Intellectual engagements of accounting academics: The ‘forecasted losses' intervention
本文通过合作自传民族志，反思了2010年和2012年西班牙学者签署宣言反对立法改革中滥用‘预计损失’会计概念的干预行动，并运用布迪厄的公共知识分子理论探讨会计学术与政策制定、社会议题的互动。
This paper explores the social and political potential of accounting scholarship, presenting and discussing an intellectual intervention challenging a legislative reform that significantly affected Spanish industrial relations. In this reform, an accounting artifact (forecasted losses) played an unexpected role and was misrepresented, prompting a sizeable number of scholars to sign two manifestos in 2010 and 2012 against the use of forecasted losses made by the new legislation. As promoters of this manifesto, we perform in this paper a collaborative autoethnography to reflect on the context, events, reactions, and significance of this intervention for both the academic and the industrial relations fields. We mobilize Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas on the public intellectual to think more generally about academic engagements in the interplay between accounting, policymaking, and social issues. This intervention illustrates the different manners in which administrative and economic powers interfered in the Spanish accounting academic field, limiting the disposition of Spanish scholars to engage in public debates. We also interpret our engagement as mobilizing intellectual capital to expose how the notion of forecasted losses was used to produce a form of symbolic violence and how this capital is more effective as it produces messages addressed to the producers, i.e., policymakers and the judicature in this specific case.