficiency and effectiveness of operations, etc. The paper sees these findings as a basis for consultation in an effort to attain consensus among the accounting and the cultural values, which as the paper indicates is how traditional leaders operate in the participative cultures that are ascendant in the country of study.

The third paper is like that of Brown (2009) in being located in the Fiji Islands but takes after Hauriasi and Davey (2009) in being at the national level. What is different about Umesh Sharma and Stewart Lawrence’s study is that although its focus is on two large national-level Fijian organisations, one dealing with housing and the other telecommunications, the issues it raises stem from the relationship between the Fiji Government and two multi-faceted International Financial Institutions from “the periphery”, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. The researchers again employ qualitative methods, Umesh in particular being well-placed to glean data from a selection of Fijian participants in their two case study organisations about fundamental, second order changes (Laughlin, 1991), effected through colonisation by people whose ideas about the superiority of commercial business practices conflicted with ideas formulated in the colonial era and in the decade or so after the Fiji Islands gained independence, with the aforementioned Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor as paramount chief. The subsequent changes to Fiji’s form of government turn out to be incidental to the pathways that the two organisations were taken on by their new colonial masters (i.e. officials of the two banks, accountants, business managers and boards of directors with commercial experience). In addition to analysing the implications of the colonisation process for the two organisations, Sharma and Lawrence (2009) indicate that many Fijians were certainly no better off because of the changes, and were probably worse off than if changes had been instituted that addressed issues of poverty alleviation and economic participation through greater housing provision, better settlement planning and greater (affordable) access to reliable telecommunications.

As is evident from the previous mention, although we called for papers about the Pacific, what were submitted were papers about what people on the periphery call the “Pacific Islands”. The fourth paper is also of that ilk, except that although its focus is on people from one of the island groups, Tonga, it examines how some Tongans are faring in a place where most of the population do not like being referred to as Pacific Islanders, namely New Zealand (or Aotearoa). In their paper, Semisi Prescott and Keith Hooper examine the mixed success experienced among Tongan businesses in the Auckland region and elsewhere, as their proprietors try to come to grips with a business environment predicated not on Pacific ideas but Atlantic ones, including competition over markets, customers, resources, finance, business expertise and the like, and compliance with governmental and non-governmental regulations governing such aspects as business proprietorship, business operations and tax. Semisi was particularly adept in being able to gather data in a series of open-ended interview type sessions called talanoa. Prescott and Hooper (2009) found that business proprietors adhere to their Tongan culture, not far removed from that of the village and based on a “commons” mentality of sharing and making distributions for social purposes, and in which social capital features. This adherence can be used to explain not only why some businesses are failing, as the environment in which they are functioning is an “anti-commons” environment, but also why some businesses prevail, albeit operating far more within the expatriate Tongan community than outside it.

The fifth paper resembles Brown (2009), and Sharma and Lawrence (2009) in being about the Fiji Islands and in being based on qualitative data. It also resembles Sharma and Lawrence (2009) for being pitched at the national level, drawing on interview data from officials of two Fiji Government bodies. The distinguishing feature is that Nacanieli Rika has taken a theory that is much in vogue on the periphery (i.e. institutional theory) and applied it to environmental auditing arrangements in Fiji in a way that is consistent with a perspective from the periphery. This approach leads Rika (2009) to conclude that this specialist area of auditing is motivated by various institutional forces deriving from United Nations’s bodies and affecting the behaviour of national Fijian bodies; and that there is evidence of de-coupling, in that, notwithstanding elaborate rituals to signal compliance with these external expectations, the actual auditing operations are under-resourced in terms of the quality and quantity of auditors, and written documents to audit are lacking.

