Critical Perspectives On Accounting:, Prof - Eve Chiapello

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YCPAC 1960 No. of Pages 18
Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2016) xxx–xxx
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Critical Perspectives on Accounting

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cpa
[156_TD$IF]Critical accounting research and neoliberalism

, Prof.Eve Chiapello
[158_TD$IF]EHESS Paris, PSL University, Institut Marcel Mauss (UMR 8178 CNRS/EHESS), 190 avenue de France, 75013 Paris, France
A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T
Article history:
Received 8 October 2015 This article reflects on the way critical accounting research has addressed the question of
Received in revised form 21 July 2016 liberalism. I show that the rise of this theme has been accompanied by a broadening of the
Accepted 30 September 2016 issues addressed, but fairly little enlargement of the geographical spaces concerned. Three
Available online xxx different approaches to neoliberalism are identified (as a phase of capitalism, as a discourse
and as governmentality): while dialogue may exist between them, they are still disjointed
Keywords: and built on different inquiries. I seek to outline the contributions and limitations of each
Accounting research one. A second section studies the various roles critical authors have attributed to
Neoliberalism
accounting and its actors in the neoliberal phenomenon and the way accounting is seen in
Literature review
their research (as an instrument, a project or an object). This mapping leads to proposal of
Public sector
Critical an analysis framework that can be used for a broader conception of accounting's role in
economic and social changes, based on a study of the conventions embedded in accounting
devices and the distributive effects of the tests or trials they equip. Avenues for research are
opened up throughout the article, with a view to enriching work on neoliberalism and
delineating the specific contribution made by accounting researchers to its criticism.
ã 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Reference to neoliberalism has become obligatory in critical thinking. From the 1930s to the 1960s the term was used by
certain think tanks to describe their stream of thought and their efforts to renew liberal thinking (Audier, 2012), but it now
has almost entirely negative connotations. The word “neoliberalism” has become part of the critical vocabulary. Like
capitalism when the concept was first forged (Chiapello, 2006, 2007), neoliberalism is primarily known, understood and
analyzed by people who are critical of it. It has become harder for people to claim they are neoliberal, unless they intend to
provoke an audience reaction. It is thus quite natural to find this concept used by critical accounting research. This article
aims to better understand the uses of the concept and its history in this academic space, and to sketch out several avenues for
research. As in other disciplines, notably geography where it has been particularly popular, reference is made to
neoliberalism to describe a range of phenomena that are the subject of criticism, such that the introductory comment made
by Ferguson (2009) to his own community provides us with an entry point:
In thinking about the rapidly expanding literature on neoliberalism, I am struck by how much of the critical scholarship
on topic arrives in the end at the very same conclusion—a conclusion that might be expressed in its simplest form
as: “neoliberalism is bad for poor and working people, therefore we must oppose it.” It is not that I disagree with this
conclusion. On the contrary. But I sometimes wonder why I should bother to read one after another extended scholarly
analysis only to reach, again and again, such an unsurprising conclusion. (Ferguson, 2009, p. 166)
E-mail address: [157_TD$IF]eve.chiapello@ehess.fr (E. Chiapello).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2016.09.002
1045-2354/ã 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article in press as: E. Chiapello, Critical accounting research and neoliberalism, Crit Perspect Account (2016),
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2 E. Chiapello / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2016) xxx–xxx
It seemed to me that to answer this question, we had to try and understand what accounting research is doing with this
concept. I have thus attempted to organise the literature in order to show its main themes. The wide variety in both uses and
analyses conducted under the neoliberalism label can certainly be used to suggest that such a vague, all-encompassing term
is ultimately useless. But it can also help to determine what the term contributes, particularly the possibility of moving
between its multiple meanings and illustrations, and to show links and relationships between the phenomena studied. The
first type of analysis (part 1) concerns the use made of reference to neoliberalism: what do accounting researchers say about
it, how is it understood, what phenomena are associated with it, which theoretical references are used? In the end, the
variety of appeals to neoliberalism that this study will bring out is fairly similar to what we observe in other fields of the
social sciences (Ferguson, 2009; Pestre, 2014). Since the aim is to understand what the critical accounting literature is doing
with the concept of neoliberalism, I shall not seek to give a definition in advance, for example to position it in relation to
liberalism or capitalism. As we shall see, the answers to these questions depend on the approaches taken. The second type of
analysis (part 2) sets out to grasp the role authors attribute to accounting, its practices and its actors in the development of
neoliberalism. Which aspects and dimensions of accounting have accounting researchers chosen to look at? How do they
conceive the relationships between these elements and neoliberalism?
The aim of this two-level reflexive review of the uses accounting research has made of the neoliberalism concept is of
course not solely taxonomic, but also programmatic, because it should identify research perspectives that will be brought out
throughout the following discussions.
2. Critical accounting research and neoliberalism
To delimit the intellectual area this examination will cover, I have chosen to concentrate on publications in the three
central journals of social-based accounting research (as opposed to economics-based accounting research): Accounting,
Organizations and Society (AOS, founded in 1976), Accounting, Auditing, Accountability Journal (AAAJ, created in 1988) and
finally Critical Perspectives on Accounting (CPA, created in 1990).1 In early March 2015 I collected all the articles published or
put online by these journals since their foundation that contained the words “neoliberalism”, “neo-liberalism”, “neo-liberal”,
or “neoliberal” in their title, key words or abstract (i.e. in the key descriptive fields). This procedure was used to identify the
articles that made central use of the concept. The resulting corpus comprises 51 articles (see Appendix A 2 ). If I had collected
all articles using one of these words at least once in their text, the corpus would of course have been much larger. And as I did
not want my corpus to be based on a presumed meaning of the word “neoliberalism” (since one of the objectives of this
review is to bring out the role authors assign to this concept in their writings), I did not include articles that concern
phenomena often associated with neoliberalism, such as New Public Management and privatisations, but do not actually use
the concept. After a general presentation of the corpus and what it teaches us about the history and pervasiveness of the
concept in accounting research (1.1), we shall identify the different meanings of the concept of neoliberalism encountered
(1.2) and the principal theoretical frameworks used (1.3).
2.1. The rise of neoliberalism in accounting research
Unsurprisingly given the word’s critical dimension, reference to neoliberalism is more frequent in CPA (34 articles) than
the other journals, with 8 articles in AOS and 9 articles in AAAJ. The first article that considers the concept important enough
to place it in the key descriptive fields is *Nikolas Rose’s 1991 article in AOS, but AOS subsequently published no more articles
of this type until 2009 by which time the concept was widespread. AAAJ published its first such article in 1993 (*Humphrey,
Miller, Scapens, 1993), and this should be related to the Foucault-inspired research in sociology being undertaken at the same
period by Miller and Rose (Miller & Rose, 1990; Rose & Miller, 1992). So a very small circle of authors inaugurated the concept
of neoliberalism in these two journals, but the framing of their work by this concept was not taken up by accounting research,
although as we know, it subsequently became a nerve centre of the Foucauldian approach (Chiapello & Baker, 2011; Gendron
& Baker, 2005). Twelve years passed before AAAJ published a second article referring to neoliberalism (2005). The profile for
CPA is different: the concept of neoliberalism made its entrance in 1996 with *Cooper, Puxty, Robson, Willmott (1996) and
remained less remote (3 articles in 1999; 2 in 2003, then regularly from 2006).
Another striking factor that is clearly visible in Fig. 1 concerns the temporality of the reference to neoliberalism: this was
sporadic until the mid-2000s, but took off from 2005. It reached a plateau in 2009–2010 with 5 articles in the three journals,
and has remained more or less at that level since then, with a peak of 9 articles in 2013. The mid-2000s is thus clearly a point
when a shared understanding of the world encapsulated in this reference became established. It is difficult to account for
these collective phenomena which suddenly catapult a word only previously used by a few people into widespread use. In
the English-speaking world, an important factor was the publication in 2005 of Harvey’s book A Brief History of Neoliberalism,
1
I also undertook a quick search of the histories of other accounting journals that also occasionally publish social-based accounting research (such as
European Accounting Review, Management Accounting Research, and Abacus) but found no occurrences. The only exception is Accounting Forum, but only 4
articles published in that journal up to March 2015 use a derivative of neoliberalism in the key descriptive fields.
2
In this article, the articles belonging to the corpus are quoted preceded by a * (eg. *Rose (1991)). In that case, the complete reference should be found in
the Appendix A, not in the References list.
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E. Chiapello / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2016) xxx–xxx 3

