The Third Policeman: ‘The true and fair view’, language and the habitus of accounting

The calculative reproduction of social structures – The field of gem mining in Sri Lanka

“…A recent paper by Hamilton and Ó hÓgartaigh (2009) comes rather closer to the way I intend to deploy Bourdieu in this paper. Their attention is on how accounting doctrines, especially the notion of true and fair view (TFV), become what they are: systems of symbolic violence that maintain and reinforce the institutionalised hierarchy of the accounting field.…”

“…It helps us, on the one hand, together with rich ethnographic accounts, to understand accounting as a carnal practice (i.e. practices so inseparably in the bodies and souls of people who carry them out that those bodies and souls are defined by those accounting practices), and its defining principles (such as the notion of true and fair view and field-specific reporting templates) as historical products of such carnal practices (see also Hamilton and Ó hÓgartaigh, 2009). On the other hand, it also helps us to see accounting as a powerful symbolic system through which structural properties of the field are cognised, communicated, reproduced and transformed into a set of practical dispositions that orient day-to-day work practices.…”

From four to zero? The social mechanisms of symbolic domination in the UK accounting field

“…Outside of accounting, symbolic violence has been linked to business planning, whereby language and the processes of naming, categorising and regularising allowed dominant agents to replace one set of meanings with another (Oakes et al, 1998), and more recently to the globalising of the Scottish banking elite (Kerr and Robinson, 2012). Whilst much research tends to focus on the importance of language in symbolic violence, the present research shares the underlying sentiments of Hamilton and Ó hÓ gartaigh (2009) that symbolic violence is evident in 'collective beliefs' and the rites and rituals of the profession, which go beyond language and shared meaning (Bourdieu, 1991;Hamilton and Ó hÓ gartaigh, 2009). …”

25 Years of Giddens in accounting research: Achievements, limitations and the future

“…Papers with their main focus on financial accounting or auditing-issues (e.g. Hamilton & Hogartaigh, 2009). …”