The Impotence of Accountability: The Relationship Between Greater Transparency and Corporate Reform

Abstract

This paper explores the role of accounting in the attempted reform of the corporation during the "progressive era" in the United States. Focusing on the activities of three institutional bodies in the early twentieth century, the paper documents how their repeated recourse to "publicity," which relied crucially on accounting technologies, failed to turn the corporation into an entity more sensitive to the public interest. Specifically, two interrelated contributions are made to existing literature on accounting and corporate governance. Firstly, the paper documents the early historical development of the now taken-for-granted phenomenon of accounting and adjudicating at the entity level (Miller and Power 2013). Secondly, the paper offers a rejoinder to present-day projects of corporate governance which identify better and enhanced accountability as key to the successful reform of the corporation. During the progressive era, accounting expanded and territorialized new spaces, bringing trusts out of a hitherto secretive, private realm and into the view of the public. Yet this was not enough to engender substantive corporate reform.

The Construction of the Efficient Office: Scientific Management, Accountability, and the Neo‐Liberal State

“…Finally, similar to Radcliffe et al (), our paper offers a “history of the present.” In the latter study, the authors examine the political struggles behind the first legislation on corporate disclosure in the United States in 1933, legislation which is generally viewed as the original impetus for contemporary accounting disclosures. Our own study, we suggest, also contributes to current debates in accounting research, in particular to the role of accounting within neo‐liberal society.…”

“…For accounting scholarship in this vein, see Carter and McKinlay (), Graham (), McKinlay and Pezet (), McKinlay and Pezet (2017), Neu (), Preston et al (), Radcliffe (, ), Radcliffe et al (), Rahaman et al (), Richardson (), and Spence and Rinaldi ().…”

Auditing and the Development of the Modern State

“…A similar dynamic is illustrated by Radcliffe et al (2017) in a recent history of corporate governance in the United States. 7.…”

Strategic change, leadership and accounting: A triptych of organizational reform

“…Going beyond the boundary of an organization, accounting can mediate between the micro level of the organization and wider meso and macro levels. By way of illustration, Radcliffe et al () demonstrate how wider rationalities of corporate reform in the progressive era in the United States intertwined with specific programmes enacted by public sector regulatory bodies who, in turn, relied crucially on the elaboration of accounting as a means of identifying corporate malfeasance. In this way, accounting at the entity level made wider discourses of corporate reform both thinkable and possible.…”

“…Miller was centrally involved with the Ideology and Consciousness journal, which was associated with post‐Althusserian thought (Louis Althusser was a highly influential Marxist intellectual, associated with theorizing ideological state apparatuses, a prelude to governmentality). Governmentality itself has become one of the most prominent theoretical positions within IA (Neu ; Spence ; Mennicken and Miller ; Jeacle ; Radcliffe et al ). Mike Power is well known for his work on the audit society (Power , ), the risk society (Power 2009) and, most recently, accounting infrastructures (Power ).…”