Episode 008: Christine Cooper
Prof. Christine Cooper is an accounting scholar who examines the roles of accounting in society. Drawing on Marx and other critical theorists, she explains how a feminine perspective can reveal the hegemonic roles of accounting in capitalism.
Transcript
Cameron Graham: My guest today is Prof. Christine Cooper of the University of Edinburgh Business School. Professor Cooper studies accounting, not from the safe confines of her office, but out in the trenches, so to speak. She is an experienced activist who has worked to support social change through unions, marches, protests, and political engagement. I’m fortunate professionally to count Christine as a co-author and colleague, and fortunate personally to count her as a friend. Prof. Cooper spoke to me from Edinburgh in June. I hope you enjoy our conversation. …
Christine, I am delighted to have you on the podcast.
Christine Cooper: Thank you.
Cameron: I want to talk to about a whole range of topics today, but let’s start with one of your earlier papers. It’s called “The Non-and Nom- of Accounting for Mother Nature.” It was published in 1992. The paper says that it “offers a feminist critique of accounting, particularly its capacity to function as a tool for reporting on environmental performance.” I know that this is true about the paper because I read it on Wikipedia, and I know what’s in Wikipedia is true because I actually wrote that article about you. So about this paper, “The Non-and Nom- of Accounting for Mother Nature,” what motivated you to write it?
Christine: Oh my gosh! Right. This was actually kind of strange, because in some ways it wasn’t animated really by accounting research at all. I was in a class looking at poststructural philosophy. We got readings in interesting French social theorists, and one of them was Hélène Cixous. I was actually pregnant at the time, so this was really a long time ago. It seemed that, for all of my life, I had assumed that men and women were equal. I was a young woman, and up until that point in my life, while there is clearly discrimination against women, I thought it was overcome-able. I think being pregnant, as an experience, made me realize that women and men, while of course they should be equal and should have equal opportunities, there were important differences between them. And so I was reading Hélène Cixous’ work, and she spoke about sitting in a tree as a child, becoming really angry at the inequality, and her work, I suppose, was like therapy for me, because in my head I was trying to work out what I thought about difference then. At the end of the 1980s, there was a wave of political movements that looked different politics, identity politics. I suppose this was part of that wave. Just now I’m looking back and reflecting on those social movements, and wondering. And now, in lots of countries if you’re gay it’s possible to get married. Lots of those social movements have actually brought about progressive changes, but in terms of the overall politics, we’ve been too divided to fight against the rise of neoliberalism, Donald Trump, I don’t know, you could probably list the things perhaps we should’ve done better. And while there’s lots of good things we fought for and achieved, we perhaps haven’t achieved the things we really hoped that we would achieve in the 1970s and 80s. So it’s a time of reflection, but nonetheless, I think that in the spirit of social movements at the time, I started to think about the whole feminist issue. So that was the genesis of that paper. Nothing very much to do with accounting.
Cameron: No, but there’s a couple of things about this. For starters, you’re focused here on reporting for environmental performance. Was there something about environmental performance that drew you to a feminist critique of the way accounting was being done? You could’ve gone after standard financial accounting.
Christine: I suppose in some ways, I kind of thought — and I still do think this — that the researchers that research in social and environmental accounting, these aren’t people that believe that the purpose of accounting is to give information so that you can get shareholder value maximization, or profit maximization or something like that. So I suppose I was addressing an audience that I thought would be a little bit receptive to the kind of ideas that I was working on. And it seemed to me that accounting is masculine, in the sense that it was derived in a way that rationalizes very complicated things and reduces them to a very rational ordered system. This is also part of the growing social movements of the time, where suddenly people were concerned about the environment, in the late 1980s, and also of course concerned about the social aspects of capitalism. So there was a growing movement that thought that perhaps accounting could help in some of those social struggles. And I guess this work turned out to be a kind of warning, to say if you’re going to use a very rational, masculine way of understanding the world, and think that then you’re going to capture the environment’s multiplicity, you perhaps need to think again about that. It was almost like a new motherhood, a maternal warning against thinking that you can solve the problems of the world through accounting.
Cameron: Just to clarify, you using the word “feminine” as opposed to “feminist” in this critique. So is not just about the role of women in accounting, but about the way that accounting is done and the way that it represents things. You’re suggesting there is a different way of looking through the lens of accounting, or a different lens that we could use for accounting, to produce something that incorporates feminine perspectives or feminine values?
Christine: There’s always this issue of whether there is an essential difference between men and women.
Cameron: I was going to ask!
Christine: Yeah, and in any case can we even begin to know what that is, because we are so structured through language that it’s very difficult to see things in a different way. If I’m going to put a reference to say that this is what it means to be a woman and this is what it means to be a man, for me one of the most compelling ways of thinking about that is to say, well, women have very different productive work-life experiences. And of course they are derived socially, the responsibilities of men and women, and so forth, but nonetheless women do have these very particular work and productive-related experiences that are then going to be different from men. So it’s not just giving birth, it’s a whole social expectation of the way women have to operate in the home and in the workplace. I’m not saying it’s essential or fundamental, or whatever, but if you need a starting point with this – and clearly, of course, there are huge gender differences still, in terms of income inequality and all kinds of other things that we really know a lot about — this is where I’d start. I know that that’s not a wholly satisfactory way of thinking about these things.
Cameron: Well it can’t be. For starters, it’s a very binary way of looking at gender, right?
Christine: Yeah, that’s for sure.
Cameron: Your paper was written in 1992, and I don’t know how open academic discourse was in 1992 to non-binary representations of gender. I suspect it was fairly traditional, male and female, masculine and feminine, back then, at least compared to today. And even today we still have very entrenched binary representations of gender in the academy.
