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Article
Publication date: 8 October 2020

Chandana Alawattage

191

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Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, vol. 33 no. 8
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0951-3574

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Article
Publication date: 18 February 2021

Danture Wickramasinghe, Christine Cooper and Chandana Alawattage

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…

1497

Abstract

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.

Details

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, vol. 34 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0951-3574

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Article
Publication date: 30 October 2023

John De-Clerk Azure, Chandana Alawattage and Sarah George Lauwo

The World Bank-sponsored public financial management reforms attempt to instil fiscal discipline through techno-managerial packages. Taking Ghana's integrated financial management…

518

Abstract

Purpose

The World Bank-sponsored public financial management reforms attempt to instil fiscal discipline through techno-managerial packages. Taking Ghana's integrated financial management information system (IFMIS) as a case, this paper explores how and why local actors engaged in counter-conduct against these reforms.

Design/methodology/approach

Interviews, observations and documentary analyses on the operationalisation of IFMIS constitute this paper's empirical basis. Theoretically, the paper draws on Foucauldian notions of governmentality and counter-conduct.

Findings

Empirics demonstrate how and why politicians and bureaucrats enacted ways of escaping, evading and subverting IFMIS's disciplinary regime. Politicians found the new accounting regime too constraining to their electoral and patronage politics and, therefore, enacted counter-conduct around the notion of political exigencies, creating expansionary fiscal conditions which the World Bank tried to mitigate through IFMIS. Perceiving the new regime as subverting their bureaucratic identity and influence, bureaucrats counter-conducted reforms through questioning, critiquing and rhetorical venting. Notably, the patronage politics of appropriating wealth and power underpins both these political and bureaucratic counter-conducts.

Originality/value

This study contributes to the critical accounting understanding of global public financial management reform failures by offering new empirical and theoretical insights as to how and why politicians and bureaucrats who are supposed to own and implement them nullify the global governmentality intentions of fiscal disciplining through subdued forms of resistance.

Details

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, vol. 37 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0951-3574

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Article
Publication date: 27 August 2021

Chandana Alawattage and Danture Wickramasinghe

This paper draws on the concepts of biopolitics and neoliberal governmentality to provide a sociological analysis of the strategic turn in management accounting.

1161

Abstract

Purpose

This paper draws on the concepts of biopolitics and neoliberal governmentality to provide a sociological analysis of the strategic turn in management accounting.

Design/methodology/approach

This conceptual and review paper addresses four interrelated questions: How can the early history of management accounting be revisited from a biopolitical angle? How has strategising been linked to the neoliberal evolution of capitalism? How has this neoliberal connection transformed management accounting into its new form of strategising? What are the implications of this transformation for future research and pedagogical practices in management accounting?

Findings

Management accounting is strategised in four interrelated directions: by absorbing the jurisdictional and veridictional roles of the market into the calculative practices of management accounting; by transforming management accounting's centripetal hierarchical order of calculations to a centrifugal order the neoliberal governmentality demanded; by re-calculating the point of production as a site in which labour now takes the form of entrepreneurs of the self, performing not only material but also immaterial elements of managerial labour; and by rescoping management accounting to address issues the “fourth or the global age of security” brought, including the social and the environmental ones.

Research limitations/implications

The research expands the existing frames of reference for exploring contemporary calculative practices in neoliberal governmentality.

Social implications

Strategic turn in management accounting implicates in issues of security, governance and ethics and offers “new opportunities” for expanding management accounting's relevance beyond economic enterprises to various civil society and political constituencies.

Originality/value

This paper makes a theoretical contribution to management accounting's contemporary developments by demonstrating how it moves into biopolitical circulation.

Details

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, vol. 35 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0951-3574

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Article
Publication date: 19 December 2018

Akrum Helfaya, Mark Whittington and Chandana Alawattage

The purpose of this paper is to provide a multidimensional model for assessing the quality of corporate environmental reporting (CER) incorporating both preparer- and user-based…

3144

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to provide a multidimensional model for assessing the quality of corporate environmental reporting (CER) incorporating both preparer- and user-based views.

Design/methodology/approach

As opposed to frequently used researcher-chosen proxies, the authors used an online questionnaire asking preparers and users how they assess the quality of a company’s environmental report.

Findings

The analysis of the responses of 177 users and 86 preparers shows that quantity was not perceived as the most significant element in determining quality. Besides quantity, the respondents also perceived information types, measures used, themes disclosed, adopting reporting guidelines, inclusion of assurance statement and the use of visual tools as significant dimensions/features of reporting quality.

Research limitations/implications

The online questionnaire has some limitations, especially in terms of researcher being absent to clarify meanings and, hence, possibilities that respondents may misinterpret the questionnaire elements.

Practical implications

Considering that robust, reliable measurement of reporting quality is difficult, preparers, standard setters and policy makers need multidimensional quality models that incorporate both users’ perceptions of quality and preparers’ pragmatic understanding of the quality delivery process. These will make the preparers informed of whether their disclosure may be falling short of users’ expectations.