[(Fig._1)TD$IG]
Fig. 1. Number of articles using ‘neoliberal' or ‘neoliberalism' in key descriptive fields, by year and outlet.
The graph ends in 2014 as the database search took place in March 2015, and the year 2015 is thus incomplete.
making its author known beyond Marxist and geographical circles. In a powerful narrative, Harvey set out a new connection
between a multitude of ideological, political and economic phenomena occurring on all continents since the 1970s. He is also
the author most frequently “tied up with” the concept of neoliberalism in our corpus, if only to borrow a definition. Still in the
field of ideas, the publication in France in 2004 of Michel Foucault’s lectures discussing the question of neoliberalism at the
Collège de France (given in 1978–79, published in an English translation in 2008) presumably contributed to the theme’s
popularity in accounting research given how important Foucault has become in such work, even though only the most recent
articles in the corpus contain references to this publication. As regards economic events, the financial crisis of 2008 was also
a turning point,3 as it was immediately considered as a crisis of liberalism similar to the 1929 crisis, and like that crisis also
led to State interventions on a massive scale. Once the spotlight had shifted to the debt crisis in developed countries, and
reforms had begun, many observers noted the incredible resilience of (neo)liberal ideas (see, for example, Mirowski (2013)
and Streeck (2014) for recent expressions of this diagnosis, which are themselves embedded in extensive historical
narratives, or Guénin-Paracini, Gendron, and Morales (2014) in accounting research).
The 51 articles in the corpus were written by 73 authors, only a few of whom have made neoliberalism a central concept in
their research trajectory. Examples are Jane Andrew who has published five articles with a number of co-authors (two with
Ying Zhang), and Christine Cooper, who has published six articles written alone or co-authored.4
2.2. Did someone say neoliberalism?
The rooting of reflection in the question of neoliberalism can be tenuous. Some articles in the corpus hardly use the
vocabulary concerned in the body of their text (slightly under a quarter of articles – 12 out of 51 – use a word deriving from
neoliberal fewer than 10 times). Also, some (often the same) articles never use the nominal form with the meaning provided
by the ism ending indicating some form of system, an overall logic or ideological core.5 The presence of the nominal form
grows over time until it accounts for the majority of occurrences by 2009, which I see as a clear indication that a whole series
of phenomena were by then clearly perceived as constituting a system. Towards the end of the period, many articles take for
granted that neoliberalism is a marker of contemporary times. The term no longer needs to be explained and presented, but
is important to inform reflection. This is seen in programmatic articles such as the research published by *Boyce (2008),
*Lehman (2012) and *Cooper and Colson (2014), but also in case-study focused publications.
3
*Cooper (2015) and *Sikka (2015) are examples of very direct considerations of this crisis. Both articles were published in a special edition of CPA
dedicated to the crisis (Chabrak & Gendron, 2015).
4
Only 9 authors published two or more articles in the corpus. After Christine Cooper, Jane Andrew and Ying Zhang they are Carolyn Windsor (2), Cheryl
Lehman (2), Keith Robson (2), Prem Sikka (2), Robert Jupe (2), and Yves Gendron (2).
5
2 articles out of 9 in AAAJ, 4 out of 8 in AOS and 8 out of 34 in CPA do not use the nominal form at all, or only use it once in the whole article, preferring to
use the adjective, which is less charged with meaning and can apply to “smaller”, more “localised” objects that do not necessarily suggest incorporation into
a global system.
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What all these ways of using this vocabulary have in common is that the terms are designated as descriptive of the public
policies implemented from the 1970s and 1980s, generally considered to begin with the election victories of Margaret
Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US. Reference to neoliberalism is thus primarily used to comment on public
policies. The economic system may be called “capitalist” or “financialised”, but the policy is “neoliberal”. The criticism of
neoliberalism is above all a criticism of governments and their policies. In fact the objects that are called neoliberal are
doctrines, discourses, reforms, agendas and political projects. Neoliberal policies encompass a vast range of reforms, often
referred to as a whole (privatisation, deregulation, dismantling of social welfare apparatus, tax cuts, etc.), underpinned by a
common intent to draw more broadly on market mechanisms and private actors, particularly businesses, consulting firms
and NGOs, to regulate the economy and distribute all sorts of products and services, including those that are educational,
social, etc. (the free market, small government doctrine).
As a result, an enormous collection of policies is addressed in the corpus: privatisation policies are generally associated
with neoliberalism (eg. *Arnold, Cooper, 1999; *Uddin, Hopper, 2003; *Cole, Cooper, 2006; *Andrew, 2007; *Jupe, 2009;
*Smyth, 2012; *Jupe, Funnel, 2015), but so is New Public Management (*Humphrey, Miller, Scapens, 1993; *Edwards,
Ezzamel, Robson, 1999; *Ellwood, Newberry, 2007; *Parker, 2011), the post-socialist transition (*Mennicken, 2010), certain
tax policies (*Sikka, 2015; *Cooper, Danson, Whittam, Sheridan, 2010), climate policies that use market mechanisms or self-
regulation (*Andrew, Kaidonis, Andrew, 2010; *Lohman, 2009; *Andrew, Cortese, 2013), and development policies led by
national and international agencies (*Duval, Gendron, Roux-Dufort, 2015; *Sikka, 2011; *Uddin, Hopper, 2003). Certain
accounting standards and laws governing businesses may also be called neoliberal (*Zhang, Andrew, Rudkin, 2012; *Zhang
Andrew, 2014; *Ravenscroft, Williams, 2009; *Merino, Mayper, Tolleson, 2010).
Most of the cases analysed are British policies that are a legacy of the Thatcher years. The brutality of the reforms
conducted at the time, their openly ideological stance based on the work of the economists of the Chicago school, and their
pioneering nature as policies that would later spread to other developed countries, explain this focus on the UK which even
during the Labour government years and right up until today has continued to apply more economically liberal policies than
most countries in the European Union. Another explanation is that a large share of critical accounting research has been
forged in resistance to such policies, and is driven by British authors whose particular historical experience provides a
decisive contribution to research into neoliberalism.6 Australian authors (*Andrew, 2007) and New Zealanders (*Cronin,
2008) recount their own countries’ experiences. There is a small number of studies on developing countries such as
Bangladesh (*Uddin, Hopper, 2013), Chad and Cameroon (*Sikka, 2011) and Sri Lanka (*Jayasinghe, Wickramasinghe, 2011).
There is only one article on China (*Zhang, Andrew, Rudkin, 2012), and one on Russia (*Mennicken, 2010). US policies are
relatively rarely studied, except for two articles concerning reconstruction in Irak (*Chwastiak, 2013; *Cooper, Catchpowle,
2009), one on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (*Merino, Mayper, Tolleson, 2010) and one on a FASB standard (*Ravenscroft, Williams,
2009). The small number of American examples raises questions. American monetary policy since 1979, under Paul Volcker
then Alan Greenspan, and the election of Ronald Reagan as President in 1981, are usually considered as major neoliberal
political turning points. Also, the criticism of neoliberalism generally makes the US the reactor core, because the country has
fed on the work of the Chicago economists and because its ideological, economic and military power makes the US an
extraordinary exporter of political ideas and practices (see also the expression “Washington Consensus”7 used to designate
the doctrinal agreement between the US government and the global institutions IMF and World Bank). It is clear that since
the structure and modes of production and reproduction of accounting researchers in the US emphasise economics-based
accounting research i.e. research which by construction is part of the Chicago economics and has trouble detaching itself
from the neoliberal model, in some cases actively promoting it (in my corpus, see *Ravenscroft, Williams (2009) and
*Chabrak (2012)) – broad deployment of critical accounting research by US-based researchers is very difficult (Panozzo,
1997).
While “neoliberal” initially referred essentially to Thatcher’s policies and then Reagan’s, the spectrum was enlarged by a
gradually-established major narrative of neoliberalism built up by its denigrators. This enlargement is also visible in the
diversification of the objects of accounting research, although it remains incomplete. The origins of neoliberalism are now
increasingly traced back to the Chilean coup d’état of 1973, and South American experiences (Dezalay & Garth, 2002;
Fourcade-Gourinchas & Babb, 2002; Harvey, 2005; Klein, 2007) which are not covered at all in my corpus. They can also be
considered to encompass (at least some) former socialist European countries’ experiences of the transition to capitalism
after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, the structural adjustment policies of the 1980s and 1990s,8 and even the shift seen in
an entire country such as China, which began the transition to a market economy in 1978 (Harvey, 2005). As seen earlier,
6
See for example Cooper’s (2014) obituary of the British researcher Tony Lowe. Significantly, the article by *Cooper, Puxty, Robson and Willmott (1996),
the oldest in the corpus with the exception of the two Foudauldian articles by *Rose (1991) and *Humphrey, Miller, Scapens (1993) which also concern the
UK, associates neoliberalism solely with the UK even though their research object, a European directive, is international from the outset. The great narrative
of neoliberalism had not yet been written in the mid-1990s.
7
“This concept is proposed by Williamson (1990), to underline the points that are common to all the economic reforms so far presented as a remedy for
the monetary problems of Latin American countries: budgetary discipline and tax reforms, public spending cuts, less restriction on trade and financial
markets, privatisation, protection of ownership rights, and more generally deregulation. The expression caught on immediately.” (Dezalay & Garth, 1998, p.
121, my own translation).
8
In accounting research, for example, Neu and Ocampo (2007) (first submission 13 January 2005) have addressed these policies, but without any
reference to the word neoliberal, in line with the trends I observe for the period.
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although these areas are present in the corpus studied, they are still not extensively examined. Also, the doctrinal sources of
neoliberalism have been traced to the Mont Pèlerin Society, an international learned society established in 1947 by Friedrich
Hayek, involving liberal economists from various allegiances: Austrian (notably Hayek), German (including ordoliberals like
Walter Eucken), and American (including Milton Friedman) (Audier, 2012; Dixon, 2008; Mirowski & Plehwe, 2009). This
origin allows criticism to use the encompassing term of “neoliberal” to connect the reconstruction of federal Germany
around the postwar Mark and the “ordoliberal”-inspired European construction with the “ultraliberal”-inspired policies of
Reagan and Thatcher (Dardot & Laval, 2009; Foucault, 2008).9 The influence of this interpretation opens the door to new
objects in the accounting criticism of neoliberalism, such as European policies or the Greek debt crisis (*Morales, Gendron,
Guénin-Paracini, 2014).
Among the possible avenues for more in-depth critical accounting research on neoliberalism, I strongly suggest that it
should address more diverse objects, drawn from those associated with neoliberalism more recently than the objects that
have mainly occupied it so far; while acknowledging that the objects already examined have at least had the merit of
enabling the research to forge several analytical instruments, which we shall now study.
The next Section (1.3) continues the focus on the concept of neoliberalism: I seek to identify the major approaches to the
question of neoliberalism in the articles identified, especially the meaning assigned to the term. The second part of the
article, which more specifically considers accounting in the same corpus, leads me to address other questions such as the
way the “accounting” object is conceptualised (Section 2.1) and the identified forms of contribution made by accounting to
the neoliberal phenomenon (Section 2.2).
2.3. Some theoretical approaches to the question of neoliberalism
Although it is not always easy to establish a clear association between articles and theoretical approaches, three major
approaches to the question of neoliberalism can be identified. The first relates to the Marxist tradition, and sees
neoliberalism as a phase of capitalism. The second considers it as a political discourse and sometimes also has a Marxist
tendency (using the concepts of ideology or hegemony). The third engages in dialogue with the Foucauldian tradition and
sees neoliberalism more broadly as a manifestation of liberal governmentality. As we shall see, each of these approaches
involves choices concerning specific objects of study, and particular methods of demonstration.
2.3.1. Neoliberalism as a phase of capitalism

