Modes of regulation in advanced capitalism: Locating accountancy in four countries

doi:10.1016/0361-3682(87)90041-9

Accounting, Organizations and Society

Volume 12, Issue 3, 1987, Pages 273-291

https://doi.org/10.1016/0361-3682(87)90041-9 Get rights and content

Abstract

The paper presents a framework for examining how accounting practices are regulated within advanced capitalist societies. Through the critical use of Streeck & Schmitter's (Private Interest Government and Public Policy, Sage, London, 1985) exploration of models of social order, regulation is theorised as an expression of the combination of the organising principles of Market, State and Community. The analytical framework is then applied to compare modes of accounting regulation in the Federal Republic of Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden and the United States of America. The paper highlights the significance of contradictions within and between the organizing principles of advanced capitalism and seeks to display the regulation of accounting as a medium and outcome of the articulation of these contradictions.

References (58)

S. Burchell et al.
Accounting in its Social Context: Towards a History of Value Added in the U.K.
Accounting, Organization and Society
(1985)
D.J. Cooper et al.
The Value of Corporate Accounting Reports: Arguments for a political Economy of Accounting
Accounting Organisations and Society
(1984)
A. Loft
Towards a Critical Understanding of Accounting: The Case of Cost Accounting in the U.K., 1914–1925
Accounting, Organisations and Society
(1986)
A.M. Tinker et al.
The Normative Origins of Positive Theories: Ideology and Accounting Thought
Accounting, Organisations and Society
(1982)
H. Willmott
Organising the Profession: A Theoretical and Historical Examination of the Development of the Major Accountancy Bodies in the UK
Accounting, Organisations and Society
(1986)
Armstrong, P., The Rise of Accounting Controls in British Capitalist Enterprises, Accounting, Organizations and Society...
G. Benston
Required Disclosure and the Stock Markets: An Evaluation of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934
American Economic Review
(March 1973)
G. Benston
The Market for Public Accounting Services: Demand, Supply and Regulation
The Accounting Journal
(Winter 1979–1980)
S. Burchell et al.
The Roles of Accounting in Organisations and Society
Accounting, Organisations and Society
(1980)

W. Busse von Colbe

Financial Accounting Research in Germany. Some Socio-economic Determinants

D.J. Cooper

A Political Economy of the U.K. Accounting Profession

(1984)

Cooper, D.J., Lowe, E.A. & Puxty, A.G., The Accounting Profession, Corporation and the State, in Chua, W.F., Lowe, E.A....

R. Coward et al.

Language and Materialism

(1977)

A.G. Fielding et al.

Professions and the State—Towards a Typology of Bureaucratic Professions

Sociological Review

(1980)

M. Foucault

Discipline and Punish

(1977)

B. Frankel

Beyond the State?

(1983)

J. Habermas

Legitimation Crisis

(1976)

N. Haworth et al.

Workers of the World United

(1985)

J. Holloway et al.

State and Capital

(1978)

A. Hope et al.

Power and Policy Making

Journal of Business Finance and Accounting

(1982)

T.M. Hopper et al.

Financial Control and the Labour Process in the National Coal Board

A.G. Hopwood

Accounting Research and Accounting Practice. The Ambigous Relationship between the Two

(1984)

A.G. Hopwood et al.

The Development of Accounting in its International Context: Past Concerns and Emergent Issues

B. Jessop

The Capitalist State

(1982)

T. Johnson

Professions and Power

(1972)

T. Johnson

1980 Work and Power

Jonsson, S., The Elite and the Norms: Driving Forces in the Development of Accounting Policy (Chichester: John Wiley,...

V.I. Lenin

State and Revolution

(1971)

Cited by (247)

