Intractable Controversies Research Articles

Framing accounting for goodwill: Intractable controversies between users and standard setters

How to account for goodwill arising from business combinations has proven to be one the most controversial topics for the standardisation, preparation, and audit of financial reports. Given its contested nature, and recent debates about improper goodwill accounting by failing companies, standard setters are currently reconsidering existing recognition, measurement, and disclosure requirements. In this study, we explore the views of a relatively neglected group of stakeholders in the financial reporting policy-making arena – financial statement users. We draw on empirical evidence from interviews with financial analysts and from responses by analysts to IASB and EFRAG consultations. We mobilise framing theory as used in public policy studies to analyse how users make sense of goodwill accounting information as compared to standard setters. Our key finding is the plurality of colliding frames between users and standard setters that remain intractable. Our analysis reveals that users’ interest in management’s accountability on acquisitions cannot fit easily into the financial reporting frame. Not only are claims by standard setters about the value relevance of goodwill impairments found not to be experienced in practice, but also we discover that users question the benefits of standard setters working in this area, while they take recourse to ‘street numbers’ for their analysis. We interpret the intractability we discover as putting into question public policy claims that accounting policies are developed with a commitment to serve the public interest.

Taking Playful Scholarship Seriously: Discursive Game Design as a Means of Tackling Intractable Controversies

The article at hand explores the concept of playful scholarship, focusing specifically on the use of playfulness in re-assessing the collaboration between academia and societal partners to tackle “intractable policy controversies” (Schön and Rein 1994, p. 23)—i.e., challenges in which opposing parties operate with conflicting frames (often without even noticing). After arguing that earlier attempts at using games in academia often only evoke the rhetoric rather than the spirit of play (Sicart 2014) and thereby limit spaces for actually playful scholarship, we emphasize how the heuristic of playful game design (rather than game play) can help address this issue.To illustrate our point, we draw on a recent research project about drug policies in the Netherlands, in which concerns of (among others) law enforcement, policy-makers and healthcare workers are characteristically entangled. In this project, we first we defined the societal context of drug policies as an “ecology of games” (Long 1958; Lubell 2013) and proposed two ‘base games’—one created from scratch and the other inspired by the CIA-developed card game Collection Deck. These games were iteratively played by a diverse group of academic and non-academic stakeholders using self-modifying rules that allowed participants themselves to engage in “playful design” (Flanagan 2014), changing, adding or removing rules in order to identify where the game-as-model deviated from their lived experience (and how they might translate their experiences into the ‘language’ of the game). Drawing on ethnographic data collected over the course of six months, we investigate how the contingent ‘versions’ of the game as boundary objects (Leigh Star 2010) facilitated a playful attitude towards the otherwise characteristically entrenched discourse on Dutch drug policies.As a basic frame of reference, we use and adapt Lieberman’s original definition of playfulness, based on “physical, social, and cognitive spontaneity, manifest joy, and sense of humor” (2014, p. 23), and Shen’s differentiation between “situations for play” (2020, p. 540) and “playful states” (2020, p. 542) to interpret the processes in our community of practice. More specifically, we observe the impact of playful objects and object play (Riede et al. 2018) as well as bricolage (Antonijevic and Cahoy 2018) on playful attitudes within the group. This showed the constant tension between, on the one hand, expectations that the game itself should ‘produce’ new insights and, on the other, as Sicart recommends, “carnivalesque” (2014, p. 23) attempts at resisting ‘utilitarian’ play (e.g., exploring ideas that would be ruled out by conventional wisdom as optional in-game scenarios or events).Finally, we conclude with how adopting a playful game designer’s rather than a player’s perspective may challenge habitualized practices and corresponding roles inherent in public-private partnerships within academia. This makes different preconceptions amongst stakeholders visible, facilitates perspective change, and acknowledges the interconnected frames within intractable controversies by continually re-designing the base games.