We now reflect on work that might be included in future issues of Pacific Accounting Review, either in another themed issue or in issues of a general nature. As indicated previously, our call for papers about the Pacific drew forth papers about what people on the periphery call the “Pacific Islands”. More of these would be valuable and, of course, there are plenty more island nations (e.g. Kiribati, the Marshalls, Samoa), island (quasi) colonies (e.g. Hawaii, Nouvelle-Calédonie, Polynésie Française), and island groups and peoples (e.g. North Solomons, Kain Nikunau) to choose to focus on. Just as valuable at least would be studies with a geographical or other Pacific identity focus from around the Pacific Rim, and/or that recognised the movements of people, goods, services, ideas, etc. around and across the Pacific Ocean. With trade continuing to increase ever since statistics began being kept, and our knowledge of Pacific settlement now going back much, much further, 5,000 years and more, surely there are many more things to know and to help us understand how and why the many peoples now in the Pacific region, north as well as south (and east and west) got here as far as accounting and related practices are concerned. It might also help to know why certain peoples did not appear to develop such practices, and why others that did did not extend them around the region before peoples from the Atlantic brought theirs. As to the latter, it might be interesting to know more about how Atlantic (or Western accounting, as Brown (2009) refers to it) has figured as a sub-system of extracting from the land (e.g. guano, nickel) and sea (e.g. whales, tuna), of commodity planting and trading (e.g. copra, sugar, coffee), of carrying out or disposing of the unwanted (e.g. nuclear bomb testing, Irish rebels, chemical munitions), of converting many Pacific peoples to non-Pacific religions, of bringing lands and ocean areas within imperial control, of establishing thriving settlements, of bringing in tourists, and to operating neo-colonial institutions that, as Sharma and Lawrence (2009) exemplify, are clearly influential among sovereign governments. Part and parcel of the coming of accounting from the Atlantic to the Pacific has been the extension of accounting professionals and their membership bodies, be they the Antipodean or Far Eastern branch of a Europe-based body or ones formed in the Pacific by settler professionals and their descendants.

An interesting aspect of these is how the possibility of membership of such bodies has extended beyond Atlantic settlers and their descendants to not only settlers from other parts of the world but also Pacific peoples in their own lands. In her Viewpoint paper examining New Zealand possibilities, Patty McNicholas (2009), raises challenging questions about whether professional bodies should provide their members from among such Pacific peoples with the opportunity to develop approaches based on their own priorities and culture. She intimates that this may assist in building the capacity and capability of Pacific-oriented organisations and the members in question as service professionals, thereby making a valuable contribution to Pacific development.

The extensions to knowledge alluded to here would entail researchers engaging with perspectives not only taken from the broad range in the existing accounting literature but also adapting perspectives from other literatures and inducing new perspectives during ocean-work. Protocols, processes and effectiveness are among issues that arise for researchers as they attempt to integrate what Karen Nero refers to as “local” and “metropolitan” research, and these issues were our reason for inviting a viewpoint from a scholar from outside the accounting box (Nero, 2009). Not only does she outline how these issues are changing, in particular drawing to our attention gudelines established for research about Pacific persons resident in New Zealand by the Health Research Council of New Zealand (2005) and suggesting how they can be adapted to research on/with/for the multifarious Pacific communities on the Rim and on the many specks of still habitable land protruding from the Ocean. But also she illustrates how important that criteria and indicators of relevance in these guidelines are to research findings and implications. For example, she shows how different perspectives of what constitutes valuable economic activities give rise to different accounts, which send different signals about policy responses; and that taking flawed perspectives leads to errors of policy and undesirable consequences.

Acknowledgements

The Guest Editors would like to thank the following: All the hopeful authors who submitted papers and the authors whose work appears here; the dozen or so referees, who responded enthusiastically to their request for reviews of manuscripts but who could not be listed here without undermining the process of blind peer review; the two Viewpoint authors who responded to their invitations; Annette Wanty for her administrative planning and support; Amanda Ball and Markus Milne for their encouragement (and “stick waving”); and Emily Hewitt for undertaking some copy editing.

Corresponding author

Keith Dixon can be contacted at: keith.dixon@canterbury.ac.nz

Keith Dixon, Michael GaffikinGuest Editors