In this interpretation, broadly popularised by the work of researchers such as Duménil [18_TD$IF]and Lévy (2001, 2011) and taken up
by Harvey (2005), the current phase of capitalism is associated with neoliberalism, i.e. policies actively pursued by States,
and financialisation, i.e. the growing importance of “finance” in the operation of the economy. Neoliberalism is thus a stage of
capitalism, the latest so far, and its chief feature is its reinforcement of the power and income of the capitalist class. In this
analysis, whatever official motives and discourses are associated with economically liberal policies, only a class analysis can
uncover the truth.
The article published by *Arnold and Cooper (1999) was the earliest in my corpus to present a case study combining
neoliberal policies, in this case the privatisation of an English port, with class analysis. It was followed by *Cronin (2008) and*
Jupe and Funnell (2015) in a well-established tradition of critical research studying accounting from a class relations angle,
especially as regards the situation of workers, whose exploitation is hidden from sight in capitalist forms of calculation,
although it lies at the source of profit. What is new is that these analyses extend to public policies and public actors who may
find themselves just as dispossessed as workers, for the greater profit of capitalists. Some of the research thus consists of re-
establishing “the true account”. The case of privatisations, many of which are analysed in the corpus as noted earlier, is
particularly appropriate to this type of research, since from the outset privatisations are operations to increase capitalist
ownership.
The link between neoliberalism and financialisation,10 which is also considered as a result of neoliberal policies designed
to make the financial markets more important, or to reinforce shareholder primacy (i.e. the primacy of the capitalist class)
has been explored in more recent times, essentially since the financial crisis (eg. *Cooper (2015)). The type of public policies
examined in this stream of research tends to relate to financial market regulation and the influence assigned to financial
actors in orientation of the rules governing economic life, which of course include accounting standards (eg. *Zhang, Andrew,
Rudkin, 2012; *Zhang, Andrew, 2014).
In this productive research perspective, it seems to me that there is still a lack of accounting research able to provide a
better description of the phenomena of rising inequalities and displacement of the sites and forms of profit formation that
have come with the new capitalism. They are fairly well described at macro-economic level (Epstein, 2005; Krippner, 2005;
9
This operation is not unproblematic, because the narrative tends to deny the profound conflicts between the various trends of “neoliberalism” that were
present in the Mont Pèlerin Society until the 1960s (Audier, 2012).
10
The process of financialisation of the economy, which has been developing for more than two decades, is described in several ways: the growing
importance of the financial markets in economic regulation and funding of investments, the dematerialisation of markets that makes worldwide
interoperability possible, the progressive decompartmentalisation of banking and insurance activities, the unfettered inventiveness of financial
engineering, the increasing contribution of financial activities to developed nations’ GDP, etc.
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Lin & Tomaskovic-Devey, 2013; Piketty, 2014), although for a relatively small number of countries, and with a notable
inability to document the effects of globalisation, since the statistics are national while the actors are transnational (Durand,
2014). *Sikka (2015) has begun to propose some analyses of the “role of accounting and accountancy firms in deepening
income and wealth inequalities and the economic crisis” for the United Kingdom, and these should now be extended. There is
also a shortage of research at organisational level, inside the new “secret laboratory of production” (to use Marx’s
expression), which would help us understand how income distribution is founded on an understanding of the structures of
financialised, neoliberal capitalism, i.e. an organisation of the economy in which the power of financial actors has increased
and the legal context has been broadly redefined. Accounting researchers have the resources and skills to explain the
mechanisms at work at micro-economic level, in particular what public policies are doing to profits. Participation in
multidisciplinary research by accounting researchers alongside economists and lawyers, who are to some extent in search of
such skills, is certainly a dynamic that should be encouraged.11
2.3.2. Neoliberalism as a (hegemonic) discourse

This approach to the neoliberal question may take for granted the previous interpretation of neoliberalism as serving
capital, or may remain agnostic. What all these articles have in common is their focus on the strength of neoliberal ideas and
the associated rhetoric. What is then recognised as an ideology inspires public policies, organises their presentation and
public justifications by supplying analyses and a phraseology, emphasises certain modes of problematisation and the search
for solutions. The writings of Gramsci (1971) on hegemony, or of Chomsky (1989, 2003) and Herman and Chomsky (1988)
can be used to examine the cases studied.
*Arnold and Cooper (1999), for example, refer to Gramsci’s analyses concerning the different roles and positions of
“organic intellectuals” to understand the role of auditors in the wave of neoliberal privatisations. *Merino, Mayper, Tolleson
(2010) present the different tactics used to gain consensus – coercion, agenda-setting (for example through lobbying or
political campaign contributions), and manufactured consent – considering this last tactic, based on the power of ideas, as
“the most effective form of power”.
Endowing the neoliberal discourse with a hegemonic nature means it can be considered to play a crucial role in
implementation of the reforms studied (eg. privatisations); also, for more recent periods, it can explain the apparent inability
of crises and scandals to lead to a change of political direction. *Merino, Mayper, Tolleson (2010) attempt to analyse the
Sarbanes-Oxley act’s inability, after a series of accounting scandals including Enron and WorldCom, to “address the systemic
problems associated with deregulation”. *Morales, Gendron and [159_TD$IF]Guénin-Paracini refer to a “failed scandal” in discussing the
effects of the discovery that Greece had used accounting manipulation on its national debt; this did not result in any long-
term questioning of the financial derivatives industry, even though derivatives were also central to the 2008 financial crisis.
These authors use a detailed press review to show how presentation of the crisis problem in a way that stressed Greece’s
failings ultimately superseded the initial responses blaming the role of financial actors. *Cooper, Danson, Whittam, Sheridan
(2010) show from a study of an attempted tax law reform in Scotland that “one of the tricks of ideology is that it makes it very
difficult to imagine alternatives” (p.209).
One of the notable research perspectives emerging from this approach is the need for a better combination of actor-based
approaches (as proposed by *Andrew and Cortese (2013), who map out the actors involved in the Climate Disclosure
Standards Board) with discourse-based approaches that pay attention to problematisation and framing operations (as used
by *Morales, Gendron and Guénin-Paracini (2014)). The risk of staying at the discourse level is that power may be attributed
to the discourse alone. This research direction could also be an opportunity to develop Bourdieusian research into
neoliberalism,12 since as Bourdieu (1998, p.1) explains, “neoliberal discourse is not just one discourse among many. Rather, it is a
‘strong discourse’ – the way psychiatric discourse is in an asylum, in Erving Goffman’s analysis. It is so strong and so hard to combat
only because it has on its side all of the forces of a world of relations of forces, a world that it contributes to making what it is. It does
this most notably by orienting the economic choices of those who dominate economic relationships. It thus adds its own symbolic
force to these relations of forces. ( . . . ) The neoliberal program draws its social power from the political and economic power of
those whose interests it expresses”. On the whole these comments have yet to be converted into a research programme.
Another pitfall for analyses considering neoliberalism as a hegemonic discourse is that in highlighting its infinite
repetition, they tend to reinforce the strength of that discourse. There is a risk that the researchers will only pay attention to
parts of the political construction that serve their analysis, and play down anything to the contrary. Research into
neoliberalism as a hegemonic discourse should, in my view, take a more plural view of the concept of neoliberalism, to show
that today, as in the 1950s (Audier, 2012), the corpus of doctrine is not all that homogeneous and internal struggles exist; it
should also take seriously the counter-discourses and competing discourses, in order to account for the variable
11
One illustration is the research by Baud and Durand (2012), which is a good example of cooperation between an accountant and an economist.
12
I did not encounter any Bourdieusian research in my inquiry. *Jayasinghe and Wickramasinghe (2011) use the work of Bourdieu to account for the way
“neoliberal” poverty alleviation schemes are implemented in an Sri Lankan fishing village. But Bourdieu does not really help their understanding of
neoliberalism. The other article claiming a central reference to Bourdieu is by *Cooper and Coulson (2014), but the inspiration for their research is more
Bourdieu’s figure as a public intellectual than his theoretical work.
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achievements of neoliberalism evidenced in studies like *Jayasinghe and Wickramasinghe (2011) in Ski Lanka, or
*Mennicken (2010) in Russia.13 It is important to identify resisting and opposing forces, and to seek to theorise them as
*Smyth (2012) does in the case of contestation of social housing policies. Alternative discourses are all the more likely to be
neglected if the very people who call for them simultaneously stress their futility. Also, there are many different reasons for
undertaking neoliberal-style reforms (Fourcade-Gourinchas & Babb, 2002), and it is equally obvious that the language that
has come to be considered neoliberal, with its emphasis on individual responsibility, transparency and the role of civil
society, is also increasingly used by actors who appear to be more preoccupied with social or environmental progress than
economic profitability. The strength of the neoliberal discourse lies perhaps in its ability to redefine the whole world. And if
so it is perfectly possible for alternatives to be expressed partly in the same language, if only to have some influence on the
world. In fact this is the type of reflection suggested by Ferguson (2009) when he describes his ambivalence towards South
Africa’s Basic Income project to reduce poverty. These initiatives could no doubt be considered as nothing more than an
operation by which neoliberal capitalism attempts to take over its critics, in line with my own previous research (Boltanski &
Chiapello, 2005; Chiapello, 2003), but with the proviso of understanding that while it tends to weaken the force of
contestation, this “taking over” also transforms the way the world works, and that criticism also acts on the world by being
taken over (Chiapello, 2013).
2.3.3. Neoliberalism as governmentality

