Fabrizio Panozzo

The making of the good academic accountant

Abstract In view of the extensive deployment of theoretical and methodological resources it generates, doctoral training is taken as the point of departure for the exploration of the fragmented state of accounting research. The dominance of a mainstream within the North American disciplinary matrix is contrasted with an emergent “European” perspective whose vague identity is essentially to be found in the variety of methodological approaches brought about by different national traditions. It is argued that differences in the institutional contexts in which accounting academics are trained and research evaluated frame fundamental conditions of possibility for the nature and content of accounting theorising. Compared to the North American one, the construction of a European perspective appears to enjoy an institutionally determined anti-dogmatism allowing accounting research to elude the quest for “scientific” and rigorous knowledge.

Accounting for the city

Purpose - This paper aims to identify the study of cities as an important and neglected focus for accounting researchers. Design/methodology/approach - The paper is based on a case study approach to visualizing and calculating the city. Findings - There is a major preoccupation with the study of cities from numerous disciplinary perspectives. The positioning of cities is reaffirmed as a key part of modes of governing. This reveals tensions between disciplinary approaches based on space and design with the financial imperative of cities managed within a world which is dominated by New Public Management ideas and in which finances have primacy. Research limitations/implications - The paper is based on one case study, and it demonstrates the need for longitudinal and interdisciplinary approaches to increase understanding of the twenty-first century city. Practical implications - The significance of accounting as a technology, which is embedded within the public management of cities is profound. This has major implications both for the design of financial information systems and their capacity for, and the manner of, their interactions with other disciplines in planning and managing cities. Originality/value - This study is distinct in the manner in which it studies and reveals the importance of accounting in the management of cities. There is an increasing trend to visualize the city and represent it in numbers. This study reveals that accounting provides the most important numbers in shaping and visualizing the city.

Preface: Trends and Fashions in Management Studies

“New Institutionalism,” “Knowledge Management,” “Actor-Network Theory,” “eGovernment,” “Balance Scorecard,” “Corporate Social Responsibility”: Are these passing fads or future institutions? Perhaps they are fashions: lasting longer than fads, they may or may not become institutions. But if they are fashions, are they fashions in theories or fashions in the practice of management? And if there are fashions in theories, are they paradigm shifts or merely variations on universal themes? What is the source of such fashions—management practice, other fields of theory, politics, or popular culture? Why those, and why now? Does management research always follow trends, or does it initiate trends as well? This preface addresses these issues, formulating both tentative answers and new questions, based on “Trends and Fashions in Management Studies,” a European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management (EIASM) workshop held in Lisbon, Portugal, October 20–22, 2005, whose participants contributed papers to this issue.

The Endogenous Construction of Accounting Discourses in a Trade Union

The exploration of accounting practices reported in this paper illustrates how perceptions of financial problems and notions of economic accountability develop within cultural and institutional environments that substantially differ from those of the business firm. The paper seeks to oppose a notion of economic determinism which, explicitly or implicitly, promotes the “ideal” identity between market and society. In contrast to such a view, an institutional and organizational embedded understanding of accounting is suggested as a more fruitful way of appreciating the nature and scope of economic discourses as they develop within a nonprofit organization. The analysis focuses on the ways in which economic functioning is interpreted and accountability developed within an organization that rejects stereotyped views of managerialism and conventional notions of economic rationality. The presence of endogenous fabrications of economic accounts is what eventually allows us to problematize the way in which the economic framework is all too easily seen to enter non-business environments as a colonizing force.

Standards, Triple Bottom Lines and Balanced Scorecards: Shaping the Metaphor of Corporate Citizenship with Calculative Infrastructures

It was never easy, and will probably never be, for capitalist corporations to state precisely and officially what they are, whom they serve and what they do to society. Of course reliable solutions have been found over time. Legal systems have had to provide stable definitions of the corporation as an economic and legal entity with specific aims, rights, duties and obligations to fulfil. But this was, and still is, an exercise that mainly responds to the need of assuring varying degrees of economic freedom — and set limits to it — within a more or less regulated market systems. The ‘laws of the market’ are not really enforceable until they are expressed in proper legal terms and stabilized across time and space. But it is precisely such stabilization provided by the legal language that causes its inadequacy to fully grasp the complex identity of the corporation, its variations over time, its adaptations to changing conditions, and its capacity to evolve into something that better ‘fits’ with the environment. On the contrary, management has always been concerned, probably due to its double nature of professional skill and academic discipline, by the need to mediate between abstractions and practice and thus capture the nature of the corporation as it unfolds. Such conciliation has historically been made possible by the intercession of one of the most notorious and celebrated rhetorical devices: the metaphor.

Triple Bottom Lines, Standards and Balanced Scorecards: The Making of Private Firms Commensurable with the Public Good

How can we talk of private enterprise as (good) citizens? This short paper originates from the attempt to answer this question and tries to explore some of its consequences. The answer normally makes reference to the notion of accountability and to its ability to mobilize the concepts of legitimacy and identity. Accountability has to do with the giving and taking of accounts on the activity conducted by economic and social agents (Mouritsen and Munro, 1996). Based on such a broad definition, relationships of accountability can be established and analyzed at multiple levels but the one of interest here is the one between private firms and their social and natural environment. The construction, re-construction and maintenance of a relationship of accountability require the use of a language that allows for communication between those that produce the account and its recipients. Discussions and discourses can develop once such language is made available and its rules shared by the interested parties. There is therefore a linguistic issue at the hearth of the transformation of private firms into public actors: the managerial discourse of corporate citizenship is to a significant extent dependent on the possibility of representing the firm as capable of expressing the ways in which it contributes to society and the environment (Sahlin Andersson, 2006). Thanks to these specific types of representations the firm is in the position of enhancing its social and political legitimacy (Meyer, 1994). But the availability of such language and the development of a discursive potential for corporate citizenship is in itself problematic. It is not only a question of inventing a new language but also to come to terms with the one that firms normally use to account for their results. The private firm has indeed traditionally used a language – the financial one – to affirm its identity and communicate its performances to interested parties. In doing so the corporation has established a specific type of legitimacy on purely economic grounds and constructed a relationship of accountability with those parties that are solely interested in the financial returns it generates. Throughout the history of capitalism these characteristics of the language of business have rarely been seen as fundamental limitations and the role of the firm within society was seen as accurately represented by its ability to generate financial profits. This attitude has been radically challenged by the advent of corporate social responsibility, which has invited to a fundamental redefinition in the language of business. The discourse of corporate citizenship has drawn attention to the limits of the mainstream business language and evoked the existence of more appropriate ways of narrating the identity and the functioning of the private enterprise. Corporate citizenship is to a significant extent constituted by the demand and supply of new forms of corporate accountability that should supplement the existing mainstream ones. But what does this call for new, improved accountability imply? What it is precisely that has to be redefined in order for private firms to be made more “transparent” to the public scrutiny? The critique of traditional forms of accountability invites us to take into consideration the role of the accounting language. Although in an indirect manner, discourses of corporate citizenship criticize accounting for its inability to account for those aspects that manifest the identity and action of the firm as a good citizen. What is seen a problematic is the technical language that is conventionally used to report on the functioning and performance of the corporation. It comes therefore as no surprise that the development of new forms of corporate accountability is paralled by corresponding calls for transformation of the tools and principles of accounting.