Financial and nonfinancial disclosures are still anchored to conventional notions of transparency, whereby corporations “push” information out to various stakeholders. Such…
Abstract
Purpose
Financial and nonfinancial disclosures are still anchored to conventional notions of transparency, whereby corporations “push” information out to various stakeholders. Such information is now “pulled” from various sources and addresses aspects of corporate behavior that go well beyond those envisioned by the disclosure framework. This shift makes notions of values, measurement and accountability more fragmented, complex and difficult. The paper aims to bring the accounting scholarly debate back to what and how transparency can be achieved especially in relation to issues of social inequality and sustainability.
Design/methodology/approach
After an analysis of the limitations of current approaches to disclosure, the paper proposes a shift toward normative policies that profit of years of critique of positivism.
Findings
Drawing on the notion of value-added, the paper ends with a new income statement design, labeled as Value-Added Statement for Nature, which recognizes Nature as a further stakeholder and forces human stakeholders to give voice, or at least acknowledge the lack of voice, for non-human actors.
Originality/value
The author proposes a shift in the perspective, practice and institutional arrangements in which disclosure occurs. Measurement and transparency need to happen in communication exercises, which do not presuppose what needs to be made transparent once and for good but define procedures on how to make fragmented, complex, multiple and volatile notions of value transparent. Income statements and accounting more in general is to be reconceived as a platform where stakeholders will have to continuously negotiate what counts as the common good in the interest of all, including Nature.
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Lana Sabelfeld, John Dumay, Sten Jönsson, Hervé Corvellec, Bino Catasús, Rolf Solli, Ulla Eriksson-Zetterquist, Elena Raviola, Paolo Quattrone and James Guthrie
This paper presents a reflection in memory and tribute to the work and life of Professor Barbara Czarniawska (1948–2024).
Abstract
Purpose
This paper presents a reflection in memory and tribute to the work and life of Professor Barbara Czarniawska (1948–2024).
Design/methodology/approach
We invited those colleagues whom we knew to be close to Barbara to submit reflections about her contributions to academia alongside their memories of her as a person. We present these reflections in the order we received them, and they have only been edited for minor grammatical and punctuation issues to preserve the voice of the contributing authors.
Findings
The reflections in this paper represent different translations of Barbara’s academic and theoretical contributions. However, she also contributed to people. While we can count the number of papers, books and book chapters she published, we must also count the number of co-authors, Ph.D. supervisions, visiting professorships and conference plenaries she touched. This (ac)counting tells the story of Barbara reaching out to work and interact with people, especially students and early career researchers. She touched their lives, and the publications are an artefact of a human being, not an academic stuck in an ivory tower.
Originality/value
A paper in Barbara Czarniawska’s honour where some of her closest colleagues can leave translations of her work through a narrative reflection, seems to be a fitting tribute.
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Jose Bento da Silva and Paolo Quattrone
This paper discusses how mystery was imprinted into the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises, supporting their diffusion across space and time. It shows that the book of the Spiritual…
Abstract
This paper discusses how mystery was imprinted into the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises, supporting their diffusion across space and time. It shows that the book of the Spiritual Exercises is a practice in itself and fosters a practice or set of practices. The book is more than an object: it is an action, unleashed not by the specification of what actions it dictates but by the mystery the “book-as-practice” carries. The paper contributes to the literature on practice-driven institutionalism, namely by showing how mystery furthers our understanding of the mutual constitution of practices and institutions. The Spiritual Exercises have been practiced for more than four centuries, even though their meaning is not stable and they are never fully understood. Therefore, our paper asks: how do the Jesuits understand what they have to do if the book does not prescribe everything? The authors argue that it is indeed this mystery that distinguishes religious practices, explaining their endurance across time and space and, henceforth, their institutionalization. The authors show that the Spiritual Exercises are to be practiced and it is this practicing that allows them to diffuse and institutionalize a new understanding of how the individual relates to God. “God’s will” is searched through the practicing, without ever being determined by the practice. It is by practicing the book that the mystery of “God’s will” reveals itself. Moreover, “God’s will” is never known or knowable. Instead, it is embodied and felt while practicing the book of the Exercises. Emotions thus reconcile, through mystery, the book and the practicing of it. Our paper contributes to practice-driven institutionalism by showing how mystery can drive institutionalization processes.
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Patrizio Monfardini, Paolo Quattrone and Pasquale Ruggiero
This paper narrates the efforts made in Italy after the end of the Second World War to develop an economic and social model in between corporate capitalism and planned economy, on…
Abstract
This paper narrates the efforts made in Italy after the end of the Second World War to develop an economic and social model in between corporate capitalism and planned economy, on the one hand, and shareholder versus stakeholder capitalism on the other. The result was the institutional infrastructure that supported the Istituto per la Ricostruzione industriale (IRI), a state-owned public holding in charge of managing the funds of the so-called Marshall Plan. The history of IRI illustrates the importance of a pragmatic approach to dealing with institutional constraints and opportunities when faced with the need to reconstruct destroyed economies in a context of very fragmented societies such as those of post-war Italy. The result was the resistance to an acritical adoption of the corporate American model and the definition of a more balanced form of capitalism. In an era of new recovery plans, there is a lot we can learn from IRI’s history.
