Discourses Of Accountability Research Articles

Examining Minnesota schools’ discursive positioning and intended educational opportunities for refugee-background students

Minnesota is known for its large concentrations of Hmong, Somali and Karen refugee-background students (RBSs). Drawing on an equity/heritage framework that centres educational equity and the sustaining of the cultural and linguistic practices of minoritized communities, this study examined how district/school websites with the highest enrolment of each student group described equity/heritage focused educational opportunities for RBSs and discursively represented and positioned these students. Our findings show that these school websites largely lacked indications of equity/heritage-based educational opportunities for RBSs, especially for Somali and Karen RBSs. While the websites had a strong visual representation of their RBSs, equity/heritage-focused textual discourses were limited. Instead, discourses of neoliberalism, meritocracy and accountability driven by the global human capital framework were prevalent. We argue that RBSs should be supported with equity/heritage-focused educational opportunities and discourses at schools instead of solely on the basis of global human capital focused discourses. A limitation of our study is that the implementation and impact of these website policies on RBSs’ educational experiences were not explored. However, we also note that examining discourses embedded within these critical online spaces is crucial because they communicate certain ideologies and motives to the public that can influence their perspectives about RBSs and their educational opportunities.

Green Accounting Discourse as an Effort to Mitigate Climate Change Risk in Banks in Pandaan District

Green Accounting Discourse as an Effort to Mitigate Climate Change Risk in Banks in Pandaan District

EFL Pre-service Teachers’ Enactment of Agentic Capacities in their Online Pedagogical Practicum

The global COVID-19 pandemic has significantly changed how education is delivered and accessed. In the evolving landscape of pre-service teachers’ pedagogical practicums within teacher education programs, both teacher educators and school supervisors continue to follow traditional national bilingual policies and curricula. These frameworks, often marked by discourses of accountability, control, and prescription, fail to address the post-pandemic realities faced by second and foreign language student-teachers. Factors influencing the pre-service teachers’ capacities to take initiative and make decisions in online pedagogical practices have not yet been thoroughly explored. This case study aimed to explore how 16 pre-service teachers exercised their agency in their online EFL pedagogical practicum classes and the factors that influenced their actions. Data were gathered through surveys, focus groups, recorded class observations, whole-class discussions, and teacher’s journal. The findings suggested that an intermediate competence on educational software enabled EFL pre-service teachers’ agentic capacities, which were manifested in transformative online teaching strategies centered on learners. Likewise, the lack of computer-mediated communication literacy, bad perceptions towards online teaching, unstable connection, and unequal power relations with school practicum teachers related to textbook coverage and impossibility to address social issues critically restricted their agentic capacities. These findings urge teacher educators, practicum supervisors, and curriculum developers to incorporate innovative, teacher agency-based policies, designs, and practices in both face-to-face and online instructional environments. Doing so will raise pre-service teachers’ awareness and empower them in decision-making processes during their pedagogical practicum, ultimately contributing to societal transformation through remote education.

Teacher positioning within the figured world(s) of urban school science

AbstractAlthough research has highlighted the challenges of teaching in urban settings, particularly for science teachers, it has paid less attention to the development of science teaching identities in urban settings. This paper situates science teaching identity within societal discourses of science, education, and teaching to explore the ways in which macro‐level discourses influence the positions available to science teachers in urban schools. Using questionnaire data from 64 teachers, discourse analysis is used to demonstrate how participants reinscribe or disrupt prominent macro‐level discourses, including the elitism of science, accountability, and deficit views of urban areas, and the resulting positions that are created by this negotiation process. The findings include possible positions relative to science, education, and teaching as well as a consideration of differences between elementary and secondary teachers and between beginning and experienced teachers. Although many participants successfully disrupted damaging discourses of science as elite and disconnected, as well as discourses of accountability and the role of standardized testing, they were not able to disrupt deficit discourses that resulted in positioning themselves as outside of their students' worlds, often as saviors. The findings demonstrated the strong influence of deficit discourses on teachers' descriptions of their experiences as science teachers and the need to support teachers in understanding the historical and cultural contexts of urban education to identify and disrupt deficit discourses and create teacher positions based on asset and justice‐based views of students, schools, and communities.

