Political controversies over accounting technologies - The case of ‘other comprehensive income’

Despite analyses of accounting standard-setting as a political process, how controversies over proposed accounting technologies proliferate and endure remains largely under-studied. To explore this, we take a distinctive approach to the one taken by existing studies that has largely focused on constituents’ interests and ideological conflict. Drawing on the notion of the ‘political’ of artefacts from actor-network theory we investigate how the features of accounting technologies become objects of contestation during due process deliberations. We employ the case of other comprehensive income (OCI) and use empirical evidence from standard setters’ discussion papers and users’ responses to these to identify and discuss the ‘political qualities’ it is attributed with. We find that the articulation of these qualities works to amplify the controversies OCI is designed to address and to create new controversies. Our analysis reveals how controversies around accounting technologies can interact and multiply forming ‘political situations’ resulting in inadequate or incoherent policies. Accounting technologies are also found to be ‘ontologically political’ as their qualities are shaped and contested in their construction prior to their actual use, implying that alternative configurations are both possible and imaginable. Overall, our paper demonstrates the value of studying the object-centred socialities of accounting regulation.