Jeffery Everett

To better understand how the practice of auditing can be more effectively enrolled in the fight against fraud and corruption, this study (1) examines how these problems are viewed and defined by the public and (2) contrasts this view and definition with that of professional auditors. The examination is informed by the dispositive theory of Foucault and an inductive analysis of a large (90,000+) multi-year sample of news stories related to fraud and corruption in the Italian health sector. While auditors define these problems in relatively narrow terms and consign them to ‘a form of risk, a threat to reputation and revenue, and a cost of doing business,’ the study finds that the public has a broader definition and a greater concern with problematic acts and actors ‘in and of themselves’. These findings have important implications for the audit expectations gap and how it might be addressed. The study also provides a useful analytical method for locating and better understanding fraud and corruption in other large, institutional settings.

The emergence of double-entry bookkeeping has been traced back to roughly the same period as the emergence of practices which are today broadly understood as capitalist. This has led some to suggest that capitalism and accounting are interdependent. This thesis, however, neglects an important set of similarly-paired developments that occurred much earlier: around the same time as the first traces of accounting appeared in ancient Mesopotamia, patriarchal forms of social organization were also spreading across that region. In this paper, we propose that accounting practices are less a function of the rise of capitalism and more a function of the expansion of patriarchy, which itself fuelled the widespread adoption of capitalism. Drawing on anthropological insights and the work of feminist scholars, the paper offers an alternative perspective, one that we hope will help fuel resistance against the current, damaging hegemony: a ‘herstory’ of accounting. In addition, this study has implications for how we understand a number of topics of importance to critical accountants, including accountability, violence and subjugation, women’s rights and working and living conditions, capitalism (and neoliberalism), environmental degradation, spirituality, and the rise of political states.

This study examines the role of ‘accounting artifacts’ in the reformation of a country’s healthcare system. Focusing on a single hospital and four decades of policy reform in the African nation of Ghana, and starting from Pierre Bourdieu’s Logic of Practice, the study shows how different forms, constructions, and classifications of accounting information—or accounting artifacts—shape policy regimes and facilitate particular patterns of activity and interaction. The study demonstrates how these regimes and patterns, in conjunction with the embedded social memory or habitus of individual actors, in turn lead to the construction and use of new artifacts. Finally, the study highlights how hospital staff and patients use various tactics to work with and around these artifacts, resulting in at times unintended consequences and the need to pursue new policy directions. In so doing, the study furthers our understanding of why policy-reform processes in the field of healthcare are so often sequential, if not perpetual, in nature.

This study examines the ‘letters to the editor’ section of the practitioner accounting journal and its role in the process of accounting professionalization. Data for the study are derived from the AICPA periodical Journal of Accountancy. The theoretical framing for the study draws on the linguistic theory of Mikhail Bakhtin. The study’s analysis relies on latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling. The study finds that the letters forum helps to construct a believable and useful image of the professional accountant. The forum also provides a means for practicing accountants to intervene in, impact, and, at times, challenge the activities of the field’s authorities. Besides contributing to our understanding of accounting professionalization and the field’s competing institutional logics—professional, commercial, and bureaucratic—the study offers a methodological contribution, building on a first wave of topic-modeling research and demonstrating the usefulness of a theoretically-informed, but not theoretically-determined, approach to the study of textual accounting materials.

Reflecting on how critical academics intervene in the public sphere, this paper explores how accounting is mobilized to reinforce and counter neoliberal hegemony in a public-policy debate over the role and size of government debt. The paper draws on the work of Gramsci, Laclau, and Mouffe to analyze case-data derived from three decades of media articles, research reports, and government financial documents in the Canadian province of Québec. The study finds that hegemonic actors seek consent from the population by exciting emotions (esp. fear and guilt), referencing the common sense, and aligning their arguments with people’s everyday experiences. While counter-hegemonic actors initially relied on conceptual reason and logic in their arguments, positioning accounting as an ‘ammunition machine’, they too came to adopt an approach aimed at exciting emotions, translating accounting concepts into non-economic fields, and rearticulating hegemonic signifiers, in an effort to refine and reshape the common sense. Highlighting the limitations of purely rational modes of argumentation, the study has implications for the manner in which accounting academics intervene in the public sphere and how they need to be skilled translators and re-articulators of hegemonic discourse.

