Not on the ruins, but with the ruins of the past – Inertia and change in the financial reporting field in a transitioning country

Abstract

We investigate how local actors in the Romanian financial reporting field mobilize their indigeneity to enact and operationalize transnational financial reporting models in a context where neoliberal ideas represent a substantive change in respect to the past. We mobilize interviews with local key actors, evidence from multiple data sources, and Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to investigate how inertia and change are intertwined. We explain how the Romanian state continues to draw on and reproduce the local accounting inclinations inherited from communist times. At the macro level, the state’s actions (through the role of financial reporting regulator) suggest a strong agency exerted in the backstage, paralleling the appearance of accepting International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in the frontstage. At the micro level, where rules are operationalized, indigenous professionals deal with their historically created habitus and with various destabilizing influences from newcomers to the financial reporting field, which reflects diverse relationships and power imbalances between nascent actors of a market economy. We show that habitus is critical in understanding the complicated dynamics of inertia and change in accounting practices. Our results illustrate a web of improvisation, imitation, hybridization, and reinterpretation of both locally traditional and Western principles as local accounting rules and practices become global and remain local.