This third approach to neoliberalism, inspired by Foucault, can engage in dialogue with the other two, particularly the
view of neoliberalism as an ordered discourse that organises the world, because they all three consider it as a political
project. Yet there are fundamental differences in what is scrutinised, and the association with capitalism is here largely non-
existent.
This time, neoliberalism is understood as “part of a much wider phenomenon, a shift in the rationalities and practices of
Western processes of government” (*Humphrey, Miller, Scapens, 1993, p. 13). In fact when Foucault (2008) refers to
neoliberalism (i.e. German ordoliberalism of the 1930s to 1950s, and postwar American neoliberalism) in his lecture of 31
January 1979, it is not in order to criticise it but to place it in the continuity of the new (liberal) art of governing, which was
invented in the 18th century and has a complex relationship with freedoms, because it must produce them, and in doing so
may destroy them. The specificity of approaching the government of people from the standpoint of their freedom developed
by neoliberalism is in Foucault’s view – as compared to “old” economic liberalism – not that it reduces the State’s role to
make room for the market (the laissez-faire approach), but that it actively produces a society, subjects, and the markets
themselves – which are no longer considered “natural” – so that they will produce benefits, and organise and regulate the
interaction of liberties. This requires the human being to become a calculating subject, set up as an entrepreneur responsible
for himself, in order to be governed based on his interests: the homo economicus becomes the sole interface between power
and the individual. This long lineage of neoliberalism – which *Rose (1991) also associates with the lineage of democracy –
casts light on the seductive appeal of neoliberal policies, which the critical research generally finds difficult to recognise,14
having failed to continue the reflection initiated by *Humphrey, Miller, Scapens (1993): “much of the ‘success’ of Thatcherism
and its neoliberalist philosophy in the public sector has resided in its ability to link together and give coherence to a diverse range of
criticisms of welfarism and the mechanisms of social government; criticisms coming not just from the ‘New Right’, but from radical
socialists, sociologists, feminists, civil libertarians, social researchers and the newly constituted welfare consumers” (p.13).
The Foucauldian approach to the liberal art of government, when it is not trying to grasp theories of government, is
interested in practices of power and the many apparatuses through which subjects are both produced and governed. And
accounting and its practitioners play a specific role, by participating in the production of a governable world: “Neo-liberal
rationalities of government may revive the old nineteenth-century liberal themes of freedom, the market and choice. However, they
become possible bases for a technology of government only in the presence of a population of personal, social and economic actors
who will reason and calculate their freedom. They require a numericised environment in which these free, choosing actors may
govern themselves by numbers. And they depend upon the elaboration of an expertise of number, embodied in all those professions
(economists, accountants, statisticians, demographers) and all those techniques (censuses, surveys, national income tabulations
and formulae, accounting practices) which render existence numerical and calculable” (*Rose, 1991, p. 691). From this
standpoint, even though Foucault considered governmentality via a reflection on the State, his analyses encompass more
13
All the same, we should not subscribe too hastily to Harvey’s (2005) argument that the mixed achievements of the liberal agenda are essentially
explained by the “fact” that the reforms’ main objective was to restore the power of capital, which only draws on neoliberalism insofar as it serves its
purpose in different contexts.
14
*Merino, Mayper, Tolleson (2010) suggest that this difficulty (opposing a regime that wants to expand freedom) can be overcome by going back to the
classic opposition between “negative freedom” (the freedom not to be subject to the decisions of others, which for thinkers such as Friedman is the most
important freedom) and “positive freedom” (the freedom to have the capacity for action). The positive freedom of being able to do things can, for example,
justify ambitious public policies to attempt to equalise true freedoms, and is a highly desirable freedom, even for critics of neoliberalism, while Friedmanian
neoliberalism, which essentially values negative freedom (the freedom not to be subject to the decisions of others), instead proposes a dismantling of these
policies. “Positive freedom requires subsidies. There is a tradeoff between negative and positive freedom. Taxes curb some individuals’ activities, but if those
taxes provide a subsidy for education, they create freedom for others by offering more opportunities from which to choose. We rarely see discussion of
positive freedom in the academic archival literature, but it is critical to any democracy.” (*Merino, Mayper, Tolleson, 2010, p. 780)
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than the forms in which power is exercised by and inside the public administration apparatus. Liberal governmentality, just
like the disciplinary practices he studied previously, does not concern the State alone.
The introduction through New Public Management of new practices of “accountable management” (value-for money
audit, performance indicators, budgets and internal markets, etc.) (*Humphrey, Miller, Scapens 1993) has been a relevant
object of study for this approach (see also *Edwards, Ezzamel, Robson (1999) on the UK’s education reform). But other articles
in the corpus turn toward practices that are not particularly associated with the public sector. *Power (2013), for example,
discusses the development of Fraud Risk Management, which he considers “emblematic of an ongoing neoliberal project of
individualization and responsibilization” and *Johansen (2008) examines a “self-management” and “social accountability”
program developed by a Danish Savings Bank. When neoliberalism is conceived as governmentality, the special link between
this term and a specific set of public policies tends to slacken, because all the forms of conducting conducts, whatever their
space of application, are transformed historically.
Connecting neoliberalism with the liberal art of governing also tends to result in less emphasis on the [160_TD$IF]historical shift it
represents, which also explains why although many accounting research articles have drawn inspiration from this
framework, few of them are included in our corpus.15 The privatisation of expertise nonetheless seems to be identified as a
specificity of recent times: “Reaganomics and neo-liberalism are, of course, marked by a profound suspicion of the capacity of
governments to calculate and regulate in the national interest. But, at the same time, neoliberalism relies upon and seeks to utilize
the calculative capacities of individuals and firms ( . . . ) The numerical saturation of public discourse in contemporary Britain and
the U.S. reveals ( . . . ) the new importance that is accorded to all those private agencies and consultants who claim that they can
transform market conditions into numbers and to make private calculation effective. Under neo-liberalism, a new ‘privatized’
relationship between numbers and politics is born.” (*Rose, 1991, p. 690). Numbers are still necessary, but they are produced
differently.16 The globalization of auditing technologies and the spread of comprehensive audit practices are part of this new
relationship with numbers (*Mennicken, 2010). The Foucauldian approach also stresses that neoliberalism is not organising
a “State withdrawal” to the benefit of the private sector, but should instead be seen as a general rearrangement of forms of
exercising government.17
Despite the potential fecundity of the Foucauldian approach, I am still struck by the small volume of research so far
exploring the neoliberal forms of public-private reconfiguration, especially considering that Foucauldian analysis can also
consider the always uncertain coupling between government rationalities and the apparatuses and practices of power18 :
“The discrepancy between aspirations and outcomes reinforces the contrast between the eternal optimism of programmes of
government and the perpetual struggling of practices of government. The ‘congenitally failing nature’ of such practices neither
allows one to conclude that the neoliberal conception of the objects and objectives of government has floundered irrevocably nor
that it can be sustained indefinitely” (*Humphrey, Miller, Scapens 1993, p. 14). This perspective could lead to a better
understanding of neoliberalism’s resilience, which has been pointed up by the other approaches, thanks to consideration of
the seductive appeal of this art of governing and the gap between the aims and practices of power. One of the issues
identified is the possibility of thinking that certain apparatuses forged during the neoliberal wave can then be reinvested,
“taken over” by reforming projects campaigning against the social and environmental consequences of the new capitalism.
We have seen that the objects of study are partly determined by the researcher’s chosen approach; the first approach, for
example, has been used particularly to study privatisations, and the third for New Public Management. We now examine
more precisely which aspects and dimensions of accounting and its actors are linked with neoliberalism and the nature of
the relationships described.
3. Accounting and neoliberalism
The purpose of this second part is to understand how researchers referring to neoliberalism conceptualise the
“accounting” object (Section 2.1), then which forms of contribution by accounting to the neoliberal phenomenon are
identified in the literature (Section 2.2). While the first part focused on the question of neoliberalism, this part focuses on
accounting and its actors and what accounting research, due to its specific objects, can contribute to the study of
neoliberalism. This will require conceptualisation of the resources that enable accounting researchers to produce a discourse
on a systemic or global phenomenon such as neoliberalism, based on accounting elements which by definition cannot
explain the whole. More broadly, the case of neoliberalism gives me the opportunity in Section 2.2 to propose an analysis
framework that can address global economic changes from a study of accounting.
15
The same could be said of Marxist writings, even though they make up the majority of the corpus. As seen earlier, the Marxist perspective essentially
addresses the question of neoliberalism to analyse policies that have actively produced the new capitalism, but it has also produced other research not
included in the corpus studied here.
16
This phenomenon has also been identified by the authors of the first approach, since Hanlon’s (1994) work on the commercialisation of accountancy.
They argue that this commercialisation has enabled capital to make expertise its servant, and allowed the State to get round the opposition it might
encounter if it relied on internal expertise (*Arnold, Cooper, 1993; *Sikka, 2015).
17
“ . . . neo-liberalist discourse re-produced the traditional categories of the “public” and the “private” spheres that make up “society”, but expressed a shift in the
location of that boundary and the relative value attributed to the public and the private sector in favour of the latter sector.” (*Edwards, Ezzamel, Robson, 1999, p.
476)
18
*Mennicken (2010) is the only really successful example of this type of research that makes reference to neoliberalism from the outset.
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3.1. Accounting as tool, a project or an object?
The articles studied approach accounting from different angles. One of the singularities of critical approaches to
accounting appears in the viewpoints adopted by the critical researchers, who did not renounce an instrumental use or a
normative project for accounting. Three different epistemological relationships intersect in the articles studied.19
3.1.1. Accounting as a tool of analysis