The current study examines the micro-linguistic details of Twitter responses to the whistleblower-initiated publication of the Panama Papers. The leaked documents contained the micro-details of tax avoidance, tax evasion, and wealth accumulation schemes used by business elites, politicians, and government bureaucrats. The public release of the documents on April 4, 2016 resulted in a groundswell of Twitter and other social media activity throughout the world, including 161,036 Spanish- language tweets in the subsequent 5-month period. The findings illustrate that the responses were polyvocal, consisting a collection of overlapping speech genres with varied thematic topics and linguistic styles, as well as differing degrees of calls for action and varying amounts of illocutionary force. The analysis also illustrates that, while the illocutionary force of tweets is somewhat associated with the adoption of a prosaic and vernacular ethical stance as well as with demands for action, these types of voicing behaviors were not present in the majority of the tweets. These results suggest that, while social media platforms are a popular site for collective forms of voicing activities, it is less certain that these collective stakeholder voices necessarily result in forceful accountability demands that spill out of the communication medium and thus serve as an impulse for positive social change.

The potential of social media to disseminate, aggregate, channel and democratize social accountability processes has encouraged a variety of organizations to actively promote and champion such initiatives. These initiatives typically envision a three step social accountability process where, for example, the publication of previously-private financial information about the inappropriate wealth accumulation activities of politicians and their business allies (step #1), combined with social media dissemination and discussion of these activities (step #2), can result in an accountability conversation that spills out of the medium and that sometimes results in positive social change (step #3). The current study examines Twitter reactions to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalist’s (ICIJ) publication of the Panama Papers. The analysis illustrates that there was a Twitter reaction: furthermore, that there were different styles of response and that certain styles were more likely to elicit an audience reaction, especially if the tweeter was a journalist or organization. While the provided analysis focuses on step #2 within the social accountability process, the results imply that publicly-interested accounting academics qua activists can facilitate social accountability by helping to make previously-private financial information public and by cultivating sympathetic individuals within the traditional media as well as within organizations that are active on social media.

This paper examines fair trade through a variety of ethical lenses as a means of determining whether or not it is, indeed, fair. The specific lenses employed are utilitarianism, justice, rights, virtue, and care. The context examined is coffee production and the analysis is based on twenty-three interviews conducted with fair trade coffee producers and other associated actors in the country of Guatemala. The paper highlights how each of these lenses draws attention to the unique moral dimensions of fair trade, and demonstrates how a pluralist view enables a better grasp of the complexity of the ethics surrounding fair trade than is provided by any one, singular framing. Implications of the analysis are provided for business educators, practitioners, and students of fair trade.

This paper examines the role of internal controls and monitoring practices in corrupt contexts and how these controls and practices shape the ethics and moral behaviors of organizational actors. Specifically focusing on corruption in government procurement and drawing on the insights of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, the paper proposes that effective anti-corruption practices depend upon an understanding and analysis of the practices and politics of visibility, and that effective ‘luminous arrangements’ have the potential to discourage corrupt practices and influence ethics within organizations. While such arrangements do not necessarily prevent corrupt practices, they do encourage certain actions and reactions among organizational actors, suggesting that organizational actors are at one and the same time free and autonomous, yet subject to and constructed by anti-corruption practices. These practices are thus both disciplinary and productive, affecting individuals in specific ways, while also benefitting the organizations for whom they work.

