Denis Gendron and Gaétan Breton
This paper aims to explore the use of narrative instruments, mainly storytelling, to sell the privatization of State‐owned enterprises (SOE) to the general public by their CEO.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explore the use of narrative instruments, mainly storytelling, to sell the privatization of State‐owned enterprises (SOE) to the general public by their CEO.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper uses a semiotic analysis approach. It uses specific semiotic analysis instruments: Greimas' actantial model and Propp‐Bremond function model. These main instruments can be backed on time by other devices. The analysis is centered on the president's letters in the pre‐privatization period of Canadian SOEs.
Findings
The paper finds evidence of the use, by the CEO, of discourse in general and specifically accounting discourse to advocate for the privatization. The paper also finds that the general structure of storytelling in the presidents' letters studied implies the use of narrative instruments to surreptitiously convey specific messages in accordance with the surrounding ideology.
Research limitations/implications
This paper studies only SOE that had been privatized. However, top managers of every SOE are facing the same legitimating problematic. The context is strictly Canadian. Therefore, further research may examine Canadian non‐privatized SOEs or foreign SOE, privatized or not.
Practical implications
Privatization is a political decision, i.e. being decided ultimately by citizens. Therefore, CEOs of SOEs do not have to intervene in the debate using their privileged standpoint. Moreover, they will not do it except if backed by politicians promoting the same interests, although tacitly. Citizens must be aware of the manoeuvres done to orientate them toward the “good” decision.
Originality/value
The paper shows that the apparent objectivity of the financial results can be used to promote political agendas. It says that accounting is not a pure reflection of reality but a language used to promote specific interests. It also shows that accounting is telling stories that are used in other parts of the annual report, such as the president's letter.
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Dogui Kouakou, Olivier Boiral and Yves Gendron
This paper aims to examine, through a qualitative study, how auditor independence is socially constructed within the network of individuals involved in the realization of ISO…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to examine, through a qualitative study, how auditor independence is socially constructed within the network of individuals involved in the realization of ISO 14001 audit engagements – ISO auditors, consultants, and managers of certified companies. The paper analysis focuses on the sense-making strategies used by actors within the network to develop and sustain trust (or doubt) in professional independence.
Design/methodology/approach
This study is predicated on a theoretical perspective centered on sense-making processes and the construction of inter-subjective meanings around claims to expertise. Interviews were conducted with 36 Canadian practitioners – including ISO auditors, managers of certification bodies, accreditation inspectors, consultants, and corporate environmental managers – to better understand how confidence into auditor independence is constituted in the flow of daily life within the small group of people involved in the surroundings of ISO 14001 audit engagements.
Findings
Practitioners use a range of sense-making strategies to construct and maintain the belief that IS0 14001 audits meet the professional requirements of auditor independence. As such, the constitution of confidence involves stereotyping, distancing, storytelling and procedural mechanisms that are collectively mobilized in the production of a culture of comfort surrounding the concept of auditor independence.
Originality/value
Through interviews with a range of actors involved in the achievement of ISO 14001 audits, the study provides insight into the production of meaning related to one of the chief claims surrounding auditing expertise, that of professional independence. This paper also points to a lack of self-criticism in the ISO auditing community since practitioners seem disinclined to adopt a reflective attitude of professional skepticism towards the claim of auditor independence.
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Mary Canning and Brendan O'Dwyer
This paper aims to advance understanding of the disciplinary decision‐making process underpinning the professional ethics machinery employed by professional accounting…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to advance understanding of the disciplinary decision‐making process underpinning the professional ethics machinery employed by professional accounting organisations, using elements of francophone organisational analysis to examine the influence of the key formal organisational components established by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland (ICAI) to administer its disciplinary decision‐making process up to December 1999.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper uses evidence gathered from a series of in‐depth interviews with members of the ICAI disciplinary and investigation committees.
Findings
Illuminates the internal tensions and conflicts permeating the disciplinary decision‐making process of the ICAI and the influence key organisational components have on resolving these conflicts through their encouragement of decision making driven by a preferred reasoning or logic of action.
Research limitations/implications
The evidence presented questions the public interest proclamations of the ICAI with respect to its disciplinary procedures pre‐December 1999. It further exposes the tensions between profession protection and society protection motives in the disciplinary decision making of accounting bodies.
Originality/value
This paper represents a first attempt at getting inside the disciplinary decision‐making process of a professional accounting body to examine the process using the voices of process participants.