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In this paper, I compare Theodore Schatzki’s practice theory, the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger upon whom Schatzki drew in its formation, and my own theory of…
Abstract
In this paper, I compare Theodore Schatzki’s practice theory, the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger upon whom Schatzki drew in its formation, and my own theory of institutional logics which I have sought to develop as a religious sociology of institution. I examine how Schatzki and I both differently locate our thinking at the level of practice. In this essay I also explore the possibility of appropriating Heidegger’s religious ontology of worldhood, which Schatzki rejects, in that project. My institutional logical position is an atheological religious one, poly-onto-teleological. Institutional logics are grounded in ultimate goods which are praiseworthy “objects” of striving and practice, signifieds to which elements of an institutional logic have a non-arbitrary relation, sources of and references for practical norms about how one should have, make, do or be that good, and a basis of knowing the world of practice as ordered around such goods. Institutional logics are constellations co-constituted by substances, not fields animated by values, interests or powers.
Because we are speaking against “values,” people are horrified at a philosophy that ostensibly dares to despise humanity’s best qualities. For what is more “logical” than that a thinking that denies values must necessarily pronounce everything valueless? Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” (2008a, p. 249).
Jonathan Tweedie and Matteo Ronzani
To advance understanding of transparency by problematising the motivations and strategies of a so far underexplored group: its users.
Abstract
Purpose
To advance understanding of transparency by problematising the motivations and strategies of a so far underexplored group: its users.
Design/methodology/approach
We explore the relationship between blindness, visibility, and transparency by drawing on our analysis of Max Frisch’s experimental novel Gantenbein (1964), in which the protagonist lives a life of feigned blindness.
Findings
The accounting scholarly debate on transparency has neglected the users of transparency. We address this through a novel theorisation of transparency as a game, highlighting some of its distinctive features and paradoxes.
Originality/value
By theorising the transparency game we move beyond concerns with what transparency reveals or conceals and conceptualise the motivations and strategies of the players engaged in this game. We show how different players have something to gain from the transparency game and warn of its emancipatory limits.
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Nico Cloete, Nancy Côté, Logan Crace, Rick Delbridge, Jean-Louis Denis, Gili S. Drori, Ulla Eriksson-Zetterquist, Joel Gehman, Lisa-Maria Gerhardt, Jan Goldenstein, Audrey Harroche, Jakov Jandrić, Anna Kosmützky, Georg Krücken, Seungah S. Lee, Michael Lounsbury, Ravit Mizrahi-Shtelman, Christine Musselin, Hampus Östh Gustafsson, Pedro Pineda, Paolo Quattrone, Francisco O. Ramirez, Kerstin Sahlin, Francois van Schalkwyk and Peter Walgenbach
Collegiality is the modus operandi of universities. Collegiality is central to academic freedom and scientific quality. In this way, collegiality also contributes to the good…
Abstract
Collegiality is the modus operandi of universities. Collegiality is central to academic freedom and scientific quality. In this way, collegiality also contributes to the good functioning of universities’ contribution to society and democracy. In this concluding paper of the special issue on collegiality, we summarize the main findings and takeaways from our collective studies. We summarize the main challenges and contestations to collegiality and to universities, but also document lines of resistance, activation, and maintenance. We depict varieties of collegiality and conclude by emphasizing that future research needs to be based on an appreciation of this variation. We argue that it is essential to incorporate such a variation-sensitive perspective into discussions on academic freedom and scientific quality and highlight themes surfaced by the different studies that remain under-explored in extant literature: institutional trust, field-level studies of collegiality, and collegiality and communication. Finally, we offer some remarks on methodological and theoretical implications of this research and conclude by summarizing our research agenda in a list of themes.
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Giovanni Battista Dagnino and Paolo Quattrone
The aim of this paper is twofold: on the one hand, it discusses first the notion of istituto as it has been developed by Gino Zappa within the Italian research tradition known as…
Abstract
Purpose
The aim of this paper is twofold: on the one hand, it discusses first the notion of istituto as it has been developed by Gino Zappa within the Italian research tradition known as economia aziendale. It then proposes a critical comparison between the historical institutional approaches developed by Gino Zappa and John R. Commons. On the other hand, it speculates on the possibility of updating the notion of institution.
Design/methodology/approach
The study is first solidly rooted on historical institutional inquiry. Second, it draws on the constructivist epistemology put forth by Edgar Morin, Mauro Ceruti, and Hans von Foerster.
Findings
This paper allows more informed theorizing about the notion of institution since it deepens our understanding of the epistemological, theoretical, and practical “genetic variations” between the institutional perspectives of Zappa and Commons. This body of work is capable to extend its range in time and space to inform a number of present day relevant issues (i.e. the rising debates on corporate social responsibility and the firms' environmental and social reports) and to pave the way to additional research in the direction of a renewed holistic view of the concept of institution.
Originality/value
First, it is argued that, during the first half of the twentieth century, a somewhat unusual and unexpected convergence occurred, according to which the study of institutions coupled Italy and (part of) the US. Second, in the renewed perspective, the concept of institution becomes the active locus of mediation of multiple viewpoints; the institution turns out to be the catalizing and organizing center of knowledge developed in different disciplinary contexts.
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This paper speculates about the potential of the constructivism of Piaget and Morin to offer a framework which might go beyond dualisms and fragmentation in accounting research…
Abstract
This paper speculates about the potential of the constructivism of Piaget and Morin to offer a framework which might go beyond dualisms and fragmentation in accounting research. These, it is argued, are because inter‐disciplinary research is still embedded in a hierarchical organization of human knowledge (“Encyclopaedia”). In pursuing this aim, this paper seeks to reformulate the subject‐matter of accounting in the trans‐disciplinary terms of the “knowledge of knowledge”. Such a theoretical framework will introduce the issues of trans‐disciplinarity, evolution and reflexivity into accounting research. Such issues have already been the concern of other disciplines within and outside the field of managerial studies, providing new insights for understanding organizational problems. However, they have not yet been given enough attention within accounting research.