مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد تحقیقات حسابداری انتقادی و نئولیبرالیسم – الزویر 2018

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) 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.