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This case study draws on interviews conducted with officials from the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM), City of Woonsocket and Town of North Smithfield…
Abstract
Research methodology
This case study draws on interviews conducted with officials from the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM), City of Woonsocket and Town of North Smithfield. Additionally, it pulls from relevant legal documents, recordings and minutes from meetings of the Woonsocket City Council and North Smithfield Town Council, City Council resolutions, state legislation and local press coverage.
Case overview/synopsis
From 2012–2017, the communities of Woonsocket and North Smithfield engaged in a protracted dispute concerning wastewater disposal. For 30 years, the two jurisdictions had maintained a signed service agreement. Following its expiration; however, Woonsocket imposed a new host fee on North Smithfield. Woonsocket needed to upgrade the facility to comply with mandates from the RI DEM. Over the next five years, leaders from both jurisdictions vociferously fought over the new fee. At the same time, leaders within communities experienced their own divisions. This case study highlights the challenges that decision-makers faced in both communities.
Complexity academic level
This case is appropriate for graduate and executive level courses in environmental policy, communication and leadership.
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Marie-Soleil Tremblay, Yves Gendron and Bertrand Malsch
Drawing on Bourdieu’s (2001) concept of symbolic violence in his work on Masculine Domination, the purpose of this paper is to examine how perceptions of legitimacy surrounding…
Abstract
Purpose
Drawing on Bourdieu’s (2001) concept of symbolic violence in his work on Masculine Domination, the purpose of this paper is to examine how perceptions of legitimacy surrounding the presence of female directors are constructed in the boardroom, and the role of symbolic violence in the process.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors carried out the investigation through a series of 32 interviews, mostly with board members in government-owned, commercially focussed companies in Québec. The study was conducted in the aftermath of the adoption of a legislative measure aiming to institute parity in the boardroom of government-owned companies.
Findings
The analysis suggests that perceptions of legitimacy are predicated on two main discourses, as conveyed through board members when interpreting the presence of female directors. In the first discursive representation, feminine gender is naturalized and mobilized by participants to support (quite oftentimes in a rather apparent positive way) the distinctive contributions that femininity can make, or cannot make, to the functioning of boards. In the second discourse (degenderizing), the question of gender disappears from the sense-making process. Women’s presence is then justified and normalized, not because of their feminine qualities, but rather and uniquely for their competencies.
Research limitations/implications
While, from a first level of analysis, the main discourses the authors unveiled may be considered as potentially enhancing women’s role and legitimacy within boards, from a deeper perspective such discourses may also be viewed as channels for symbolic violence to operate discreetly, promoting certain forms of misrecognition that continue to marginalize certain individuals or groups of people. For example, the degenderizing discourse misrecognizes that a focus on individual competency contests overlooks the social conditions under which the contesters developed their competencies.
Practical implications
Provides awareness and a basis for directors to understand and how symbolic power covertly operates in apparently rationalized structures of corporate governance and challenge assumptions.
Social implications
Implications in terms of policy making to promote board diversity are discussed. This is particularly relevant since many countries around the world are considering affirmative-action-type regulation to accelerate an otherwise dawdling trend in the nomination of women on boards.
Originality/value
The research is the first to empirically address the notion of gendering in the boardroom, focussing on the construction of meanings surrounding the “legitimate” female director. The study is also one of few giving access to a field where a critical mass is attained, allowing the authors to investigate perceptions regarding the extent to which the order of things is altered in the boardroom once formal parity is established. Finally, the study sensitizes the authors further to the pertinence of investigating how symbolic power covertly operates in today’s society, including within apparently rationalized structures of corporate governance.
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Paul Andon, Clinton Free, Vaughan Radcliffe and Mitchell Stein
The authors examine how political players attempt to rationalise arguments for and against the expansion of auditing into governmental affairs, and how state audit authorities…
Abstract
Purpose
The authors examine how political players attempt to rationalise arguments for and against the expansion of auditing into governmental affairs, and how state audit authorities respond to politically motivated boundary work. This study is motivated by growing evidence of political involvement in attempts to both expand and undermine state audit oversight of government affairs.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors present an interpreted history (covering relevant events from 1995 to 2016) of political rationales and associated boundary work that led to the expansion of the Office of the Auditor General of Ontario's (OAGO) mandate to audit government advertising campaigns for partisanship as well as attempts to modify this new audit remit over time.
Findings
The authors reveal substantive, formal and practical ways in which political players sought to rationalise/counter-rationalise expanding the OAGO's authority to the unfamiliar territory of advertising probity. The authors show how such justification claims ebb and flow in accordance with changeable political interests, and how state auditors react to the fraught nature of politically motivated boundary work.