How to think about… SPECIES

Attempts to divide nature into neat units throw up intractable controversies, including possibly in our own evolutionary history

A framing analysis of Canadian household food insecurity policy illustrates co-construction of an intractable problem

ABSTRACTHousehold food insecurity (HFI), lack of access to food because of financial constraint, is a persistent and growing problem in Canada. Framing theorists Donald Schön and Martin Rein explain that in ‘intractable policy controversies’, policy issues that are particularly stubborn or resistant to change, the frames policy actors apply permit them to talk past each other without resolution. This paper examines how HFI is framed in Canadian legislative sessions and how the framing process renders the problem ‘intractable’. We assembled verbatim extracts from the legislative session records of the Canadian federal government and the provinces of British Columbia, Nova Scotia, and Ontario from 1995 to 2012. Our framing analysis found that legislators’ use of symbolic devices illuminated a foundational dispute around partisan claims of moral authority. HFI has thus become so imbued with irreconcilable conflict that rival parties have co-constructed it as an intractable policy problem resulting in scant policy solutions.

A political theory of territory

This title offers a political self-determination theory of territory. Territorial disputes are at the centre of some of the most intractable controversies facing us today but it is also one of the most under-theorised concepts that we rely on. Most work in political philosophy, international relations, political science, and law take for granted the territorial imperative (that we need states, and states are necessarily territorial); yet, this book argues, territory itself requires a defence.

Floral hazards: nootka lupin in iceland and the complex politics of invasive life

Once established in new spaces, exotic plants not only impact the “native” biota, but also affect environmental politics in often complex ways. This article looks into one instance of such politics: that of the Nootka lupin (Lupinus nootkatensis), a leguminous plant of North American origin. Imported to Iceland in 1945 to stem soil degradation and recover vegetation, it soon became firmly established in Icelandic landscapes. Its spreading was actively assisted by human actors as part of fulfilling a moral duty to heal a land scarred by unsustainable past land use practices. Changing perspectives in environmental management have brought about a radical reversal in the lupin's status. It is now seen by many as a “floral hazard”, and has been declared an “invasive alien species” by the Ministry for the Environment. New lines of defence are being established to curb its spread into the deserts of the central highlands. A polarized debate has ensued about the politics of invasive life. Increased research by natural scientists has not led to any resolution. It is argued that such seemingly intractable controversies cannot be resolved unless close attention is paid to the historical construction of values and moralities underwriting the production of the discursive communities involved. Conditions of radical uncertainty with the advent of the Anthropocene further complicate the politics of invasive life.

The Family Factor: Congressmen, Turnover, and the Burden of Public Service in the Early American Republic

During the first decades of the new nation's existence, the decision to serve in Congress imposed immense personal sacrifices not only on those who were elected but also on the members' wives and children. During this era, a class of professional politicians had not yet emerged. In order to attend meetings of Congress, ordinary citizens had to leave their farms, families, homes, and businesses and live for long periods in distant capital cities. For a variety of reasons, most congressmen did not bring their loved ones with them to the seat of government. Without the emotional moorings of home, members often experienced their time in Congress as a kind of exile. Surrounded by hostile antagonists and intractable controversies, they did not have the solace of domestic life to cushion them against the blows of the political arena. Back home, wives were left to fend for themselves.

The Care of Migrants: Telemetry and the Fragile Wild

AbstractDrawing on a multi-sited study of transnational efforts to safeguard the highly endangered Lesser White-fronted Goose (Anser Erythropus), the text develops an argument about a certain “biopolitics of the wild”—a particular mode of governing nonhuman life, rooted in certain conditions of visibility and engagement. As a wild avian population, the Lessers are known and managed primarily through practices of asymmetrical intimacy, such as field observation and telemetry. These practices, in turn, determine the emergence of biopower in a specific modality, as a power that takes hold of its object—and generates it— in a mode of constitutive withdrawal. Outlining the shape and parameters of this withdrawn presence, the essay locates “the wild” at a complex, awkward juncture in contemporary human-nonhuman relations: simultaneously an object of control and withdrawal, absence and intimacy, wildness and impurity; a site of complex and intractable controversies—but also, perhaps, of hope.

