Accounting and development

This project aims at exploring transformative roles that various calculative practices (especially accounting in its various forms including management accounting and financial accounting) play in ‘modernising’ and development of peripheral non-western societies, which are often labelled as Less Developed Countries (LDCs). We are especially interested in the exploration of:

1. different socio-political, cultural and institutional processes and apparatuses through which western notions of accounting are transferred to these peripheral societies (e.g. role of NGOs and microfinance in bringing ‘accounting’ as a modernising technology to organise economic activities of peripheral rural communities);
2. how such peripheral societies react, respond, accommodate and resist such ‘modernising’ movements;
3. accounting and accountability paradoxes resulting from such encountering of western notions of ‘modernisation’ (for example, as embedded in accounting technologies) and peripheral socio-cultural and political idiosyncrasies.

Empirical focus can vary covering, for example, microfinance, NGO accountability, role of accounting in mitigating (or reproducing) crony capitalism, patronage and corruption and even organisational level transformation of control systems through importation of western management accounting techniques such as Balanced Scorecards (BSC), activity-based costing (ABC) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) packages.

Methodological approaches can range from case studies to surveys but with an aim of contributing to on-going academic debates especially pertaining to theoretical/empirical issues of development, accounting and accountability in LDCs.

Theoretical frames could broadly be ‘critical’ and ‘political economy’ and can range from Orthodox Marxist to various post-structuralist and institutionalist theoretical stances.