Originality/value
The authors conceptualise important forms of rationalising rhetoric (which cannot be reduced to expressions of neoliberal government) that can be mobilised to deem state auditor authority legitimate in overseeing otherwise novel, unfamiliar and controversial government affairs. The authors also reveal a hitherto unrecognised resolve in state auditor responses to political intervention and shed further light on generalised forms of rationale that can underpin boundary work at the margins of accounting.
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Henri Guénin-Paracini, Yves Gendron and Jérémy Morales
– This paper aims to better understand why neoliberal governance is so resilient to the crises that frequently affect all or part of the economy.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to better understand why neoliberal governance is so resilient to the crises that frequently affect all or part of the economy.
Design/methodology/approach
The argument of this paper relies on a macroanalysis of discourses surrounding the Global Financial Crisis.
Findings
Drawing on Girard and Foucault’s work, this paper argues that the resilience of neoliberalism partly ensues from the proclivity of this mode of governing to foster, for reasons that this paper seeks to highlight, spontaneous and widespread processes of scapegoating in times of turmoil. As a consequence of these processes, crises often are collectively construed as resulting from frauds: the blame is focused on specific actors whose lack of morality is denounced, and this individualizing line of interpretation protects the regime from systemic questioning.
Practical, social and political implications
Particular actors, rather than the system itself, are made accountable when things go wrong. Consequences are paramount. Today’s political economy is characterized with a proclivity toward social reproduction. While substantive change is possible in theory, considerable challenges are involved in practice in overcoming the dominance of neoliberalism in society.
Originality/value
Although Girard’s work has exerted significant influence over a number of disciplines in the social sciences, his ideas have not yet been widely used in governance and accountability-related research. Anthropological theorizations – such as those proposed by Girard – are valuable in providing us with a sense of how power develops in the economy.
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Cynthia Courtois, Maude Plante and Pier-Luc Lajoie
This study aims to better understand how academics-in-the-making construe doctoral performance and the impacts of this construal on their positioning in relation to doctoral…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to better understand how academics-in-the-making construe doctoral performance and the impacts of this construal on their positioning in relation to doctoral performance expectations.
Design/methodology/approach
This study is based on 25 semi-structured interviews with PhD students from Canadian, Dutch, Scottish and Australian business schools.
Findings
Based on Decoteau’s (2016) concept of reflexive habitus, this study highlights how doctoral students’ construal is influenced by their previous experiences and by expectations from other adjacent fields in which they simultaneously gravitate. This leads them to adopt a position oscillating between resistance and compliance in relation to their understanding of doctoral performance expectations promoted in the academic field.
Research limitations/implications
The concept of reflexivity, as understood by Decoteau (2016), is found to be pivotal when an individual integrates into a new field.
Practical implications
This study encourages business schools to review expectations regarding doctoral performance. These expectations should be clear, but they should also leave room for PhD students to preserve their academic aspirations.
Originality/value
It is beneficial to empirically clarify the influence of performance expectations in academia on the reflexivity of PhD students, as the majority of studies exploring this topic mainly leverage auto-ethnographic data.
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This paper examines the qualities of situations wherein hybrid professionals in knowledge-intensive public organizations (KIPOs) vary in their displays of conflicting…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper examines the qualities of situations wherein hybrid professionals in knowledge-intensive public organizations (KIPOs) vary in their displays of conflicting institutional logics. Specifically, it examines the situations when individual researchers vary in their displays of a traditionalist academic- and an academic performer logic.
Design/methodology/approach
Analysis is grounded in an institutional logics perspective and founded on qualitative interviews with university researchers recurrently exposed to performance measurement and management.
Findings
The findings show that individual researchers display a traditionalist academic- and an academic performer logic in situations of lower or higher “perceived control exposure” (i.e. perceptions of (not) being exposed to “what the performance measurement system wants to/can ‘see’”). In more detail, that a traditionalist academic logic is displayed more in situations of lower “perceived control exposure” whereas an academic performer logic is displayed comparatively more in situations of higher “perceived control exposure”.
Originality/value
These findings add insight into when there is room for resistance to pressures to perform in accordance with increasing performance measurement and when researchers more so tend to conform. While previous research has mostly studied such matters by emphasizing variation between researchers, this study points out the importance of situations of lower or higher “perceived control exposure”. Such insight is arguably also more broadly valuable since it adds to our understanding about hybridity of professionals in KIPOs and how to design and use performance measurement systems in relation to them.