Social media access in K-12 schools: Intractable policy controversies in an evolving world

The use of social media in public primary and secondary education (K-12) presents schools with numerous obstacles and constraints. Educators might use new media to enrich the classroom, but there are also accounts of grave student misconduct (such as cyber bullying) and legal liabilities for school districts. Education leaders and policymakers face difficult questions of how to promote access and use of technology while safeguarding children. In this paper, we present a frame analysis of several policy forces that govern technology use in K-12 schools. The paper highlights how an evolving, technology-mediated society and traditional education institutions create competing policy frames. These conflicting policy frames lead to intractable controversies that threaten student opportunities to access and learn with new media tools. Such an outcome may have negative repercussions in literacy, learning, and workforce development. This paper discusses several key policy controversies and offers suggestions for ways that K-12 institutions can set policy to facilitate technology in schools.

Stem Cells, Cloning, and Political Liberalism

AbstractThis paper examines the political and policy making challenges posed by human embryonic stem cell research and somatic cell nuclear transfer, known colloquially as cloning, by applying two facets of John Rawls' construct of political liberalism—the burdens of judgment and overlapping consensus—to consider how such seemingly intractable controversies are resolved in a constitutional democracy. The analysis underscores the importance of both civic and scientific education to promoting the capacity of citizens to achieve what Rawls calls an overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive doctrines.

The Psychology and Sociology of Fraud: Integrating the Behavioral Sciences Component Into Fraud and Forensic Accounting Curricula

INTRODUCTION The 2008 Report to the Nation issued by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners indicated that U.S. organizations lose almost 7 percent of their revenue to fraud, and that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)-based annual fraud estimate for the United States alone was $994 billion (ACFE, 2008). Of course, we all now recognize that the scourge of fraud is a global phenomenon that extends far beyond the borders of the U.S. However, the study of white collar crime has hitherto been relatively sparse because ‘‘few areas of criminological investigation are plagued [with such] intractable controversies [including] conceptual ambiguities, distinctions, and taxonomies’’ (Shover 1998). Nevertheless, future business professionals, and especially accounting majors, must have a keen understanding of the new 21st century era of governance and accountability spawned by the post-Enron/WorldCom environment. In this regard, colleges and universities must do their part by encouraging business, criminology, and law faculty to carry out much-needed research in this important area and teach courses in fraud and forensic accounting (FFA). Because any organization can be plagued by fraud, organizations should strive to understand the behavioral root causes of fraud—who commits fraud and why—and thus, proactively manage their fraud risk exposure. Indeed, these are the fundamental premises underlying the model FFA curriculum developed by and implemented at West Virginia University (2007). In this paper, I will make the case for looking seriously to the behavioral sciences—

Responsibility in Uncertain Times: An Institutional Perspective on Precaution

Precaution is a key issue in environmental governance. Variously defined, intensively debated and introduced in many regulations, its meaning, scope and application remain problematic. This article argues that the controversy on precaution is a matter of culturally patterned expectations concerning the production and use of knowledge and the related social positions and responsibilities. The way uncertainty and its role in the policy process are understood is crucial. For some precaution is a flawed concept, to be accommodated to the current expert-based cooperative scheme. For others it is a major innovation requiring a rearrangement of the latter. Precautionary policies may evolve in different directions. They may either strengthen the role of means-ends rationality, increasing people's dependence on expert knowledge and shrinking the opportunity and scope of public debate or, on the contrary, enhance the role of value-commitments, leading to a decline in the legitimacy of established hierarchies and an intensification of intractable controversies.

Fatherless Children and Accouchement Sous X, From Marriage To Demarriage: A Paradigmatic Approach

The author proposes a paradigmatic approach to the construction of fatherless, abandoned, and/or motherless children as social issues needing some policy responses: within the different historical Western configurations of the repertoire of potential responses, major organizing paradigms draw the line between those responses that are rejected as belonging to the supreme evil sphere and others that can be considered as lesser evils. Within the framework of a paradigm, dilemmas exist and debates go on as to which lesser evils should be preferred and how the policies should be implemented. Policies deriving from different paradigms give rise to intractable controversies since the disagreements concern not only the means but also the ends. Four paradigms can be extracted from the historical data with regard to illegitimacy and single motherhood: Christian angelism, Malthusian angelism, healthy citizenship, and proper citizenship.