Originality/value

Amid, increasing complexity of CER, the research contributes to the growing body of literature on assessing the quality of CER by developing a less subjective, multidimensional, preparer–user-based quality model. This innovative quality model goes beyond the traditional quality models, subjective author-based quality measures. Focussing on the three dimensions of reporting quality – content, credibility and communication – it also offers a high-level resolution of meaning of CER quality.

Details

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, vol. 32 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0951-3574

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Article
Publication date: 25 September 2007

Chandana Alawattage, Trevor Hopper and Danture Wickramasinghe

This paper seeks to introduce, summarise, and reflect on the key themes and findings raised by the seven papers selected for this special issue devoted to management accounting in…

3429

Abstract

Purpose

This paper seeks to introduce, summarise, and reflect on the key themes and findings raised by the seven papers selected for this special issue devoted to management accounting in less developed countries (LDCs).

Design/methodology/approach

The conclusions are drawn from desk research generally and the articles contained in this collection.

Findings

This paper finds that accounting research in LDCs needs to address issues of poverty reduction, corruption, community involvement, history, culture, and politics, and examine a wider spectrum of organisations ranging from households to non‐governmental organisations.

Practical implications

Effective management accounting in LDCs may require broader, simpler, open and transparent, sometimes informal systems developed locally.

Originality/value

This paper presents a collection of mainly empirical papers on an important but neglected topic, namely how management accounting might aid economic development in poor countries.

Details

Journal of Accounting & Organizational Change, vol. 3 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1832-5912

Keywords

Available. Content available
Article
Publication date: 6 June 2008

387

Abstract

Details

Journal of Accounting & Organizational Change, vol. 4 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1832-5912

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Article
Publication date: 5 November 2020

Saiful Alam, Seuwandhi B. Ranasinghe and Danture Wickramasinghe

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…

228

Abstract

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.

Details

Journal of Accounting in Emerging Economies, vol. 11 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2042-1168

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Article
Publication date: 27 March 2009

Chandana Alawattage and Danture Wickramasinghe

This paper aims to report on subalterns' emancipatory accounting (SEA) embedded in transformation of governance and accountability structures (GAS) in Ceylon Tea.

2880

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to report on subalterns' emancipatory accounting (SEA) embedded in transformation of governance and accountability structures (GAS) in Ceylon Tea.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper draws on James Scott's political anthropology to examine how subalterns' resistance and emancipatory accounting triggers structural transformations.

Findings

An attempt is made to theorise subaltern resistance as a form of emancipatory accounting. Concerning the commentaries that accounting has been to suppress or hegemonise the subalterns and appreciating the analysis of indigenous resistance implicated in emancipatory potential, this paper examines how a distinct subaltern group in Ceylon Tea deployed their own weapons towards the changes in GAS.

Originality/value

The accounting literature neglects how subalterns reconstruct governance and accountability structures: this paper introduces a social accounting perspective on resistance, control and structural transformations. Also, it introduces to accounting researchers James Scott's political anthropology as an alternative framework.

Details

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, vol. 22 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0951-3574

Keywords

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Book part
Publication date: 1 January 2008

Chandana Alawattage and Danture Wickramasinghe

Purpose – This paper examines the changing regimes of governance and the roles of accounting therein in a less developed country (LDC) by using Sri Lanka tea plantations as a…

Abstract

Purpose – This paper examines the changing regimes of governance and the roles of accounting therein in a less developed country (LDC) by using Sri Lanka tea plantations as a case. It captures the changes in a chronological analysis, which identifies four regimes of governance: (a) pre-colonial, (b) colonial, (c) post-colonial and (d) neo-liberal. It shows how dialectics between political state, civil state and the economy affected changes in regimes of governance and accounting through evolving structures, processes and contents of governance.

Methodology – It draws on the works of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi to articulate a political economy framework. It provides contextual accounts from the Sri Lankan political history and case data from its tea plantations for the above chronological analysis.

Findings – The above four regimes of governance had produced four modes of accounting: (a) a system of rituals in the despotic kingship, (b) a system of monitoring and reporting to absentee Sterling capital in the despotic imperialism, (c) a system of ceremonial reporting to state capital in a politicised hegemony and (d) good governance attempts in a politicised hegemony conditioned by global capital. We argue that political processes and historical legacies rather than the assumed superiority of accounting measures gave shape to governance regimes. Governance did not operate in its ideal forms, but ‘good governance’ initiatives revitalised accounting roles across managerial agency to strengthening stewardship rather than penetrating it into the domain of labour controls. Managerial issues emerged from contradictions between political state, civil state and the economy (enterprise) constructed themselves a distinct political domain within which accounting had little role to play, despite the ambitious aims of good governance.

Originality – Most accounting and governance research has used economic theories and provided ahistorical analysis. This paper provides a historically informed chronological analysis using a political economy framework relevant to LDC contexts, and empirically demonstrates how actual governance structures and processes lay in broader socio-political structures, and how the success of good governance depends on the social and political behaviour of these structural properties.

Details

Corporate Governance in Less Developed and Emerging Economies
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-84855-252-4

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