Accounting, Ideological and Political Work and Chinese multinational operations: A neo-Gramscian perspective

Xinxiang Li and Teerooven Soobaroyen

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, 2021, vol. 74, issue C

Abstract: This paper critically analyses the role of accounting in China’s new phase of politically driven economic reforms, which is the international expansion of Chinese enterprises. In particular, the paper examines how China’s multinational state-owned enterprise (SOE) and its managers conceive of, and use, accounting and control practices in response to the state’s international political and economic objectives. Drawing upon neo-Gramscian concepts of hegemony, this study contends that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has sought to create and maintain its hegemony by turning its political ideologies into initiatives of “economic development”, articulated through intensive ideological and political work exercised from the national to the organisational level. The study highlights the role of SOE managers in accommodating accounting and control practices in line with the state’s hegemonic and ideological demands. Crucially, it reveals the ability of managers to coordinate and balance the state’s political ends and the enterprise’s economic interests, where there is a selective use of accounting and control practices deployed for reasons beyond their economic functionality. This paper argues that it is necessary to include the superstructure and economic base of the Chinese state in a hegemonic analysis, and to investigate how the managerial cadre engages with ideology building at the organisational level. By focusing on the Chinese state’s new political dynamism regarding the expansion of multinational business operations, this paper provides new insights into the complexity of the motivations underlying the use of accounting and control practices in a globalised context.

Keywords: Accounting and control practices; Ideological and political work; Chinese multinationals; Hegemony; Ideology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1045235420300137
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:crpeac:v:74:y:2021:i:c:s1045235420300137

DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2020.102160

Access Statistics for this article

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING is currently edited by Marcia Annisette, Christine Cooper and Yves Gendron

More articles in CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().