Vassili Joannides De Lautour, Zahirul Hoque and Danture Wickramasinghe
This paper explores how ethnicity is implicated in an etic–emic understanding through day-to-day practices and how such practices meet external accountability demands. Addressing…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper explores how ethnicity is implicated in an etic–emic understanding through day-to-day practices and how such practices meet external accountability demands. Addressing the broader question of how ethnicity presents in an accounting situation, it examines the mundane level responses to those accountability demands manifesting an operationalisation of the ethnicity of the people who make those responses.
Design/methodology/approach
The study followed ethnomethodology principles whereby one of the researchers acted both as an active member and as a researcher within a Salvation Army congregation in Manchester (UK), while the others acted as post-fieldwork reflectors.
Findings
The conceivers and guardians of an accountability system relating to the Zimbabwean-Mancunian Salvationist congregation see account giving practices as they appear (etic), not as they are thought and interiorised (emic). An etic–emic misunderstanding on both sides occurs in the situation of a practice variation in a formal accountability system. This is due to the collision of one ethnic group's emics with the emics of conceivers. Such day-to-day practices are thus shaped by ethnic orientations of the participants who operationalise the meeting of accountability demands. Hence, while ethnicity is operationalised in emic terms, accounting is seen as an etic construct. Possible variations between etic requirements and emic practices can realise this operationalisation.
Research limitations/implications
The authors’ findings were based on one ethnic group's emic construction of accountability. Further research may extend this to multi-ethnic settings with multiple etic/emic combinations.
Originality/value
This study contributed to the debate on both epistemological and methodological issues in accountability. As it is ill-defined or neglected in the literature, the authors offer a working conceptualisation of ethnicity – an operating cultural unit being implicated in both accounting and accountability.
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Rachel F. Baskerville, Kerry Jacobs, Vassili Joannides de Lautour and Jeff Sissons
Accounting research has struggled with how ethnicity is to be understood in relation to concepts such as nation and nationality and how ethnicity may impact on accounting and…
Abstract
Purpose
Accounting research has struggled with how ethnicity is to be understood in relation to concepts such as nation and nationality and how ethnicity may impact on accounting and auditing practices, behaviours, education and professional values. These themes are explored and developed in the papers presented in this special issue. In particular, the purpose of this paper is to explore the contrasting theoretical and methodological approaches reflected by the papers in the issue.
Design/methodology/approach
This is a reflective and analytical paper which explores how notions of ethnicity are conceived and operationalised in accounting research. The authors identified two distinctive analytic ordering processes evident within this AAAJ Special issue: Mary Douglas’ scheme of Grid and Group and the Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual tools of field, capital and habitus.
Findings
The “Grid and Group” Culture Theory with Bourdieu’s theoretical tools evident in the papers provide powerful tools to explore the relationship between ethnicity and accounting both conceptually and empirically, suggesting that ethnicity can be deployed to reveal and challenge institutionalised racism. This paper highlights the potential to integrate elements of the “Grid and Group” Culture Theory and Bourdieu’s theoretical tools. The issue of ethnicity and the relationship between ethnicity and accounting should be more fruitfully explored in future.
Research limitations/implications
The authors acknowledge the challenges and limitations of discussing the issue of ethnicity from any particular cultural perspective and recognise the implicit dominance of White Anglo centric perspectives within accounting research.
Originality/value
The papers presented in the special issue illustrate that the issue of ethnicity is complex and difficult to operationalise. This paper highlights the potential to move beyond the ad hoc application of theoretical and methodological concepts to operationalise coherent concepts which challenge and extend the authors’ understanding of accounting as a social and contextual practice. But to achieve this it is necessary to more clearly integrate theory, methodology, method and critique.
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Phillipe Naszalyi and Arnaud Slama-Royer
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the structural problems emerging in the course of managing and safeguarding a French association for home care to a thousand elderly or…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the structural problems emerging in the course of managing and safeguarding a French association for home care to a thousand elderly or disabled people between 2007 and 2012, employing 150
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190 people and on the verge of bankruptcy. In France, small local businesses not only compete with major capital outlets in this sector but also with associations of varying size and origin. Free market rules apply, under the legislation of 2003, to what is, in part, “competition free”, being “in the public interest” and within the framework of local and national public funding.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper analyses those pragmatic solutions put in place to meet the aim of shared governance and in the context of a generalized financial crisis.
Findings
Borrowing from cooperatives and associations, the non-profit-based management structure the authors arrived at, including worker participation in the decision-making processes, raises questions for researchers as to the advisability of any short-term models and the validity of present social and supportive economic models.
Originality/value
The hybrid management of this paper is offered as a working model in what the authors have termed an “adhocracy of stakeholders”.
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Stéphane Jaumier, Thibault Daudigeos and Vassili Joannidès de Lautour
The purpose of our article is to contribute to the further understanding of individual responses to pluralism, by studying in particular the role played by critiques and…
Abstract
The purpose of our article is to contribute to the further understanding of individual responses to pluralism, by studying in particular the role played by critiques and compromises in the formulation of such responses. Drawing on theoretical insights from the sociology of conventions, we look at the various modes of justification publicly advanced by French co-operators when engaging with co-operative principles. Our analysis allows us to identify three main instantiations, that is situated and flexible enactments, of these principles: pragmatic, reformist, and political. Our contribution to the understanding of pluralism and its instantiations by organizational members is threefold. First, in contrast with studies drawing on an institutional-logics perspective, our study shows that individual instantiations of pluralism rely not only on positive affirmations of logics but also on critical mobilizations of competing logics. Second, our study shows that pluralism can be understood not only as co-existing multiple logics, but also as different possible instantiations of the same logic, the ambiguity of which allows compromises to be settled with other logics. Third, we suggest that organizational members’ responses to pluralism often involve more than two logics, which are combined into a complex set of interdependent judgments. In addition, in relation to co-operative studies, our proposed typology provides a mapping that usefully extends the range of possibilities found in co-operators’ instantiations of co-operative principles, thus furthering our understanding of the diversity of the co-operative movement.
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Karen VanPeursem, Kevin Old and Stuart Locke
The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the accountability practices of the directors in New Zealand and Australian dairy co-operatives. An interpretation of their practices…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the accountability practices of the directors in New Zealand and Australian dairy co-operatives. An interpretation of their practices, which focus on the relationship between directors and their farmer-shareholders, is informed by Roberts’ (2001a) understandings of a socializing accountability.
Design/methodology/approach
The fieldwork consists of interviews with 23 directors, including all chief executive officers and chairmen, of six dairy co-operatives together with observations and document analysis. These co-operatives together comprise a significant portion of the regional dairy industry. The methodology draws from Eisenhardt’s (1989) qualitative approach to theory formation.
Findings
The authors find that these directors engage in a discourse-based, community-grounded and egalitarian form of socializing accountability. As such, their practices adhere generally to Roberts (2001a) hopes for a more considerate and humble relationship between an accountor and an accountee.
Social implications
Findings add to the small pool of research on the lived experiences of co-operative boards and to a parsimonious literature in socializing accountability practices. The contributions of the study are in advancing real understandings of alternative forms of accountability, in evaluating the conditions in which these alternatives may be likely to arise and in anticipating the challenges and opportunities that arise therefrom.
Originality/value
The originality of the project arises from accessing the views of these industry leaders and, through their frank expressions, coming to understand how they achieve a form of a socializing accountability in their relationships with farmer-shareholders.