https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7366-5079
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ABSTRACT
Although the philosophical literature on social institutions has been insightful for social scientific studies, the application of its core concepts, such as collective intentionality, to real institutional dynamics remains challenging. One factor contributing to this situation is insufficient work that identifies collectively accepted social norms and shows how they constitute social institutions. Relying on the perspectives of John Searle and Raimo Tuomela, this study integrates recent analyses of the concept of performativity with discourse analysis. It presents an analytic framework, drawing on the concept of nominalization, to identify collectively accepted social norms that performatively constitute social institutions. Finally, it illustrates the identification of collectively accepted ‘globalization’ that performatively constitutes and shapes economic institutions engaged in corporate financial reporting. This study contributes to closing the gap between philosophical analyses of social institutions and social scientific studies by highlighting the performance of nominalized collectively accepted social norms.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Noriaki Okamoto is a Professor of Accounting in the College of Business at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, Japan. He received his PhD from Kobe University in 2006. His main research interests lie in social, political, and institutional aspects of accounting and finance.
Notes
1 A seminal study by De Soto (Citation2001) focused on the Searlean perspective of social reality, which is founded on the concept of collective intentionality, and attempted to explain why the Western capitalist economic system was not a good fit for a South American developing country. De Soto (Citation2001) suggested that a system of privately owned property was not collectively accepted by the citizens of this country and that it did not contribute to the accumulation of wealth within the country as a whole.
2 Tuomela himself clarified that his we-account explicates a group’s attitudes in terms of the members’ construction of reflexive performative collective content for the group (Tuomela, Citation2013, p. 15).
3 Notably, some of these studies on financial markets are further classified as social studies of finance.
4 In a similar vein, a special issue drawing on George Soros’s work on reflexivity in economics (e.g. Soros, Citation2013) was recently published by the Journal of Economic Methodology.
5 Intentionality does not imply any special connection with ‘intending’ in the ordinary sense; rather, intentionality is a very general notion having to do with the directedness of the mind (Searle, Citation2005, p. 6).
6 Searle explained that his conception of ‘Background’ is similar to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of ‘habitus’. The Backgound has several functions, such as enabling linguistic and perceptual interpretation (Searle, Citation1995, pp. 131–138).
7 Another criticism is, for example, concerned with the distinction between constitutive and regulative rules. Guala (Citation2016a, p. 64) clarified that Searle’s distinction between regulative and constitutive rules does not reflect a substantial distinction between types of social entities.
8 Searle (Citation2005) seems to prefer the formula of ‘collective acceptance’ to the formula of ‘constitutive rules’ (Searle, Citation2005, pp. 15–17).
9 According to Tuomela (Citation2002), those agreement-based r-norms are represented as either formal norms (sanctions usually associated with infractions) or informal ones. However, Tuomela did not draw a clear distinction between them. From a behavioural perspective, Bicchieri (Citation2005) similarly distinguished between descriptive and injunctive norms. Mantzavinos (Citation2001) also distinguished three types of informal institutions: conventions, moral rules, and social norms, with conventions being similar to informal r-norms.
10 He stated in an interview that he wanted to prove that Austin’s distinction between the locutionary and the illocutionary was a mistake (Lash, Citation2015, p. 141).
11 The term ‘speech act’ is used within various disciplines, such as sociology and economics. Studies conducted within those disciplines have adopted a broad definition of the speech act. In this study, a speech act is regarded as any kind of linguistic communication. It can comprise utterances, textual discourses, and so on.
12 Guala (Citation2016b) may have been sceptical about the constitutive illocutionary effects because ‘speech acts cannot create social objects out of the blue. Performative statements presuppose the existence of social conventions “in the background”’ (p. 32). He subsequently argued that ‘performative speech acts create things by manipulating beliefs, and in particular, the systems of mutual beliefs that are crucial for coordination and cooperation in complex societies’ (pp. 36–37).
13 In the context of economics, counterperformativity is defined as the practical application of an aspect of economic theory, wherein economic processes are dissimilar to how they are conceptually depicted within economics (MacKenzie, Citation2006, p. 17). According to Bamford and MacKenzie (Citation2018), there are three types of counterperformativity relating to the use of a financial model: hedging, regulatory, and deliberative.
14 Chun (Citation2017) analysed the meaning of ‘capitalism’, which is a similar abstract and collectively accepted word, after the global financial crisis of 2007–2008. He found that capitalism means many different things to different people (Chun, Citation2017, p. 141). The word ‘capitalism’ is also a nominalized word with the suffix ‘-ism’, and Chun’s (Citation2017) work shares some commonalities with the present study in its investigation of the effects of a nominalized discourse within society.
15 For a discussion on how accounting standards have evolved as economic institutions, see Waymire and Basu (Citation2008).
16 IFRS are set by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). The IASB was instituted in 2001. It was funded through contributions received from central banks, major accounting firms, financial institutions, and industrial companies worldwide. The IASB is committed to developing, in the public interest, a single set of global accounting standards that require the provision of transparent and comparable information within general purpose financial statements. In pursuit of this objective, the IASB cooperates with national accounting standard setters to achieve convergence in accounting standards around the world.