This is a specific feature of what I shall call positivist critical accounting research. Construction of any critical discourse
requires the existence of a normative starting point, which here is a certain definition of what is true. Using a theory of the
world considered better-adjusted to reality, for example Marx’s theory of labour value, the ultimate truth underlying the
actors’ discourses and practices in the system studied20 can be revealed, for example exploitation for the benefit of capital.
Accounting can then be referred to and reworked to show what was hidden. It is used as an instrument of evidence. Because
the critical accounting researcher is unimpressed by numbers and the surrounding discourses, he can adjust the figures as
long as he has access to the data, to show that some are growing richer to the detriment of others. In a previous study I tried to
show that Marx himself had used his learned knowledge of capitalist accounting methods to forge his understanding of
capitalism (Chiapello, 2007). Part of current research is in my view a descendant of this, even if it means the existing data
(mainly produced by the dominant players) must be taken seriously (see for example *Jupe, Funnell (2015), *Uddin, Hopper
(2003)). This critical practice is all the more essential because quantitative expression is the legitimate form of expression
today, and it is important for the critics to have figures even though they do not control the calculation centres. Critical
accountants have the expertise to construct counter-accounts. They may not be the only people developing a criticism of
neoliberalism, but their contribution to the building of counter-expertise can be decisive. They understand better than other
actors that accounting hides as much as it shows, and that making things visible also creates invisibility. And they can
usefully support demands for accountability from stakeholders other than shareholders. “Creating visibilities and breaking
silences are powerful legacies of critical accounting research and education” (*Lehman, 2012, 2013) which are still important to
pursue. Looking down from the sky of theory, this form of analysis seems repetitive in intention, but each case, each
economic sector, each legal context remains specific, and the question of the primary distribution of wealth21 arises
differently, such that we have not yet finished documenting the many forms it takes in neoliberal capitalism.
3.1.2. Accounting as a project

Accounting can also be approached from a normative angle, which could be a marker for normative critical accounting
research. The normative basis for criticism here is not the clear-sightedness provided by a certain science of social matters,
but another state of the world that is considered better according to a set of ethical principles that are not always clarified.
The researcher either stresses the existence of possible alternatives, which is particularly straightforward when those
alternatives are in the past, or directly makes reform proposals. In my corpus, for instance, *Ravenscroft and Williams (2009)
call for accounting to be reanchored in the “root metaphor of accountability and stewardship” to prevent the neoliberal drift
that considers developments in accounting through the “root metaphor of information usefulness”. *Murphy, O’Connell, Ó
hÓgartaigh (2013) reach the same conclusion, drawing on the concept of “living law” (from the work of the Austro-Hungarian
legal scholar Eugen Ehrlich (1862–1922)). *Smyth (2012) proposes a re-examination of public accountability, which has often
been used to justify neoliberal reforms, with “a re-theorisation of public accountability as a relationship where civil society seeks
to control the state”. In this case the neoliberal discourse is taken at face value, but a more exacting definition of accountability
is proposed: “in addition to the elements of transparency, answerability and report giving, the essential core of an accountability
relationship is that unless there is a form of control based on ‘reward or sanction’ then the relationship is not one of accountability”
(*Smyth, 2012, p. 231). I noted a relatively small number of these articles in the corpus. Critical research generally has trouble
seeing accounting as a tool for emancipation, and it is rarely studied from the angle of what it can be used for.22 The irenicism
in the managerial discourse that accompanies the promotion of accounting practices no doubt, acts as a disincentive, such
that the criticism either prefers to reduce all management practices to domination, or focuses mainly on denouncement, in
which case we should not be surprised that it is short on ideas for proposals. As Lacordaire observes (my own translation),
“Between the strong and the weak, between the rich and the poor, between the master and the servant, it is freedom that
19
An ambivalent relationship with numbers appears to be a constant in accounting research, in all its streams (see for example Chiapello and Desrosières
(2006) for Positive Accounting Theory, PAT). Researchers tend to move, in a single text, from a constructivist relationship with figures when they are
perceived as historical and political constructs, to a positivist relationship when the researcher is using them to make demonstrations. This contradiction is
generally resolved by the fact that “constructed figures” and “realistic figures” are not usually the same. For PAT researchers, stock market prices and
econometric analyses tell the truth, but accounting figures are social and political constructs. For critical researchers, the flows of income received by the
different stakeholders and the increasing inequalities of income and assets are real and can be described through accounting, but the financial valuations
undertaken by capitalistic actors to arrange transactions are guided by their interests.
20
PAT authors do exactly the same, but their truth is different, being based on a different theory of value.
21
I make a distinction between research for which accountants are particularly valuable (looking inside the process of value production), and other
research with a reforming aim that concentrates on redistribution via taxation or social transfers, leaving business dynamics unexplored.
22
For a notable exception, see Gallhofer and Haslam (2003).
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oppresses and the law that sets free” and spinning out the analogy, since accounting is a cousin of law, what are the possible
characteristics of an accounting that sets free?
*Cooper and Colson (2014) document the possibility of a more active role for accounting researchers, conceived on the
basis of “Bourdieu’s more ‘activist’ work since 1995, which calls for academics to participate outside of the field of academia
within progressive social movements” (p. 252). *Cooper, Danson, Whittam, Sheridan (2010) even assert that “Progressive
academics have a role to play in this by developing empirical, public policy research which can be used by social groups who
are fighting against poverty and inequality, and for a fairer society” (p. 209). In terms of research, this stance would need
researchers to be more willing to work in cooperation with the concerns of certain social movements. Some of the research in
management and accounting still carries a normative vocation,23 and it should be possible to find stronger support for the
academic legitimacy of accounting research that is both critical and normative.
3.1.3. Accounting as an object of analysis

This is the generic position for all accounting research (critical or otherwise), whether it sticks strictly to analysis, or is
associated with an instrumental use of accounting as an instrument of evidence or a normative project. Accounting research
is legitimated as a subfield of research by the fact of being the specialist of one part of the social world, the world of
accountants and their outputs, and it is judged primarily on its contribution to knowledge of these phenomena. In the corpus
studied, the objects of study are accounting academics (eg. *Ravenscroft, Williams, 2009; *Chabrak, 2012; *Boyce, 2008),
professional accountants and large audit firms (eg. *Arnold, Cooper, 1999; *Cooper, Puxty, Robson and Willmott, 1996;
*Mennicken, 2010; *Windsor, Warming-Rasmussen, 2009; *Sikka, 2015), certain calculation methods and views of
accounting (eg. *Ravenscroft, Williams, 2009; *Zhang, Andrew, *Rudkin, 2012; *Murphy, O’Connel, Ó hÓgartaigh, 2013),
certain management apparatuses (eg. *Edwards, Ezzamel, Robson, 1999; *Gill-McLure, Ironside, *Seifert, 2003; *Power,
2013), laws with an accounting dimension (eg. *Merino, Mayper, Tolleson, 2010; *Cooper, Puxty, Robson and Willmott, 1996),
the use of certain financial products that affect balance sheets (eg. *Cooper, 2015; *Morales, Gendron, Guénin-Paracini, 2014),
and more.
We now need to study how accounting research discussing neoliberalism approaches these different objects, in order to
understand what it can contribute to knowledge.
3.2. How accounting participates in neoliberalism
In this Section 1 propose an analytical classification of the various ways accounting participates in the development of
neoliberalism. This classification enables us to identify the kind of research objectives critical accounting researchers can
target when they work on neoliberalism: as specialists in accountants and accounting techniques, one of their roles is to
show that these accountants and accounting techniques actively contribute to the development of neoliberalism, how they
have done so, to what extent, why, and more. This goes beyond a simple literature review, because the distinctions I propose
are not really clear in most of the articles in the corpus. This modelling should also make it possible to initiate new research
that can document accounting’s contribution to economic and social change, more broadly than the single issue of
neoliberalism that is the main concern of this article.
I shall distinguish between the contribution of the actors of accounting (academics and practitioners) and the
contribution of “accounting techniques”, a term I shall use very broadly to cover all socio-technical devices, management
systems, and methods with an accounting dimension (eg. accounting standards, calculation and valuation methods,
documents presenting tables and accounting analyses, budget and management-by-objective systems, sets of indicators,
etc).
The contribution made by accounting techniques to neoliberalism can be studied from two angles. The first concerns the
actual construction of techniques which are influenced by the neoliberal agenda. Neoliberalism as a discourse is what
interests me here (remembering that this discourse can itself be read in several ways, with a Marxist as much as a
Foucauldian approach). From this perspective, neoliberal ideas are embedded in the production of accounting tools and
devices, in the form of “conventions” (Diaz-Bone & Salais, 2011, 2012). The analytical work thus consists of decoding the
content of accounting techniques and relating them to the discourses surrounding their origins, revealing their neoliberal
sources.
The second angle looks more at the effects of accounting techniques on the distribution of wealth and power. In this case
neoliberalism is considered more as a phase of capitalism, and the effects are tangible. The analytical work consists of
understanding how accounting equips the “tests”24; (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005; Bourguignon & Chiapello, 2005; Latour,
1984, 1987) that govern the arrangement of economic flows and the distribution of roles and power.
23
The economics-based research stream that examines questions such as the “value-relevance of accounting disclosure” is a good example of this stance,
despite its positivist language, since it produces recommendations for change in accounting standardisation to improve the market-to-book ratio. Changes
in public research funding practices are also tending to place greater emphasis on the social impact of research.
24
I use this word here to translate the French term “épreuve”, which was translated as “test” in Boltanski and Chiapello (2006) and Boltanski and Thevenot
(2006) and as “trial” in Bourguignon and Chiapello (2005) and Latour (1984, 1987).
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Table 1
Three ways to look at accounting’s participation to neoliberalism development.
1. Neoliberal ideas are embedded in accounting techniques because of the The contribution of “accounting techniques” to neoliberalism
chosen conventions
2. Neoliberal tests make use of accounting techniques
3. Accounting actors are involved in the development and promotion of The contribution of accounting actors (practitioners and academics) to
neoliberal policies neoliberalism
The three paths for studying the role of accounting in neoliberalism are discussed below in the order presented in Table 1.
The aim is to identify the effects of accounting’s use of “conventions” derived from neoliberal doctrine, as well as the effects
of implementation of new accounting-based “tests” for distribution and social selection in the neoliberal framework, and
finally to see how actors of accounting contributed to the rise of neoliberalism. The proposed concepts of conventions and
tests are also presented in more detail.
3.2.1. Studying neoliberal conventions and documenting their effects