The myth of the best argument: power, deliberation and reason

Power in communication takes two main forms. As ‘external’ power, it consists in the ability to acknowledge or disregard a speaker or a discourse. As ‘internal’ power, it is the ability of an argument to eliminate other arguments by demonstrating its superiority. A positive or negative value may be ascribed to these forms of power. Four ideal-typical positions are discussed – strategy, technocracy, constructionism, and deliberation. Public deliberation has three virtues – civic virtue, governance virtue and cognitive virtue. Deliberation lowers the propensity to, and the benefit of, strategic behaviour. It also increases knowledge, enhancing the quality of decisions. For Habermas, the unity of reason is expressed in the possibility of agreement on the most convincing argument. However, sometimes conflicts are deeplying, principles and factual descriptions are profoundly different, and uncertainty is radical. The best argument cannot be found. There is no universal reason. The question is whether non-strategic agreement may spring from the incommensurability of languages. In search of an answer, Rawls's concept of overlapping consensus, the feminist theory of the public sphere, and the idea of deliberation as co-operation are discussed. The argument developed is that the approach to deliberative democracy may be renewed by rethinking its motivational and cognitive elements. Public deliberation is grounded on a pre-political level of co-operation. Intractable controversies may be faced at the level of practices, looking for local, contextual answers.

The myth of the best argument: power, deliberation and reason.

Power in communication takes two main forms. As 'external' power, it consists in the ability to acknowledge or disregard a speaker or a discourse. As 'internal' power, it is the ability of an argument to eliminate other arguments by demonstrating its superiority. A positive or negative value may be ascribed to these forms of power. Four ideal-typical positions are discussed--strategy, technocracy, constructionism, and deliberation. Public deliberation has three virtues--civic virtue, governance virtue and cognitive virtue. Deliberation lowers the propensity to, and the benefit of, strategic behaviour. It also increases knowledge, enhancing the quality of decisions. For Habermas, the unity of reason is expressed in the possibility of agreement on the most convincing argument. However, sometimes conflicts are deep-lying, principles and factual descriptions are profoundly different, and uncertainty is radical. The best argument cannot be found. There is no universal reason. The question is whether non-strategic agreement may spring from the incommensurability of languages. In search of an answer, Rawls's concept of overlapping consensus, the feminist theory of the public sphere, and the idea of deliberation as co-operation are discussed. The argument developed is that the approach to deliberative democracy may be renewed by rethinking its motivational and cognitive elements. Public deliberation is grounded on a pre-political level of co-operation. Intractable controversies may be faced at the level of practices, looking for local, contextual answers.

'Dialogues of the deaf' on science in policy controversies

This paper discusses the role of science in policy controversies. Policy analysis has found that some of the most intractable controversies are trapped in a ‘dialogue of the deaf’. In the dialogues of the deaf on ‘wicked problems’ the boundaries between science and politics are blurred. Thus, they pose a clear empirical corroboration of the scientification of politics and the politicisation of science. Policy analysis needs to go beyond these claims however, as its raison d'être lies in the improvement of policy-making. How can we deal with these dialogues of the deaf and what role has science to play in this? Should we not focus more on democratic or market-like approaches, as science apparently cannot come to grips with these issues? This paper concludes by connecting these insights from policy analysis to the paradoxes of science in politics.

Coping with intractable controversies: The case for problem structuring in policy design and analysis

Intractable controversies and other types of policy disagreements correspond to policy problems with a different structure. The more structured a problem is, the more consensus there is about which values and information are at stake in the process of problem solving. Policymakers like to treat problems in as structured a way as possible. Three policy strategies are described to move away from the unstructured to the more structured problem type. However, policymakers run the risk of oversimplifying an ill-structured problem, which means that elements of the problem situation relevant to other actors are overlooked or denied. Hence, policy controversies may become intractable. The remedy is a fourth strategy, characterised by problem structuring. This strategy requires political participation of actors with different views on the problem, and an argued political problem choice.