The emancipatory potential of counter accounting: A Žižekian critique
2023, Critical Perspectives on Accounting
Today, we face a climate emergency that threatens the future of all life on earth. We live in societies scarred by deep and longstanding inequalities in power and wealth, and further fractured along lines of class, race, gender, sexuality, and nationality. In this turbulent context we must reflect as a community of critical researchers as to what role can we play in bringing about more just societies. Much of the critical accounting community is now invested in exploring how accounting itself might bring about change through “emancipatory” accounting ideas and technologies. A practice that is stimulating great interest within this project is counter accounting. Giving balance to a literature that has focused on articulating the emancipatory potential of counter accounting, in this paper I examine its emancipatory limits. Drawing on Žižek’s theory of ideology, I put forward a critique of the potential for counter accounting to affect transformative change. I argue that its reliance on an epistemological awakening as a catalyst for progressive change is based on a formulation of ideology critique and its effects that cannot be maintained.
Accounting classification in the era of International Financial Reporting Standards: The case of Africa
2023, Journal of International Accounting, Auditing and Taxation
This paper presents the first empirical test of a hypothetical classification of financial reporting in Africa based on de facto or actual practices as opposed to de jure rules. Three multivariate techniques (principal component analysis, cluster analysis, and multidimensional scaling) were used to analyze the accounting policies of large, listed companies in Africa that are required by law to adopt International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). It was found that there is a dichotomy between the IFRS policy choices of companies in Francophone and Lusophone countries, on the one hand, and those in common law jurisdictions, on the other, thus, confirming the two-group classification schemes proposed by Elad (2015) and Nobes (1983). These findings have important policy implications, particularly in the context of recent recommendations of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund that large entities in Africa adopt IFRS.
Accounting as a dehumanizing force in colonial rhetoric: Quantifying native peoples in annual reports
2022, Critical Perspectives on Accounting
This paper examines quantification adopted by the British South Africa Company (BSAC) in its portrayal of native peoples in annual reports. In its colonization and administration of Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), through a royal charter, the British Crown outsourced government to the BSAC, a private-sector, for-profit company. The royal charter imposed non-economic, public-benefit responsibilities on the company, including duties for advancing the native peoples’ interests. The research analyzes annual-report narratives referencing native peoples extracted from a continuous collection of the BSAC’s first 29 annual reports over a 35-year period, 1889–1924. The analysis focusses on the BSAC’s quantification of the natives, their deaths, their health and their livestock, supplemented by analyzing the BSAC’s use of rhetorical framing and the rhetoric of silence in its portrayal of native peoples. The BSAC mobilized quantification rhetoric to demonstrate delivery of its responsibilities/duties to advance the native peoples’ interests. Quantification dehumanized the native peoples, sanitizing their deaths in service of the company’s profitability, for the London audience for the BSAC’s annual reports. The BSAC silenced the supposed beneficiaries’ voices, the native peoples. The findings highlight how the BSAC used supposedly neutral annual reports as an instrument to mask its exploitation of the colony’s native population. The paper contributes to an understanding of how colonialists used accounting as an instrument to promulgate colonial propaganda and ambitions and to mask the means by which they achieved their objectives.
Regulatory mandates and responses to uncomfortable knowledge: The case of country-by-country reporting in the extractive sector
2022, Accounting, Organizations and Society
Citation Excerpt :
The way they use language, concepts, and principles speaks to the aims and motivations of institutions (Robson, 1993). For example, Puxty et al. (1987) show how discursive shifts fundamentally inform the responses of accounting rule makers in different national sites. We extend this analysis to a global initiative, incorporating political economic and discursive insights through our two-stage case analysis.
We examine responses to pressures to act on extractive firm country-by-country reporting (CbCR) by three regulators: the International Accounting Standards Board, the European Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Debates over CbCR of payments that extractive firms make to governments center on improvements to transparency, governance, and accountability and raise questions about the division of regulatory labor in terms of where and by whom global reporting issues are undertaken and why. Our comparative analysis suggests that while the three regulators resist or respond reluctantly to similar pressures to act on CbCR, each responds in distinct ways that reflect and impact regulatory mandates. Specifically, we show how the regulators’ responses constitute the purpose, problematize the objectives, and construct the perceived interests served by CbCR in relation to each regulator’s mandate. We highlight how these responses can be understood through modes of discursive ignorance (McGoey, 2019) and the uncomfortable knowledge (Rayner, 2012) that each regulator may engage with when pressures challenge how regulators make sense of the world. Our study highlights that regulatory responses are based partly on what regulators assume are their mandates, their legitimacy and ways of operating. It analyzes their self-understandings and defense mechanisms, thereby providing an elaboration of responses to pressures for action and offering a richer political economy of regulation that highlights sensemaking in these processes. We further elaborate on what these responses imply for the division of regulatory labor around pressures to act on global reporting issues, as well as broader implications for participation in and ignorance around accounting regulatory projects.
Using historical institutional analysis of corporatism to understand the professionalization of accounting in Latin America
2022, Accounting, Organizations and Society
We investigate factors that have influenced the professionalization of accounting in five Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico). Through comparative historical institutional analysis of corporatism in those countries, we explore the role of the organized labor movement and State-labor relations in the professionalization of accounting. We regard professional accounting associations to be a form of organized labor. Using a combination of primary sources and secondary sources, we identify the critical junctures, self-reinforcing sequences and reactive sequences involved in State regulation of accountants. We find that State policies pertaining to the incorporation and ongoing activity of organized labor movements were important influences on the evolution of the accounting profession. Generally, periods of corporatism that featured inducements for the labor movement were conducive to achieving market closure and the emergence and growth of professional accounting bodies. Developments in laws relating to organized labor bodies (such as trade unions) usually preceded the promulgation of regulations directed specifically at endorsing the formation and operation of professional accounting associations. This paper contributes by using the lens of comparative historical institutional analysis of corporatism to investigate accounting professionalization in corporatist states, report empirical evidence on accounting professionalization from a hitherto unexplored geographical region, and challenge the view that accounting professionalization is temporally enduring.
Thinking like the state: Doxa and symbolic power in the accounting field in China
2021, Accounting, Organizations and Society
Literature examining dynamics between the state and self-styled professional fields is well established and points towards the crucial interrelations between the two. However, this literature evinces an occidental orientation, largely privileging the notion of a state characterised by self-limiting, liberal ideology and that is captured by dominant interests. More recent work on Asia describes a different context within which to understand how the state influences both the structure of accounting fields and the behaviour of actors therein. We build upon this literature here by reporting the results of a detailed empirical study on the dynamics of the accounting field in China. Drawing on archival analysis and interviews with 63 regulators, state actors and accounting practitioners, we show that the state successfully exercises symbolic power in the implementation of state strategies. Conceptually, we argue that the state is a deep-rooted cultural phenomenon existing in the cognitive structures of key actors in the accounting field in China, thereby drawing attention to further reaching forms of state influence than have hitherto been recognised in extant literature on accounting fields. Specifically, we point towards the importance of doxa (Bourdieu, 1977, 1992, 2014), exemplified by the taken-for-granted principles of classification and ranking produced by the state, in the form of firms and individuals ‘thinking like the state’ as the basis of symbolic power in the accounting field in China. We also reflect on the limits of such power.