Embracing Digital Advancements in Education: Assessing the Impact on Undergraduates Accounting Achievement

This study delves into the integration of digital technology within educational frameworks, specifically focusing on its influence on the academic performance of undergraduate accounting students. The study seeks to uncover the multifaceted aspects of how technological interventions shape learning outcomes, by exploring the intersections of digital tools and accounting education. Specifically, this study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the use of a digital innovation that we named as Interactive Accounting Discourse Module (INTERACC) in undergraduates’ accounting courses. This innovation provides convenience in accessing learning materials such as e-notes, discussions, and interactive assessments using digital devices and gadgets. Data were gathered through surveys with accounting students to obtain their feedback about the effective teaching and learning process especially for reading-based courses. In addition to the questionnaires, students’ performance was analyzed through the comparison of course learning outcomes achievements before and after the intervention. The findings indicate INTERACC improved the learning outcomes of the course and students showed positive attitudes toward using it in terms of its ease of use, usefulness, and accessibility. As such, this research is an attempt to contribute to the development of an interactive platform for accounting students that could create enjoyable learning, and yet informative experience.

Queering Age-Friendly NYC: A Critical Discourse Analysis

ABSTRACT This study employed critical discourse analysis to investigate the representation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) older adults in the context of New York City’s age-friendly initiative. An extensive review of over 800 pages of public records was conducted to understand how LGBTQ+ older adults were depicted within the discourse and to identify the authorities responsible for their recognition. The findings highlight the unequal representation of social identities, notably the absence of transgender and queer older adults in the examined texts. Authorities wielded discourses of power and accountability to influence perceptions of LGBTQ+ older adults, focusing on their risks and vulnerabilities. This emphasis on deficits, without acknowledgment of strengths and protective factors, has implications for age-friendly initiatives and may lead to an oversight of information necessary for the development of culturally sensitive interventions. To foster communities that are not only friendly but also equitable and just, policymakers must recognize and address subgroup variations within the LGBTQ+ population. This research underscores the importance of ensuring that age-friendly initiatives are inclusive and responsive to the diverse needs of LGBTQ+ older adults.

Bibliometric Analysis of the Development of International Accounting Research: A Review of the Literature in the Last Two Decades

This research conducts a bibliometric analysis to examine the development of international accounting research over the past two decades. Utilizing a quantitative approach, we explore clusters, highly cited publications, and keyword occurrences within the literature. The analysis reveals six distinct clusters, each highlighting key themes such as challenges in the accounting profession, financial accounting practices, cultural influences, governance dynamics, and value relevance. Additionally, the study identifies highly cited publications that have significantly influenced the international accounting discourse, offering insights into pivotal works that have shaped the field. Keyword analysis further unveils prevalent and less explored themes, with terms like "Firm," "Market," and "Accountant" emerging prominently. The abstract concludes by discussing the implications for future research, emphasizing potential avenues for exploration and the need for a nuanced understanding of the multifaceted landscape of international accounting.

The Human Side of Accountability: Dilemmas of Reaching All Learners

This portraiture-informed study by Taeyeon Kim challenges the dominant discourse of accountability, which often focuses on high-stakes policies at the expense of relational aspects of accountability in schools. Building on working theories of accountability, humanizing leadership, and paradox theory, Kim theorizes the “human side of accountability,” where leaders simultaneously address the tensions of multiple demands and implement policy mandates in ways that attempt to mitigate their unintended harm to students, particularly minoritized students. Using interviews, shadowing, photo-elicited focus groups, and artifacts generated from a yearlong qualitative study of three US elementary school principals, Kim explores how school principals make meaning of accountability in their daily practices and how they address dilemmas created by competing demands. The analysis suggests that leaders’ enactment of accountability can be understood as a daily balancing act of promoting equity to provide missing and overlooked support in policy man dates. This article thus challenges existing policy approaches and provides strategies for rethinking how processes of accountability can be imagined in school settings.

The devaluation of philosophical reflexivity in social research

ABSTRACT This paper argues that public accountability discourse and research quality processes designed to support it are associated with the validation of methodological approaches in social research which claim to capture the real condition of the social world and to remedy its ailments, supporting an expansion of representative modes of scholarship, and a technicist social research culture. Philosophically reflexive modes of thought in social research that offer an important check to power as knowledge are increasingly being marginalised. The paper concludes that the effects of discourse and practices of public accountability on methodological diversity in social research need to be considered in higher education critiques of power to resist this, necessarily entailing reflection upon the philosophical status of ‘objective knowledge’.

When the war is over: Accounting for people with disabilities

We assess the extent to which accounting discourse was used during the aftermath of the Second World War as a way of reconceptualising the notion of a person with disabilities from welfare recipient to income earner. Drawing on Foucault's notion of pastoral power, we interpret archival documents from this important period in the development of disability policy in Australia, which is so far unexplored in the accounting literature. We reveal the role of accounting in rationalising and operationalising government initiatives and programs assembled to address the ‘problem of disability’. We show that accounting terminology and techniques were mobilised as a way of justifying the transference of people with disabilities into sheltered workshops, a process that aimed to transform them into income earners who could contribute to the national economy.

