Metonyms and metaphor: the rhetorical redescription of public interest for the International Accounting Standards Board

ABSTRACT

We focus on what invoking the public interest ‘does’ for the International Accounting Standards Board [IASB], as a transnational, private regulator. Our study focuses on a snapshot from 2010 to 2015 post the global financial crisis, as the IASB and the International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation suffered a legitimacy crisis. We are interested in how the IASB restated the meaning of the public interest and the impact of invoking different conceptions of the public interest. With respect to metonyms, this article employs rhetorical redescription to identify the implications of defining the public interest as procedural due process, substantive due process and outcome-focused. At the same time, through careful interpretation, the article examines the rival metaphors attached to meanings of the public interest. By examining what invoking the public interest ‘does’, our ontological analysis illustrates how these redescriptions constituted a rhetorical strategy for organizational legitimacy, how the meanings operated as a form of ‘ideological cover’, and the political impact of constructing the ‘public interest’ as a floating signifier. We argue that these strategies operated to reinstitute the technocratic power of the IASB.

KEYWORDS:

• Public interest
• International Accounting Standards Board
• retroduction
• rhetorical redescription
• metonym
• metaphor

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Erratum

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors. This version has been corrected. Please see Erratum (https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2018.1443388).

Notes

1. Accounting regulatory theory followed a Chicago-school economics foundation, resulting in a positivist accounting theory. Key accounts of the history of accounting regulatory theory include Gaffikin (2007, 2008) and Deegan and Unerman (2011).

2. This differs to ‘retroduction’ in the critical realist sense (Modell 2017).

3. There is similarity here to Derrida’s (1988) logic of iteration.

4. This document holds a different status to the Mission statement, but is still important, as it acts to legitimize the IASB and inform the IASB’s due process procedures.

5. This was a significant document published by the IASB and is unprecedented. The document is a legitimation device and illustrates the ‘centrality’ of the IASB’s commitment to the public interest.

6. See the ‘Introduction’ section.

7. In accounting, there is debate between rules-based standards (the US approach focuses on defined rules) and principles-based standards (the International approach focuses on flexible overarching principles for guiding judgment).

8. These special interests should already be catered for by the Monitoring Board discussed earlier.

9. See Figure 2.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Carter

David Carter is an associate professor in the Faculty of Business, Government and Law at the University of Canberra, and he has interests in law, governance and accounting. His research examines the politics of information at the interface of accounting, law, regulation and discourses of capital. His work is transdisciplinary and concerns how information is used within legal and political processes, within governmental, policy, corporate, regulatory and litigation settings. He is the author, with Rebecca Warren, of ‘Accounting for indebtedness: geopolitics, technocracy and advanced financial capital’ in Innovation: the European Journal of Social Science Research, doi.org/10.1080/13511610.2017.1415804

Rebecca Warren

Rebecca Warren completed her PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, and holds a position as lecturer at the University of Essex. Her research draws on post-structuralism to examine geo-political, technocratic regulation and is interdisciplinary as it operates at the intersection of accounting, politics, policy, regulation, development and the impacts of debt through a discourse theory lens.