François-Régis PUYOU

Purpose - This paper answers calls for an in-depth, critical evaluation of carbon accounting practices by examining the missing link between knowing about and acting on carbon emissions. It explores how managers may decide to ignore uncomfortable absolute carbon emission calculations and instead develop home-made carbon accounting models of avoided emissions in order to support the status quo. Design/methodology/approach - This in-depth single case study based on 23 interviews and substantial non-participant observation (28 days) builds on the notion of displacement as a discursive mode of ignorance to better understand why knowledge generated by Carbon Accounting Tools (CAT) can be considered uncomfortable and may in fact encourage the status quo. Findings - The case study shows that the voluntary production of carbon accounting calculations is not always synonymous with improved carbon emission performance. Focusing on home-made carbon accounting models, instead of on uncomfortable absolute carbon accounting calculations, can have a negative, rather than a positive, effect on environment-friendly decisions. Furthermore, in the case examined, this decision was not viewed favorably throughout the company, with some employees expressing their unease that the company had merely replaced an uncomfortable metric with a more favorable one. Originality/value - The study builds on the concepts of displacement and uncomfortable knowledge to argue that CAT that avoid creating tensions with a company’s economic growth objectives have little impact on promoting sustainable practices. By using carbon accounting models to focus on avoided emissions, managers can deliberately move attention away from uncomfortable absolute carbon accounting calculations, thereby legitimating the status quo.

"Purpose This research interrogates how the construction of narratives and accounting forecasts contributes to managing the emotional state of actors involved in reporting meetings by promoting discourses of hope in their organization's future, mitigating their anxiety. This study shows how narratives are built from multiple antenarratives and accounting forecasts, which restore and strengthen organizational actors' commitment to their organizations. This study contributes to a better understanding of the role played by narratives and accounting documents in mitigating organizational members' anxiety. Design/methodology/approach Over eight months, an interventionist research design method gave one of the authors the opportunity to record discussions held during reporting meetings in a business incubator. These recordings captured the production of narratives and forecasts in these meetings. Findings This study shows how the production of multiple antenarratives and accounting forecasts helps organizational actors who attend reporting meetings mitigate the anxiety triggered by disappointing performance figures and restore collective discourses full of hope for the organization's future. This case highlights how personal antenarratives and successive versions of accounting forecasts contribute to restoring a collective commitment to a failing organization. Originality/value This study refines current understanding of the under-explored links between accounting forecasts, narratives and anxiety management. The study provides insight into how accounting practices contribute to the production of narratives that successfully restore organizational members' commitment to working for a failing organization. The study also exemplifies the original insights gained from interventionist research protocols."

"Purpose: Increasingly, emerging information technologies such as shared software and continuous accounting are offering alternative ways to perform accounting tasks in a supposedly more efficient fashion. Yet, few studies have investigated how they affect the provision of accounting services, especially in the context of small accounting firms, which provide legal and tax services to entrepreneurs and businesses. Drawing on the service perspective, the paper critically examines how technological innovation challenges and reconfigures the co-production of accounting services in these firms. Design/methodology/approach: The paper answers calls issued in prior studies to conduct empirical research on emerging information technologies for accountants. It focuses on the specific context of small accounting firms and draws on interviews with small accounting firms' managers (n = 20). Findings: The study emphasizes five significant challenges that accounting firm managers face when using information technologies to support the provision of their services (ensuring reliability, factoring in their heterogeneous client base, repricing, training clients to use new technologies and promoting advisory services). Information technologies are shown to have a structuring role in the co-production of accounting services, as they lead to reconfigurations of the relationships between accountants and their clients. A range of four configurations is developed to highlight accountants' strategies to maintain collaborative relationships with their clients while integrating new technologies into their work practices. Originality/value: By conceptualizing accounting services as a co-production process, the paper offers new insights into the implications of emerging information technologies for small accounting firms."

"Increasingly, management techniques and trends in accounting are incorporated into software. Continuous accounting, understood as the automated processing of firms’ accounting records to deliver real-time financial information, can be seen as a contemporary illustration of a shared belief that newly developed software stand at the forefront of progress in accounting. While such technologies are usually pictured as promising, the dynamics underlying their diffusion among accounting firms have drawn limited scholarly interest so far. Consequently, this paper sets out to explore how management fashions diffuse when they are embedded into software from the outset and sold on intermediated markets where resellers shape the interactions between fashion setters and fashion users. While extant literature on management fashions has mostly investigated cases where innovators actively promote new management concepts and ideas towards fashion users, the paper unveils the crucial role played by market intermediaries in the selection, processing, and dissemination of innovations sold as software. A revised framework of management fashion setting in intermediated markets is developed, which simultaneously contributes to the literature on management accounting innovations embedded into software and to the management fashion theory by highlighting how market intermediaries strive to maintain control over the diffusion of innovations."

