Justifying accounting change through global discourses and legitimation strategies. The case of the UK central government.

Accounting has been viewed, especially through the lens of the recent managerial reforms, as a neutral technology that, in the hands of rational managers, can support effective and efficient decision making. However, the introduction of new accounting practices can be framed in a variety of ways, from value-neutral procedures to ideologically-charged instruments. Focusing on financial accounting, budgeting and performance management changes in the UK central government, and through extensive textual analysis and interviews in three government departments, this paper investigates: how accounting changes are discussed and introduced at the political level through the use of global discourses; and what strategies organisational actors subsequently use to talk about and legitimate such discourses at different organisational levels. The results shows that in political discussions there is a consistency between the discourses (largely NPM) and the accounting-related changes that took place. The research suggests that a cocktail of legitimation strategies was used by organisational actors to construct a sense of the changes, with authorisation, often in combination with, at the very least, rationalisation strategies most widely utilised. While previous literature posits that different actors tend to use the same rhetorical sequences during periods of change, this study highlights differences at different organisational levels.

Inside the tent: Community and government in refugee camps

Refugee camps are increasingly managed through a liberal rationality of government similar to that of many industrialized societies, with security mechanisms being used to optimize the life of particular refugee populations. This governmentality has encompassed programmes introduced by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and various non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to build and empower communities through the spatial technology of the camp. The present article argues that such attempts to ‘govern through community’ have been too easily dismissed or ignored. It therefore examines how such programmes work to produce, manage and conduct refugees through the use of a highly instrumentalized understanding of community in the spatial and statistical management of displaced people in camps. However, community is always both more and less than what is claimed of it, and therefore undermines attempts to use it as a governing tactic. By shifting to a more ontological understanding of community as unavoidable coexistence, inspired by Jean-Luc Nancy, we can see how the scripting of and government through community in camps is continually exceeded, redirected and resisted. Ethnographies of specific camps in Africa and the Middle East enable us both to see how the necessary sociality of being resists its own instrumentalization and to view the camp as a spatial security technology. Such resistance does not necessarily lead to greater security, but it redirects our attention to how community is used to conduct the behaviour of refugees, while also producing counter-conducts that offer greater agency, meaning and mobility to those displaced in camps.

Delineating human resource management practice in domestic and foreign owned multinational enterprises in Australia

To date there is an absence of any systematic and extensive data on Australian multinational enterprises (MNEs). This research paper fills the information gap and leads to a discussion of the human resource management (HRM) practices of Australian MNEs in the global arena and whether there is a distinctive national identity associated with these practices. We report on the profile of Australian-based multinational enterprises (MNEs). Drawing on a systematic database developed by the authors in 2010–11 we are able to identify the numbers of Australian MNEs and their characteristics and compare them against a representative sample of foreign-owned MNEs operating in Australia.