Risk and responsibility

Part 1 The roots of disagreement: managing risks apportioning responsibility. Part 2 obstacles to consensus: two seemingly intractable controversies Power frequency electric and magnetic fields - expert assessment power frequency electric and magnetic fields - a public controversy alar, or who benefits? Part 3 Towards consensus: stakeholder negotiation antisapstain chemicals useful lessons.

The Concept of Man as Presupposed by the Historical Studies

I should like to begin by removing a misconception to which the title of this lecture may possibly give rise. My concern is not with general propositions regarding certain fairly well-attested human characteristics of the kind to which historians may, from time to time, advert in the course of their work or to which they may appeal in support of the account provided of some particular event or occurrence. I am not myself an historian, and for me to make ex cathedra pronouncements on such topics as these might well seem to constitute an unjustifiable intrusion upon a field about which I am not qualified professionally to speak. My subject lies within the sphere of philosophy of history rather than of history proper; it belongs, in other words, to a branch of philosophical inquiry, and as such relates, not to empirical facts and events of the sort to which the practising historian addresses himself, but to those assumptions, categories and modes of procedure that are, or are believed to be, intrinsic to historical thought and discourse. In this general context I wish to discuss two approaches to the problem of elucidating the character of historical knowledge and explanation. Both of the approaches I have in mind have achieved a considerable measure of support at the present time; they have also been widely understood as offering profoundly divergent — indeed, diametrically opposed — views of what is central to the structure of historical thinking and to the type of activity upon which the historian is essentially engaged. It has on occasions been suggested that what — amongst other things — divides adherents to the views in question is the fact that they are committed to radically different conceptions of the subject-matter of the historical studies; that is to say, of human beings and their activities. In the light of this fundamental disagreement, it is argued, many of the more intractable controversies that have arisen concerning the concepts and interpretative schemes in terms of which it is possible or legitimate to treat the human past become readily intelligible. In what follows I want to examine this claim. First, however, let me give a brief, and necessarily somewhat crude, outline of the two positions I have referred to, starting with one that is often described as ‘positivist’.

The Concept of Man as Presupposed by the Historical Studies

I should like to begin by removing a misconception to which the title of this lecture may possibly give rise. My concern is not with general propositions regarding certain fairly well-attested human characteristics of the kind to which historians may, from time to time, advert in the course of their work or to which they may appeal in support of the account provided of some particular event or occurrence. I am not myself an historian, and for me to make ex cathedra pronouncements on such topics as these might well seem to constitute an unjustifiable intrusion upon a field about which I am not qualified professionally to speak. My subject lies within the sphere of philosophy of history rather than of history proper; it belongs, in other words, to a branch of philosophical inquiry, and as such relates, not to empirical facts and events of the sort to which the practising historian addresses himself, but to those assumptions, categories and modes of procedure that are, or are believed to be, intrinsic to historical thought and discourse. In this general context I wish to discuss two approaches to the problem of elucidating the character of historical knowledge and explanation. Both of the approaches I have in mind have achieved a considerable measure of support at the present time; they have also been widely understood as offering profoundly divergent — indeed, diametrically opposed — views of what is central to the structure of historical thinking and to the type of activity upon which the historian is essentially engaged. It has on occasions been suggested that what — amongst other things — divides adherents to the views in question is the fact that they are committed to radically different conceptions of the subject-matter of the historical studies; that is to say, of human beings and their activities. In the light of this fundamental disagreement, it is argued, many of the more intractable controversies that have arisen concerning the concepts and interpretative schemes in terms of which it is possible or legitimate to treat the human past become readily intelligible. In what follows I want to examine this claim. First, however, let me give a brief, and necessarily somewhat crude, outline of the two positions I have referred to, starting with one that is often described as ‘positivist’.