"In this paper, we draw on Foucault’s concept “governmentality” to show how a cohort of middle-aged senior managers who engaged in competitive endurance sports fabricated (avowed) “heroic” leader identities drawing on this repertoire of discursive resources. Neoliberalism constitutes a form of governmentality which encourages people to regard themselves as autonomous and to aspire to personal fulfillment by investing entrepreneurially in themselves as “human capital.” Healthism, which requires individuals be responsible for their own health and wellbeing, is one program by which this is accomplished. We analyze managers’ talk about themselves as people who self-examined, and sought continually to transform (improve) themselves, to avow identities as superior (heroic) leaders. Our study contributes to the literature on governmentality by showing how in neoliberalism “healthism” constructs managers as enterprising selves."

"This paper critically investigates the implementation of the UN guiding principles on business and human rights (UNGPs) into the corporate setting through the concept of ‘translation’. In the decade since the creation of the UNGPs, little academic research has focussed specifically on the corporate implementation of human rights. Drawing on qualitative case studies of two multinational corporations—an oil and gas company and a bank—this paper unpacks how human rights are translated into the corporate context. In doing so, the paper focuses on the “resonance dilemma” translators encounter, the strategies used to make human rights understandable and palatable, and the difficulties that emerge from this process. We contend that the process of making human rights understandable and manageable can change their form and content, which may act as an obstacle to human rights realisation and corporate accountability for human rights."

This article advocates in favor of using existing qualitative research in management as a source of narratives relevant for teaching purposes. It suggests that empirical sections of selected academic articles (i.e. scientific literature with a small ‘l’) can be isolated from their context (abstract, introduction, literature review, methodology etc.) and read as short stories (i.e. Literature with a capital ‘L’) with noticeable pedagogical benefits. It builds on the author’s personal experience of a pedagogical experiment during which empirical sections from qualitative research articles published in the field of management accounting were used as stories to enhance classroom learning experience for teachers and students alike. It argues that such stories offered a unique combination of original narratives (like novels) with scientific legitimacy (like business cases) that enriched the students’ critical understanding of what is not there in much contemporary accounting education practices: uncertainty, ambiguity, doubt and subjectivity.

"In a context characterised by the scientification of accounting practices and standards, an important question to pose is how might accounting professionals be released from an excessive focus on rationality (technical accuracy, technical neutrality and technical abstraction) and reclaim the profession in the public interest? Grounded in a person-oriented approach, we contend the common good principle can help accountants to mitigate the tyranny of economic rationality/homo economicus notably through greater consideration of public interest, thereby enabling them to exercise stronger ethical judgement. First, the common good can serve as a basis for the establishment of an ethical protocol based on the search for embedded community goods, human development and the personal good of each member. Second, the common good provides specific ethical principles including subsidiarity, totality, teleological hierarchy, long-term commitment, reality and unity that can better assist accounting professionals to exercise ethical judgement and therefore contribute to the public interest. In contrast to defending a strict adherence to ethical rules enshrined in professional codes of conduct, this article argues for an open ended protocol inspired by the common good principle. This will, we contend, better promote the re-contextualisation of accounting practices conducted by reflexive, sentient and publically-conscious practitioners."

"The article shows how secrecy – defined as the purposeful revelation of information to some and not others – is used by management accountants to pursue their roles as independent business controllers and nurture the social proximity required to be sought-after business advisers. The paper examines management accountants’ retentive and communicative strategies in reporting practices in a subset of a large multinational company. It conceptualizes systems of secrecy as the purposeful articulation between two types of revelations (confidences and gossip). It shows how confidences and gossip can be successive steps that structure informal reporting information flows and close social interactions helpful in dealing with tensions arising from attempts to manage interdependencies and to achieve individually specified targets. The article contributes to the literature on the dynamics of management accountants’ dual role by showing how they overcome the tensions between conflicting expectations through tactful and judicious distribution of information. It shows how the articulation of confidence and gossip creates a specific format of accounting talk which facilitates compromise through the succession of private one-on-one discursive spaces. It also complements the literature on management control systems (MCS) by giving a nuanced account of the virtues of secrecy in order to mitigate some of the unanticipated adverse effects of performance evaluations."