The concept of convention attracts attention to the many choices made to produce an accounting technique.25 These
choices consist of setting conventions: conventions for recognition, valuation, classification, and more . . . every single
accounting operation is marked by the seal of some partly arbitrary choice between several possible options. In fact this is the
feature that justifies the work of accounting standardisation, intended to limit the number of practices allowed. Standard-
setters choose for the community the conventions that must be followed, but despite every effort of accounting theory to
provide foundations, these choices remain political, and the accompanying explanations look like “excuses” (Watts &
Zimmerman, 1979). Gradually, it fell to economic theories to justify and rationalise accounting choices, in a step beyond
previous standardisation practices that sought to bring order inductively by identifying “generally accepted” practices.
“Conceptual frameworks” were produced to organise coherence in the selected conventions, but this historical effort was
unable to eliminate the convention-based nature of the choices applied. Other choices could have been made, other
conventions selected. As conventions do not spring up out of nowhere, any analysis of accounting conventions must be
related to the training, socialisation, reproduction and selection of members making up “epistemic communities” (Haas,
1992) and the professions that make use of accounting artefacts.
This work of constructing any accounting tool, of choosing between alternative options for coding and framing things or
calculating figures, of drafting procedures to ensure quality in the data collected and processed . . . this “formatting work”
can also be seen a sort of investment: an “investment in forms” (Thévenot, 1984). It should be considered as an “investment”
in the same way as an investment in [16_TD$IF]machines, as setting up a “form” is costly but brings about greater yields by saving time
later (many options have already been chosen and are no longer questioned because they end up being black-boxed), and by
facilitating fluidity and regularity in action.
The authors of the articles in the corpus undertake the dual task of identifying specific “forms” related to neoliberalism
(the most common example being fair value accounting), and the communities that helped bring them into existence. Work
on accounting standards is particularly suitable for this type of analysis (eg. *Ravenscroft, Williams, 2009; *Andrew, Cortese,
2013; *Zhang, Andrew, Rudkin, 2012; *Zhang, Andrew, 2014). Mention should also be made of research challenging the work
of Positive Accounting Theory authors (eg. *Chabrak, 2012; *Cooper, 2015).
The choice of one system of conventions rather than another has specific effects that should be identified. The effects are
epistemic (because accounting techniques are intended to produce knowledge), pragmatic (because accounting techniques
are used to decide and act and thus contribute to the construction of the world and people) and political (because they take
for granted a specific organisation of the word). I propose a list of these effects in Box 1.
*Sikka (2011), for example, underlines the epistemic effects of accounting, which has presented firms in a certain light
that has conferred desirability on certain action, such as downsizing and closure in the case of UK coal mines, whereas “with
alternative assumptions, it could have been shown that the mines designated for closure made a positive contribution and
were not loss-making” (p. 9). He also questions textbooks and the countless publications by professional accounting bodies
which drum out the message that the objective of every management decision is “to maximise the profit of the company as a
whole”.
These different effects are fairly well defined, whether the situation concerns performativity (eg. Mackenzie, Muniesa, &
Siu, 2008), subjectification (Foucault, 2001), reification (eg. Bourguignon, 2005), or framing effects (cf. Critical Discourse
Analysis work), but they are usually studied separately. I propose to link them through the notion of the convention, as they
can all be analysed as effects of the conventions embedded in socio-technical arrangements.
25
Desrosières, whose work on quantification is part of this approach, contrasts the concept of “quantification” with the concept of “measurement”, which,
“inspired by the traditional epistemology of the sciences of nature, implies that something exists in a form that is already measurable under a realistic metrology, like
the height of the Eiffel tower”. But “immoderate use of the verb ‘to measure’ is misleading, leaving the conventions of quantification in the dark. The verb ‘to quantify’
in its active form (making numbers) requires elaboration and explanation of a series of conventions of pre-existing equivalences which involve comparisons, [ . . . ],
registrations, codified, replicable procedures, and calculations that can present things as numbers. Strictly speaking, measurement comes after that, as the regulated
implementation of those conventions.” [Desrosieres, 2008, p. 10–11, my own translations].
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So far, the accounting research on neoliberalism has made few attempts to decode specific accounting techniques through
a detailed exploration of the conventions on which they are based. The article by *Duval, Gendron, Roux-Dufort (2015), which
provides a discursive analysis of a highly detailed Development Agency grant application form grant-seekers must complete
is an all-too-rare example. Their “research sheds light on how the Agency, in the grant application form, frames NGOs as
financially inclined performers, focused on the standardised delivery of services as driven by financial and results-based
imperatives” (p. 49). There is also a need to extend such research on neoliberalism beyond highlighting a single effect (here,
the framing effect and discursive construction by NGOs). Other studies could try to follow the implementation of specific
techniques, in order to understand what difference they make to forms of perception and judgment in action, seeking to
diversify the diagnosis depending on the possible types of effect and types of actor.
Accounting techniques are systems for production of knowledge constructing actors’ worldviews and informing their
action, systems built on chosen conventions that are part of particular economic views and theories of the world and are
subject to debate and change. Studying the conventions embedded in accounting systems can bring out the systems of
thought on which they are based. In the specific case of neoliberalism, it is possible to seek to understand how neoliberal
ideas and discourses were able to become embedded in accounting systems, and to identify how far the existence of those
conventions produces the effects listed in Box 1.
We now discuss the decisive role of accounting systems in the distribution of resources. If neoliberalism is considered as a
phase of capitalism, then it is important to understand the roles of accounting techniques in the new forms of economic
distribution associated with this phase. The concept of the “test” makes this possible.
3.2.2. Studying neoliberal tests and documenting their effects

The way calculative practices may directly favour specific actors must be related to their function as a judgement system
that can assign “worths” (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006). The concept of the “test” refers to any judgment systems or social
arrangements organizing any testing of any entity’s abilities (an entity can be a person, a firm, a product, etc), resulting in the
ranking of tested entities by attributing “worths”. This attribution of worths can have important social consequences and
impact the way society or firms work. Indeed it frequently comes with duties, rights and powers (Boltanski & Chiapello,
2005). For example, the profit calculated by accounting can be distributed to actors, who will use it. Through its
quantification action, not only does accounting create social objects such as profit, capital, and assets which are then handled
by a multitude of users, but the figures it provides work in the same way as the attribution of prizes. Judgement leads to a
transfer of wealth (for instance when a sum of money is given with the prize), but it is also possible to use it to obtain other
social goods (for instance, being awarded a prize can open new doors and provide new social connections). Tests lead to
distributions of values and social goods (power, money, legitimacy, and more). And accounting is frequently used to
parameter tests, and this setting of parameters is crucial for it determines the judgment criteria used to attribute worths and
the fairness of the test (that is, how far it is possible to pass the test by circumventing the rules (Bourguignon & Chiapello,
2005). The role of accounting is decisive as it shapes the central tests of the capitalist world, the “share of the cake” that
business firms’ stakeholders – whoever they are (shareholders, employees, lenders, states, . . . ) [162_TD$IF]– receive (dividends, pay,
interests, taxes, . . . ) being actually largely determined by accounting calculations.
Box 1. The effects of the conventions incorporated into accounting.
Due to the epistemic nature of accounting techniques, conventions produce effects of:
– framing and education: conventions describe the world from a specific standpoint and teach users to see the world
from that perspective.
– construction of the world: they bring things into existence that would not exist without them
– veridiction: they produce specific knowledge determined by the analytical framework, and construct theories about
the world.
Due to the use of accounting techniques by actors (pragmatic dimension), conventions have the effects of:
– decisional variance reduction and normativity: conventions incorporate premises concerning the criteria and
modalities of decision-making and judgment; they teach actors how to calculate, judge and decide.
– performativity: because the actors’ action is informed by the analysis framework and models, the world increasingly
comes to resemble the theory actors have of it, and predictions tend to come true.
On the political level, there is an effect of:
– subjectification: the subject is confronted with evaluations and representations of himself and finds himself shaped
by this process, which makes him governable.
– naturalisation/reification: technical objectivity obscures the underlying conventions that are arbitrary, political and
moral in nature.
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In the corpus for this study, *Fourcade and Healy (2013) provide an example of this way of looking at accounting
techniques. They show how credit risk scores came to take on a much broader role than their initial remit of guiding
decisions by credit institutions in the United States, such that it can be hypothesised that their effects reach well beyond the
amplification and reproduction of social inequalities.
Box 2 details the wealth and power distribution effects associated with the use of accounting techniques. The way
accounting techniques actively produce a certain distribution of wealth and power may also be related to their threefold
epistemic, pragmatic and political nature.
The creative accounting techniques used by the Greek state, as studied by *Morales, Gendron, and Guénin-Paracini (2015)
are one example of production of these effects. The Greek state’s fabrication of an enhanced accounting image (the valuation
effect) gave it access to reduced interest rates for a while (the distribution effect). And until these tricks came to light, the
Greek state’s legitimacy was supported by these manipulations – before it subsequently collapsed.
So far we have concentrated on the roles of accounting techniques as vectors of neoliberal schemas (neoliberal ideas
being embedded in accounting tools through a special choice of conventions), or as contributors to the fabrication of new
neoliberal tests of distribution (accounting equipping judgement systems that favour a neoliberal order). We now need to
look at the actors of accounting, both practitioners and academics.
3.2.3. The participation of accounting actors in neoliberalism’s development