This essay examines the critical accounting field’s current reliance on qualitative methods, asking whether these methods are necessarily better than quantitative methods. The notion of praxis and the purpose of critical research are discussed and the pros and cons of quantitative methods in relation to this notion and purpose are considered. The taxonomy of critical accounting and its ontological and epistemological assumptions are reviewed in order to problematize the field’s doxa, or taken-for-granted understanding of how critical research ought to be conducted. Examples are provided of two theoretical perspectives that rely on quantitative and mixed methods (critical realism and Bourdieu’s praxeology), and a number of research questions that are conducive to the use of quantitative and mixed methods are identified.

This paper examines ethics in the field of internal audit. A set of in-depth interviews, the autobiography of ex-Vice President of Internal Audit of World Com, Cynthia Cooper, and the documents of the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) are all analyzed to shed light on the ethics—deontic, teleic, and aretaic—that characterize this weakly autonomous field. The paper further employs work in the field of economic sociology and Milan Kundera’s literary ideas to highlight how internal auditors actively moralize markets and embrace a moral will that is ambiguous, if not conflicted. The paper further raises questions about the IIA’s present offering of ethics-related resources and its ability to effectively develop moral skill in this field. In addition, and in keeping with our phronetic research approach, the paper provides suggestions aimed at improving the Institute’s ethics resources.

This study examines the nature and role of accounting practices in a network of corruption in an influence-market setting. The study focuses on the Canadian government’s Sponsorship Program (1994–2003), a national unification scheme that saw approximately $50 million diverted into the bank accounts of political parties, program administrators, and their families, friends and business colleagues. Relying on the institutional sociology of Bourdieu, the study demonstrates the precise role of accounting practices in the organization of a corrupt network imbued with a specific telos and certain accounting tasks. The study illustrates how accounting is accomplished and by whom, and it shows how the ‘skillful use’ of accounting practices and social interactions around these practices together enable corruption. In so doing, the study builds on a growing body of work examining criminogenic networks and the contextual, collaborative and systemic uses of accounting in such networks.

This article examines the business of water privatization and the ethics implied in the transformation of the water services sector in developing countries. Drawing on data derived from field visits and semi‐structured interviews held with members of government, nongovernmental organizations, and other stakeholders in one country undergoing transformation in this sector, Ghana, the article considers the ethical perspectives of the various involved stakeholders. The analysis draws on three perspectives—Gilligan’s ethic of care, Rawls’ principles of justice, and virtue ethics—which together highlight the economic, class, and gender‐based dimensions of the privatization debate. Finding that endemic mistrust characterizes this debate, the article considers what is needed to re‐instill trust among stakeholders. Specific implications are provided for business leaders and government policymakers.

This study examines the nature and role of accounting practices in a network of corruption in an influence-market setting. The study focuses on the Canadian government’s Sponsorship Program (1994–2003), a national unification scheme that saw approximately $50 million diverted into the bank accounts of political parties, program administrators, and their families, friends and business colleagues. Relying on the institutional sociology of Bourdieu, the study demonstrates the precise role of accounting practices in the organization of a corrupt network imbued with a specific telos and certain accounting tasks. The study illustrates how accounting is accomplished and by whom, and it shows how the ‘skillful use’ of accounting practices and social interactions around these practices together enable corruption. In so doing, the study builds on a growing body of work examining criminogenic networks and the contextual, collaborative and systemic uses of accounting in such networks.

This paper examines some of the ideological, political and moral challenges that face internal auditors in their fight against fraud and corruption. Specifically, the paper considers how these three factors influence the definitions of fraud and corruption and the perceived purpose of internal auditing. The paper also examines two high-profile cases of fraud and corruption – the Canadian sponsorship scandal and the WorldCom collapse – as a means of showing how these factors can undermine the auditor’s independence, integrity and professional judgment. These two cases further highlight the phenomenon of “whistleblowing,” and how a whistleblower’s “faith in the system” can lead that person to become a victim of injustice and alienation, or “tragic hero.” Finally, the paper considers how to best deal with this situation, and briefly looks at the educational resources that the profession has made available to deal with these various challenges.