Shifting language orientations: impact of state-mandated assessments on dual language educators’ language ideologies

ABSTRACT As educators can open and close implementational and ideological spaces for bilingualism, they are language policy agents. Concurrently, their language ideologies are also informed and shaped by dominant discourses such as the discourse of accountability and neoliberalism. Inspired by ethnographic studies, this qualitative study explored the interplay between midwestern dual language bilingual education (DLBE) program educators' language ideologies and their interpretation of state-mandated assessments. Qualitative data analysis was complemented by critical discourse analysis for observation and interview data collected over three months. Findings reveal that DLBE educators perceived Spanish instruction as invaluable for emergent bilingual education, demonstrating language-as-resource orientation. However, their language orientation often shifted when confronted with testing pressure, as students' performance on state-mandated assessments was used to evaluate the educators. The findings highlight that different language orientations are expressed simultaneously, indicating that the ideological orientation of language-as-problem, language-as-resource, and even language-as-right are not detached paradigms. The findings also suggest that state-mandated assessments are a powerful language policy tool, perpetuating a monoglossic ideology. A close examination of language-as-resource orientation revealed that the monoglossic ideology in bilingual programs serves the interest of white English-speaking families, which calls for critical evaluation of the orientation in future studies.

Odgovornost zaposlenih u javnoj upravi

The aim of every legal system founded on the rule of law that strives for the principle of legal certainty is to achieve effective liability to the highest extent possible. In the Serbian public administration, the long-term avoidance of accountability for different illegal acts has weakened the liability of employees who also do not feel they will be held accountable for their acts. They do not believe that an appropriate sanction is prescribed for this type of conduct. This is the case of the institutionalized forms of legal accountability, whose enforcement actions are regulated by law. We might assume the kind of the existing awareness about accountability in terms of moral norms and corresponding provisions of a soft law character The perspective of citizens on trust in public administration is largely neglected in the discourse of administrative ethics and accountability.

Community Circles in Response to Restorative Justice Research and Critique

Zero-tolerance discipline in schools has resulted in disproportionate referrals, suspensions, and expulsions for Black students, students with disabilities, and low-income students of color. Restorative Justice (RJ) seeks to intervene in these patterns by emphasizing community interconnectedness and a discourse of harm, accountability, and repair. Although RJ has been shown to increase school connectedness and decrease suspensions and expulsions, teachers and students using RJ (as a response to discipline issues) report varying degrees of satisfaction with the framework. Frustrations can include limited time and limited depth of conversations with students who have caused harm, so that root causes of behavior are not addressed or explored. Ultimately, if there is no sense of community or accountability established prior to harmful interactions, there is no justice to be restored. Community circles (a practice of ritualized egalitarian discussion) can establish the interconnectedness needed for RJ to be effectively practiced in schools. This paper instructs teachers and school staff how to plan, run, and train students to facilitate community circles in their classrooms.

The development of a multidimensional meaning of tax: From unfair tax to fair

Historically, companies have communicated taxes as a burden, as the benefits provided by governments are not perceived to be in proportion to their payments. With sustainable development becoming central in many policy areas, new discourses including ‘fair’ or ‘sustainable’ tax have become omnipresent in public talk on taxes. This paper analyzes tax discourses in corporate annual reports within this changing context to examine the use of language in the construction of the meaning of tax. By analyzing tax reporting by a state-owned multinational company over two decades, we observe that the communication of taxes increased in both number and types of discourses. Importantly, this highlights the shift in tax discourses from one dominated by codified accounting discourse reinforcing the monolithic representation of tax as an unfair expense, to one where tax is given a multidimensional meaning within a broader discursive context, where tax is a meaningful corporate responsibility to society.

Relocating the political in education: why we need to revisit the marketisation of education in the contemporary political climate

ABSTRACT This article adopts tools from political science and political anthropology to re-evaluate the prevailing discourses of accountability and marketisation that continue to shape education policies across the developing world. Following an exploration of studies promoting the quasi-marketisation of education and reforms that empower parents to exercise their voice and choice, this paper adopts principal–agent theory, social dominance theory and concept of the everyday to argue that such community-centric policies – which were initially devised to offset the capture of education by the state – may de facto lead to the education landscape becoming intrinsically politicised and reflective of national political discourses, albeit not in the way we conventionally believe. It argues that parents can no longer be regarded as passive, apolitical agents in education discourse. Rather, citizens’ interests are continually in conflict, and in a marketised system designed to respond to the interests of more dominant parents, schools may become sites in which inter-group contestations and competing political beliefs are reified. This article invites us to revise our current understanding of education and politics, and question: What – or whom – do we define as political, and why is this becoming increasingly important?