If we consider that the actors of accounting are present in situations because they are experts in accounting techniques
(eg. in standardisation arenas) or because they are required to produce analyses founded on those techniques (eg.
certifications or assessments), or to introduce new techniques (eg. new management systems in the public sector), their
contribution to neoliberalism can be considered through the dynamics that govern the production of these standards,
analyses, and tools. These dynamics of the production of accounting objects are epistemic and techno-scientific, but also
political and material. Accounting researchers studying the participation of accounting actors in neoliberalism’s
development may look at either of these dimensions of production dynamics in their work.
As far as the techno-scientific dimension is concerned, the production of accounting standards, analyses or systems is
inextricably associated with the knowledge that forms the basis of the accounting exercise and the techniques used by
practitioners. This knowledge partially obeys an autonomous logic of the activity in the sense that it has its own rules: the
experts think in terms of good professional practices, scientific relevance, practical feasibility, and legal rules. The artefacts
that are part of their traditional toolbox circulate and have their own influence in the debates. Finally, the conditions for the
discourse and devices to be endorsed, adopted and put into action are constructed by the appropriate professional
community. This perspective begs for an understanding of how neoliberal ideas have participated in production of the
expertise of accounting practitioners, who are vectors and actors of neoliberalism. It raises questions about the training of
accountants, but also the regulations governing them and what they must apply (accounting standards, for example) which
also contribute to the production of their ethos and representations.
The political and material dynamics, meanwhile, indicate power struggles and divergent interests between the actors.
Accountants are not only guided by the kind of professional knowledge they have developed: research may also seek to stress
the efforts put into lobbying, payment rules and a range of material consequences that affect their choices. Accounting
practitioners can also be seen as pursuing certain interests. These interests are not purely individual, but also result from the
forms of their professional occupation. *Arnold and Cooper (1999), for example, remind us that the work of audit firms has
been transformed, and that since the neoliberal turn a substantial share of their remuneration now comes from sales of
Box 2. The effects of accounting tests on the distribution of wealth and power.
Accounting acts on an epistemic level, producing knowledge and setting out “truth”. But this also often consists of
stating worth (wealth, or more broadly, value), and thereby establishing it.
– this is a valuation effect.
Accounting techniques are also used in different arrangements (eg. performance evaluation, incentive systems) and
because of this pragmatic dimension, they have:
– distribution effects: these set the parameters of the tests that lead to monetary distributions (tax paid to the State,
interest paid to lenders) and non-monetary distributions (status, reputation, etc).
– incentive effects: the actors react to the calculations in order to improve the distributions received.
Finally, on the political level, accounting techniques tend to produce:
[15_TD$IF]– legitimating effects: because they are embedded in important tests, they legitimate social asymmetry and
distributions. The legitimating effect also comes from “depoliticisation” of the questions produced, by technicising
them.
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advice related to the privatisation operations undertaken in all countries, relegating their statutory audit work to marginal
importance. This “commercialisation” of the profession has aligned their interests with the interests of the agents who pay
them. There is thus nothing surprising in the fact that the metrics used to account for corporate data are financialised metrics
(Chiapello, 2015) such as the Discounted Cash Flow, which emphasise the financial investor’s interest and play down the
social dimension of operations. If auditors are being paid by the public authorities to implement a neoliberal project or to
exert pressure that serves their clients’ interests, then they will be enthusiastic proponents of the neoliberal language, which
they incorporate into their reports and whose premises guide the calculations performed. *Sikka (2011) suggests for example
that as the business of tax avoidance is one of the most lucrative, it is in the interests of the Big Four accounting firms to
peddle the continual diagnosis of excessive tax pressure on business, even though it is in fact constantly declining.
It is interesting to consider both these dynamics together, since they are sources of contradiction and can foster struggles
inside the profession, or even in a single audit firm depending on the countries or specialist departments concerned, and lead
to ambivalent output. *Mennicken’s (2010) research into the history of construction of an audit profession in post-Soviet
Russia, and the research by *Cooper, Puxty, Robson and Willmott (1993) on the processes through which the Eighth European
Directive on the regulation of auditors has been implemented in the UK, for example, show these complex processes that
cross professions.
4. Conclusion and perspectives
A number of avenues for research have been identified throughout this article. Three major areas can be highlighted.
The first is that the seductive appeal of neoliberal apparatuses and some of the neoliberal discourse should be taken
seriously, as they seem to be capable of enrolling actors who are opposed to the social and environmental consequences of
the new capitalism. Some reform projects are currently being reformulated in the neoliberal Newspeak, and this
phenomenon deserves exploration. We need to account for what is currently being invented as a form of resistance inside
neoliberalism and is hidden from view by all-encompassing definitions that are too broad. The intuitions of the
governmentalism-inspired literature should be pursued on this point. How far are liberal arts of governing serving objectives
that are different from the objectives of a capitalist class whose power appears to have been restored? What contributions to
criticism can be made by the identification of controversies and debates, and discursive plurality in neoliberalism? Finally,
how can critical accounting research on neoliberalism benefit from the variable and often loose connections between the
technologies of power, programmes of government and political rationalities?
The second avenue concerns extending the research using a critical accounting analysis approach. Researchers taking this
approach use accounting as an instrument of evidence and a research tool to document social transformations, and
particularly to lift the veil of discourses of justification and reveal the reality of material exchanges. The intelligibility that the
study of accounting systems provides regarding the economic processes at work, especially at the level of organisations, is
particularly necessary today to root a major narrative26 like the story of neoliberalism in practical economic life. This
approach is also the most suitable for developing research related to the agendas of social movements, which are often
seeking accounting and financial competences and whose actors may in exchange offer other angles for diagnosis of the
same neoliberal phenomena. I am thinking particularly of environmental movements, which have trouble understanding
micro-economic dynamics although they are able to denounce their effects on the environment. Such collaborations could
also lead to normative conclusions while creating interesting spaces for progress on the first area of research presented
above. Indeed, most actors campaigning for specific causes are in a situation of pragmatic experimentation and critical
invention that cannot be subsumed into a simple stance on neoliberalism.
A third area for research would involve more detailed explorations of the varied, mixed achievements of neoliberalism,
depending on policy type, location, actor configurations, levels of analysis (from the supranational to the local), etc. Once the
existence of a global phenomenon is acknowledged, it is important to have a better understanding of how it spreads, meets
with resistance, transforms and is reinvented. I did not find any truly comparative research in the corpus studied that could
show, for example, how the same political intention expressed at supranational or national level percolates down into
national and local contexts. This is typically the type of study that could loosen the neoliberal stranglehold, at least on the
intellectual level. The fortress is kept upright by its buttresses, and the criticism of neoliberalism perpetuates neoliberalism
by opposing it. A study of the resistances, flaws and uncertain achievements is another way to fight it, not to deny the general
movement, but to show its limitations and combat fatalism.
[163_TD$IF]Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the comments received from the reviewers,[164_TD$IF] Céline Baud and the editors of Critical Perspective on
Accounting.
26
As seen in the first part, the term “neoliberalism” has gradually made it possible to aggregate a multitude of historical experiences and situations, such
that it is possible to tell the story of the western world over the last 40 years as the story of the spread of neoliberalism. The story of financialisation is
another epic narrative.
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Appendix A. Corpus of the 51 academic AAAJ, AOS or CPA articles
using “neoliberal” or “neoliberalism” in key descriptive fields (title, abstract, key words) search made on beginning of
March 2015, sorted by date, including articles available online but not yet published. These references are quoted in this
article preceded by a *, eg. *Rose (1991)
1991
Nikolas Rose, Governing by Numbers: Figuring out Democracy, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Volume 16, Issue 7,
Pages 673–692,
1993
Christopher Humphrey, Peter Miller, Robert W. Scapens, Accountability and Accountable Management in the UK Public
Sector, Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Volume 6, Issue 3, Pages 7–29
1996
David Cooper, Tony Puxty, Keith Robson, Hugh Willmott, Changes in the International Regulation of Auditors: (in)
stalling the Eighth Directive in the UK, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Volume 7, Issue 6, December 1996, Pages 89–613,
1999
Pam Edwards, Mahmoud Ezzamel, Keith Robson, Connecting Accounting and Education in the UK: Discourses and
Rationalities of Education Reform, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Volume 10, Issue 4, August 1999, Pages 469–500
Patricia J. Arnold, Christine Cooper, A Tale of Two Classes: The Privatisation of Medway Ports, Critical Perspectives on
Accounting, Volume 10, Issue 2, April 1999, Pages 127–152,
Constantinos V. Caramanis, International Accounting Firms versus Indigenous Auditors: Intra-Professional Conflict in
the Greek Auditing Profession, 1990–1993, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Volume 10, Issue 2, April 1999, Pages 153–196
2003
Shahzad Uddin, Trevor Hopper
Accounting for Privatisation in Bangladesh: Testing World Bank Claims, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Volume 14,
Issue 7, October 2003, Pages 739–774
Whyeda Gill-McLure, Mike Ironside, Roger Seifert,
The Consequences for the Management of Conflict of the Reform of English local Government Finance and Structure,
Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Volume 14, Issue 3, April 2003, Pages 255–272
2005
C. Richard Baker, What is the meaning of “the public interest”? Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, pp. 690–
703, Volume 18, Issue 5, Pages 690–703
2006
Bart Cole, Christine Cooper, Deskilling in the 21 st century: The case of rail privatisation, Critical Perspectives on
Accounting, Volume 17, Issue 5, July 2006, Pages 601–625,
2007
Sheila Ellwood, Susan Newberry, Public sector accrual accounting: institutionalising neo-liberal principles? Accounting,
Auditing & Accountability Journal, Volume 20, Issue 4, Pages 549–576,
Jane Andrew, Prisons, the profit motive and other challenges to accountability, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Volume
18, Issue 8, December 2007, Pages 877–904
2008
Bruce Cronin, Economic restructuring in New Zealand: A classical account, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Volume 19,
Issue 3, April 2008, Pages 340–382,
Thomas Riise Johansen, ‘Blaming oneself’: Examining the dual accountability role of employees, Critical Perspectives on
Accounting, Volume 19, Issue 4, May 2008, Pages 544–571
Gordon Boyce,
The social relevance of ethics education in a global(ising) era: From individual dilemmas to systemic crises, Critical
Perspectives on Accounting, Volume 19, Issue 2, February 2008, Pages 255–290
2009
Robert Jupe, New Labour, Network Rail and the third way, Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, pp. 709–735,
Volume 22, Issue 5, Pages 709–735
Larry Lohmann, Toward a different debate in environmental accounting: The cases of carbon and cost–benefit,
Accounting, Organizations and Society, Volume 34, Issues 3–4, April–May 2009, Pages 499–534,
Sue Ravenscroft, Paul F. Williams, Making imaginary worlds real: The case of expensing employee stock options,
Accounting, Organizations and Society, Volume 34, Issues 6–7, August–October 2009, Pages 770–786
Carolyn Windsor, Bent Warming-Rasmussen, The rise of regulatory capitalism and the decline of auditor
independence: A critical and experimental examination of auditors’ conflicts of interests, Critical Perspectives on Accounting,
Volume 20, Issue 2, March 2009, Pages 267–288,
Christine Cooper, Lesley Catchpowle, US imperialism in action: An audit-based appraisal of the Coalition Provisional
Authority in Iraq, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Volume 20, Issue 6, September 2009, Pages 716–734,
2010
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Barbara D. Merino, Alan G. Mayper, Thomas D. Tolleson, Neoliberalism, deregulation and Sarbanes-Oxley, Accounting,
Auditing & Accountability Journal, Volume 23, Issue 6, Pages 774–792
Andrea Mennicken, From inspection to auditing: Audit and markets as linked ecologies, Accounting, Organizations and
Society, Volume 35, Issue 3, April 2010, Pages 334–359
Jane Andrew, Mary A. Kaidonis, Brian Andrew, Carbon tax: Challenging neoliberal solutions to climate change, Critical
Perspectives on Accounting, Volume 21, Issue 7, October 2010, Pages 611–618
Christine Cooper, Mike Danson, Geoff Whittam, Tommy Sheridan, The neoliberal project—Local taxation intervention
in Scotland, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Volume 21, Issue 3, March 2010, Pages 195–210,
Bill Lee, The individual learning account experiment in the UK: A conjunctural crisis? Critical Perspectives on Accounting,
Volume 21, Issue 1, January 2010, Pages 18–30,
2011
Patty McNicholas, Carolyn Windsor, Can the financialised atmosphere be effectively regulated and accounted for?
Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Volume 24, Issue 8, Pages 1071–1096
Lee Parker, University corporatisation: Driving redefinition, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Volume 22, Issue 4, Pages
434–450,
Kelum Jayasinghe, Danture Wickramasinghe, Power over empowerment: Encountering development accounting in an
Sri Lankan fishing village, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Volume 22, Issue 4, April 2011, Pages 396–414
Prem Sikka, Accounting for human rights: The challenge of globalization and foreign investment agreements, Critical
Perspectives on Accounting, Volume 22, Issue 8, November 2011, Pages 811–827
2012
Nihel Chabrak, Money talks: the language of the Rochester School, Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Volume
25, Issue 3, Pages 452- 485
Ying Zhang, Jane Andrew, Kathy Rudkin, Accounting as an instrument of neoliberalisation? Accounting, Auditing &
Accountability Journal, Volume 25, issue 8, Pages 1266–1289
Cheryl Lehman, We've come a long way! Maybe! Re-imagining gender and accounting, Accounting, Auditing &
Accountability Journal, Volume 25, Issue 2, Pages 256–294
Stewart Smyth, Contesting public accountability: A dialogical exploration of accountability and social housing, Critical
Perspectives on Accounting, Volume 23, Issue 3, April 2012, Pages 230–243
2013
Marion Fourcade, Kieran Healy, Classification situations: Life-chances in the neoliberal era, Accounting, Organizations
and Society, Volume 38, Issue 8, November 2013, Pages 559–572
Tim Murphy, Vincent O’Connell, Ciarán Ó hÓgartaigh, Discourses surrounding the evolution of the IASB/FASB
Conceptual Framework: What they reveal about the “living law” of accounting, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Volume
38, Issue 1, January 2013, Pages 72–91
Michael Power, The apparatus of fraud risk, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Volume 38, Issues 6–7, August–October
2013, Pages 525–543,
Marcia Annisette, Viswanath Umashanker Trivedi, Globalization, paradox and the (un)making of identities: Immigrant
Chartered Accountants of India in Canada, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Volume 38, Issue 1, January 2013, Pages 1–
29,
Jane Andrew, Corinne Cortese, Free market environmentalism and the neoliberal project: The case of the Climate
Disclosure Standards Board, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Volume 24, Issue 6, September 2013, Pages 397–409
Michele Chwastiak, Profiting from destruction: The Iraq reconstruction, auditing and the management of fraud, Critical
Perspectives on Accounting, Volume 24, Issue 1, February 2013, Pages 32–43,
Gloria Agyemang, Cheryl R. Lehman, Adding critical accounting voices to migration studies, Critical Perspectives on
Accounting, Volume 24, Issues 4–5, June 2013, Pages 261–272,
Stefano Harney, Stephen Dunne, More than nothing? Accounting, business, and management studies, and the research
audit, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, volume 24, Issues 4–5, June 2013, Pages 338–349
Cheryl R. Lehman, Knowing the unknowable and contested terrains in accounting, Critical Perspectives on Accounting,
Volume 24, Issue 2, March 2013, Pages 136–144
2014
Jérémy Morales, Yves Gendron, Henri Guénin-Paracini, State privatisation and the unrelenting expansion of
neoliberalism: The case of the Greek financial crisis, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Volume 25, Issue 6, September 2014,
Pages 423–445
Ying Zhang, Jane Andrew, Financialisation and the Conceptual Framework, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Volume
25, Issue 1, February 2014, Pages 17–26,
Josephine Anne Maltby, Bringing back Thrift Week: Neo-liberalism and the rediscovery of thrift, Critical Perspectives on
Accounting, Volume 25, Issue 2, April 2014, Pages 115–127,
Christine Cooper, Andrea B. Coulson, Accounting activism and Bourdieu's ‘collective intellectual’ Reflections on the
ICL Case, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Volume 25, Issue 3, May 2014, Pages 237–254
Armin Beverungen, Casper Hoedemaekers, Jeroen Veldman, Charity and finance in the university, Critical Perspectives
on Accounting, Volume 25, Issue 1, February 2014, Pages 58–66
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2015
Robert Jupe, Warwick Funnell, Neoliberalism, consultants and the privatisation of public policy formulation: The case of
Britain's rail industry, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Volume 29, June 2015, Pages 65–85 (Available online 1 March 2015)
Anne-Marie Duval, Yves Gendron, Christophe Roux-Dufort, Exhibiting nongovernmental organisations: Reifying the
performance discourse through framing power, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, June 2015, Volume 29, Pages 31–53
(Available online 13 February 2015)
Christine Cooper, Accounting for the fictitious: A Marxist contribution to understanding accounting's roles in the
financial crisis, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 2015, Volume 30, July 2015, Special issue “Global financial crisis” Pages 63–
82, (Available online 5 October 2014)
Prem Sikka, The hand of accounting and accountancy firms in deepening income and wealth inequalities and the
economic crisis: Some evidence, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Volume 30, July 2015, Special issue “Global financial
crisis” Pages 46–62 (Available online 23 May 2013)
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YCPAC 1960 No. of Pages 18

Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2016) xxx–xxx

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Critical Perspectives on Accounting

[156_TD$IF]Critical accounting research and neoliberalism

E-mail address: [157_TD$IF]eve.chiapello@ehess.fr (E. Chiapello).

2 E. Chiapello / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2016) xxx–xxx

2. Critical accounting research and neoliberalism

2.1. The rise of neoliberalism in accounting research

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2.2. Did someone say neoliberalism?

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2.3. Some theoretical approaches to the question of neoliberalism

2.3.1. Neoliberalism as a phase of capitalism

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2.3.2. Neoliberalism as a (hegemonic) discourse

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2.3.3. Neoliberalism as governmentality

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3. Accounting and neoliberalism

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3.1. Accounting as tool, a project or an object?

3.1.1. Accounting as a tool of analysis

3.1.2. Accounting as a project

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3.1.3. Accounting as an object of analysis

3.2. How accounting participates in neoliberalism

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3.2.1. Studying neoliberal conventions and documenting their effects

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3.2.2. Studying neoliberal tests and documenting their effects

Box 1. The effects of the conventions incorporated into accounting.

On the political level, there is an effect of:

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3.2.3. The participation of accounting actors in neoliberalism’s development

– this is a valuation effect.

Finally, on the political level, accounting techniques tend to produce:

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4. Conclusion and perspectives

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Appendix A. Corpus of the 51 academic AAAJ, AOS or CPA articles

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Audier, S. (2012). Néo-libéralisme (s). Paris Grasset.

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