Darlene Himick, Gustav Johed and Christoph Pelger
The purpose of this Editorial is to reflect on the potentials and challenges of qualitative research in financial accounting and introduce the four papers included in this Special…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this Editorial is to reflect on the potentials and challenges of qualitative research in financial accounting and introduce the four papers included in this Special Issue.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors draw on and discuss extant literature and the papers included in the Special Issue to develop our assessment of the current state of the field of qualitative financial accounting research and possible future paths ahead.
Findings
The authors observe that qualitative research on financial accounting is still an emerging field with substantial further research potential.
Research limitations/implications
The authors outline future potentials for qualitative accounting research.
Originality/value
This Editorial contributes to studies on the state of academic research in (financial) accounting.
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Profit is often moralized by activists, but scant research has carefully examined what profit is for these activists or how they use it to create a more just world. The purpose of…
Abstract
Purpose
Profit is often moralized by activists, but scant research has carefully examined what profit is for these activists or how they use it to create a more just world. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how social movements use counter accounts of profit as tools of resistance.
Design/methodology/approach
A multiple case study design, informed by framing theory, is used to trace the framing of profit from activists’ counter accounts to actions they precipitated. Specifically, the study examines counter accounts of profit from the UK abolition movement, Médecines Sans Frontières access to essential medicines campaign and Brigitte Bardot Foundation’s opposition to the Canadian seal hunt, and how their framings of profit influenced change.
Findings
Activists reframe profit to create visibilities and bridges to the suffering of distant others. Reframing the calculation and boundary of profit is a strategy to elicit moral outrage, hope and ultimately a more just world. Through these reframings, activists in three different social movements were able to change the possibilities of who and what can be profitable, and how.
Social implications
The inherently incomplete nature of accounting frames give rise to accounting’s vulnerability to non-accountants to assert their views of a moral profit. Accounting therefore is both a means of control at a distance but also “emancipation at a distance.”
Originality/value
Scholars have asserted that accounting can be used for resistance, few studies have examined how. By examining how activists assert what profit is – and should be – the paper documents and theorizes profit as contested and highlights accounting’s emancipatory potential.
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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the accounting notion of “human depreciation” helped the defined benefit pension plan emerge as the dominant means of dealing with…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the accounting notion of “human depreciation” helped the defined benefit pension plan emerge as the dominant means of dealing with an aging workforce in the first half of twentieth century USA.
Design/methodology/approach
The study examines historical material to identify the intersection of several different practices and knowledges that came together in the early decades of the 1900s to permit human depreciation in 1949 to be used to formally link aging employees to their employers.
Findings
In the early part of the twentieth century, humans and machines were constructed as parts of a single productive system, human traits were studied in order to increase their machine-like capacities, in the hope of creating a more efficient industrial economy. At the same time, fatigue associated with this industrial nation was constructing the older worker as subject to decline, hence opening the door to a linkage to physical and economic depreciation.
Social implications
Reveals that the language of accounting can be utilized by non-accountants and outside organizational boundaries to effect public policy and play a constitutive role. Thus, who is able to use accounting conventions is important in understanding how accounting shapes social settings.
Originality/value
“Human depreciation”, used by the Steel Industry Board in 1949 to assign responsibility to employers for the depreciation of their human assets, has been left unexamined despite being cited as one of the greatest contributors to the growth of industrial pensions in the USA. The study examines accounting as an interface among and between the organizational and “non-accounting” spheres.
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The purpose of this paper is to shed light on accounting's role in bringing about a pension reform project in Chile under the authoritarian regime of Augusto Pinochet. The paper…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to shed light on accounting's role in bringing about a pension reform project in Chile under the authoritarian regime of Augusto Pinochet. The paper aims to reveal the specific role that the pension reform played in the regime's broader ideological goals, thus highlighting the need to reflect upon its origins when considering the reform as a template for pension change in other parts of the world.
Design/methodology/approach
The study brings together archival research showing accounting in its relation to broader structural and institutional structures, to present an alternative history of the development and implementation of the pension reform.
Findings
The pension reform was not merely a rationally chosen economic reform project. It was part of a vast modernization and institutionalization programme to change Chilean society and the mindset of its citizens. Accounting played a significant role in both the administration and functioning of the project, and in enabling the broader modernizations to take hold.
Practical implications
The Chilean pension model is held up as a fully‐exportable template to other jurisdictions. The study reveals how reflection is required to determine its suitability and potential for success in other situations, given the very specific role it was intended to play in its original setting.
Originality/value
This paper represents an under‐researched geographic setting, and also questions this much‐lauded pension model's appropriateness for other settings.
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The paper aims to describe the construction of this AAAJ special issue as an exercise in creating and consolidating social space for innovative accounting research.
Abstract
Purpose
The paper aims to describe the construction of this AAAJ special issue as an exercise in creating and consolidating social space for innovative accounting research.
Design/methodology/approach
A review of prior literature and the events leading to this AAAJ issue are used to provide a context for the articles appearing in the issue.
Findings
The paper suggests that accounting research is implicated in subalternity in complex ways, both through its construction of the subject of research and in its attempts to reproduce accounting researchers habituated to Western academic norms and practices.
Research limitations/implications
The paper sets out some conditions for innovative accounting research on less developed countries and indigenous peoples.
Originality/value
This journal issue is an attempt to expand research space by bringing together authors from different areas of accounting research, as well as a consolidation of vibrant existing streams of research. The paper introduces the special issue.