Disconnecting agricultural workers’ exploitation from migration policies: a trend towards a business and human rights approach in the European Union

AbstractSeasonal migrants’ exploitation in Europe, especially in agriculture, is often seen as having its origins in failure of migration or labour policies. Indeed, the virtual impossibility to enter a country as a regular non-European Union (EU) worker coupled with the needs of agricultural work, requiring low-skilled workforce and short time notice for recruitment, generates a perfect environment for exploitation and the related phenomenon of gangmastering. However, work exploitation in agriculture is nowadays a structural problem, requiring structural changes in the way food is produced and intended by the agri-food supply chain as a whole. Indeed, a truly preventative approach needs not only to protect seasonal migrants from human rights violations, but also to involve agribusiness in tackling the root causes of migrants’ exploitation. Building on international standards on business and human rights, the aim of this contribution is to propose a more holistic view of the phenomenon workers exploitation in agriculture. Recent European policies seem to have understood this need, calling enterprises and farmers to bear their responsibility by introducing an accountability discourse for the agribusiness and the food supply chain, either indirectly or directly. The new social conditionality clause in the Common Agricultural Policy, the Directive on Unfair Practices in Agriculture and the recent Commission proposal for a Directive on mandatory human rights due diligence should therefore be read in conjunction with major developments in international law that call for the responsibility of powerful private actors operating in agri-food sector.

Digital information systems in support of accountability: The case of a welfare provision non-governmental organisation

The paper aims at exploring how the creation of Fry's (1995) “conversations for accountability” between a welfare provision non-governmental organisation (NGO) and local institutions and private donors shaped the NGO's accountability path. To this end, the role that digital information systems (ISs) played in supporting this path was analysed. In more detail, the paper investigates how the NGO uses digital information to respond to the external pressure for accountability. This action research revealed that the construction of a shared meaning of accountability was possible because of the NGO's accountability conversations with partners that fostered and were fostered by the use of digital ISs. In this regard, organisational change toward the empowerment of digital ISs was driven by the accountability discourse. The paper indeed theorises the mutually reinforcing cycle existing between “conversations for accountability” and digitalisation of NGOs in support of their accountability path. The enactment of this mutual cycle can be particularly relevant for those small NGOs experiencing financial distress, to strengthen social bonds with partners and preserve their support over time.

White masculinity in the “New Cold War”: reading Rocky IV and White Nights as multidirectional memories

ABSTRACT Studies of films of the 1980s have noted a tendency towards “ideological conglomeration”—the presence of multiple contradictory ideological registers. This article argues that 80s films’ “ideological conglomeration” is made legible and coherent through Michael Rothberg’s (2009, Multidirectional memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the age of decolonization. Stanford University Press) concept of multidirectional memory. It thus proceeds to apply a theoretical framework of multidirectional memory to the analysis of two “New Cold War” films—Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky IV (1985) and Taylor Hackford’s White Nights (1985). Reading Rocky IV through a lens of multidirectional memory allows us to perceive links between the “New Cold War,” U.S. racializing logics, and the racializing schemas of the Nazi regime. In White Nights an analytic of multidirectional memory foregrounds the connections between Little Rock, Arkansas, the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and the displacement of the associated discourses of state brutality, racism, and accountability onto the Soviet Union. The article concludes that multidirectional memory offers a generative theoretical framework for the study of the cinema of the “New Cold War” that illuminates how films link U.S. Cold War and racial logics to secure the hegemony of white masculinity.

The construction of the responsible patient in complex palliative care: interpreting palliative care policies.

Background:To contribute with knowledge to health policy development, this article presents a critical discourse analysis of two Norwegian official reports on palliative care published in 1999 and 2017.Methods:We identify, describe and discuss how linguistic features in policy documents contribute to and engender a distinct change from 1999 to 2017 in how patients are framed, documenting the development of palliative care.Results:The analysis identifies and considers two interwoven discourses: the discourse of accountability and the discourse of complexity. The patient moves from being described as in need of care, in the 1999 report, to being described as an active and responsible patient making proper choices, in the 2017 report.Conclusion:Result of this policy development might be less involvement of professionals and focus on existential questions, and more responsibility on patients for their prospective wellbeing and health: a change that we argue should be considered and counteracted in upcoming policy processes considering palliative care.

Not Allowed: Power and Practice in Literacy Teaching as Defined by the State

Using narrative inquiry, this study examines teacher narratives about elementary literacy teaching in the context of school change and accountability discourses.