View all citing articles on Scopus

^☆: We gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance of the Economic and Social Research Council, who are funding the project “Accounting Regulation as Corporatist Control“ as part of their iniative on Corporatism and Accountability. This paper is a product of initial theorising on this project and an version of this paer was presented at the Accounting and Culture Conference in Amsterdam, the EGOS Colloquium in Stockholm, and the Interdisciplinary Perspective on Accounting Conference in Manchester. We appreciate the comments made by contributors at each of these Conferences, and notably Simon Archer, Sten Jonsson, Keith Robson, Tony Tinker and Grahame Thompson. Any errors or misunderstanding are our own responsibility.

View full text

Modes of regulation in advanced capitalism: Locating accountancy in four countries☆

Abstract

Accounting, Organization and Society

Accounting Organisations and Society

Accounting, Organisations and Society

Accounting, Organisations and Society

Accounting, Organisations and Society

Required Disclosure and the Stock Markets: An Evaluation of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934

American Economic Review

The Market for Public Accounting Services: Demand, Supply and Regulation

The Accounting Journal

The Roles of Accounting in Organisations and Society

Accounting, Organisations and Society

Financial Accounting Research in Germany. Some Socio-economic Determinants

A Political Economy of the U.K. Accounting Profession

Language and Materialism

Professions and the State—Towards a Typology of Bureaucratic Professions

Sociological Review

Discipline and Punish

Beyond the State?

Legitimation Crisis

Workers of the World United

State and Capital

Power and Policy Making

Journal of Business Finance and Accounting

Financial Control and the Labour Process in the National Coal Board

Accounting Research and Accounting Practice. The Ambigous Relationship between the Two

The Development of Accounting in its International Context: Past Concerns and Emergent Issues

The Capitalist State

Professions and Power

1980 Work and Power

State and Revolution