Christine: And probably in society generally, I think. So these are things I don’t have answers to, and that we’re still struggling with. But definitely, using the word feminine rather than feminist, it’s kind of inclusive of everyone in society, that we can embrace feminine values.
Cameron: Right, you’re not suggesting that you have a perspective that I can’t share, that I as a man can’t understand a feminine perspective and adopt a feminine perspective on things. Is that fair?
Christine: Perhaps. [laughs]
Cameron: [laughs] The jury’s still out on me.
Christine: Well, not you as an individual. I suppose what I’m really saying is that of course we’re socially constituted through language, but it’s also through experiences. I think it’s really difficult, if you been raised as a woman, to have that experience of what it’s like to be a man. So if you walk into a meeting room, if you watch men, their whole way of being is entirely different. Of course there are so many overlapping experiences that we all share, but I think were a long way yet from saying that men could really understand what it’s like to be a woman, if you’ve not been raised as a woman.
Cameron: To sum up what you’re trying to say here, I think there’s maybe two things going on. One is that simply by introducing the possibility of a feminine perspective on accounting, or feminine way of doing accounting, you are undermining that dominant, hegemonic perspective on accounting, which is related to the whole power structure that accounting supports.
Christine: The structures, exactly.
Cameron: So that’s one part, simply destabilizing the hegemonic. But then there is this other aspect which is, the thing that you are trying to use to destabilize it is specifically feminine. It’s not just alternative, but a feminine alternative, and I think that that’s important to you.
Christine: Yes, that’s exactly right.
Cameron: I’m trying to be precise about the way I describe your work here, because I find you to be one of those scholars who has, for me, a really admirable precision about the way you use social theory. And you’ve got a vast appetite for social theorists. Just off the top my head, you’ve drawn on Marx, you’ve drawn on Foucault, you’ve drawn on Bourdieu — many, many other scholars that I haven’t even begun to read. And what strikes me about the way that you use them is that you’re very direct and very clear about how you using them. You not simply making an allusion to, say, Foucault in a general way. You’re really getting into the specific arguments that these people are making and trying to employ them in a way that actually advances your own arguments about accounting. What is it that attracts you to a particular social theorist? Why would you decide to get interested in a new social theorist? What do you find appealing about this kind of thinking?
Christine: I suppose lazy might not be exactly the right word, but in some ways I’m kind of piggybacking on the shoulders of giants. The theorists that I draw from are probably way, way better read than I will ever be, in terms of philosophy and other theorists, and these theorists have spent a long time thinking about their understanding of the world and the way that it works. And of course no one theorist is going to be entirely explanatory. Their theory would not ever explain everything. Nonetheless the theories are really helpful in terms of helping you to frame things in a new way, to understand the world differently. And I suppose, also, the kind of theorists that I draw from have used their work to try to understand the world, like Marx, to create a different, better world, whatever that means. It’s not understanding these theorists to say that this person deals with agency, this person deals with structure, or whatever. It really helps me to understand accounting and its roles in society much better.
Cameron: When you’re looking at a particular topic that you’re studying, what brings a particular social theorist into that, as opposed to a different one? Are you just being very pragmatic, that you think that this person has a particular toolkit that you can use? What is it that leads you to choose a particular theoretical perspective?
Christine: I think that’s a tough question. No, I don’t just think, “Oh yeah, for this problem, that’s going to be a great social theorist and it’s just going to work well.” No, I don’t do that. Underpinning everything I do, I suppose, is kind of a Marxist belief that capitalism dominates and shapes our world. For me there’s no question about that. But I think, just like the Frankfurt theorists would say, that doesn’t mean to say that you can explain an argument at a bus stop between a girlfriend and boyfriend.
Cameron: [laughs]
Christine: So it’s a big mistake if you think that a Marxist understanding of capitalism is going to give you the whole picture. I think historically that’s been an issue, early on, and I think that some of the theorists who come from a more Weber analysis of the spirit of capitalism, Foucault, Bourdieu, those kind of theorists, I don’t think they have a disagreement — well perhaps Foucault, a bit — lots of theorists that I draw from don’t have a problem with saying that capitalism is important, but they think it’s not sufficient just to understand that.
Cameron: So there’s an underlying, I don’t know what word you would use, maybe “emancipatory” morality for you, in the basis of your work?
Christine: Yes.
Cameron: Good, I like that!
Christine: I suppose it depends on your theory of what makes a better world, and actually I might be entirely over simplistic on this issue, but we know that if you give someone decent accommodation that they can afford, if we give their children decent education, if people can afford to buy enough food, if we have enough time in our lives that we can socialize and mix with our friends and family, you know, those are the things that make a good life. And we’re actually, definitely in the UK, we’re just moving further and further away from that. But I think the latest figures are that one in six people in Britain is homeless, not that they’re living on the street, but they don’t have the means to afford a safe roof over their heads. I think it’s something like 40% of children are now living beneath the poverty line. I mean, we’re one of the richest countries in the world and the everyday trauma of trying to raise children when you’re living in poverty, I mean, I understand that this is Britain, but this is replicated across the globe millions and millions of times. So we definitely need research that’s trying to look at how to get the things that give people a good life.
Cameron: Now, you’re referring to developments in the West in the last 10 or 20 years that have, I think, seen as exacerbation of inequality. But you’re drawing on theorists who were writing at a very different time. Marx, in particular. But even Foucault was motivated by what was happening the middle of the 20th century, writing around 1979, 1980. Bourdieu, around the same time. How do you go about taking their framework and their way of thinking, and applying it to problems that they never saw? Are these really just the same problems or do you have to do some kind of an update?
Christine: I think you have to do an update. That’s why I said that capitalism shapes and animates all of our lives. I don’t think there’s a question about that. I suppose one of the things that worries me at the moment is the destruction of welfare states, and arguably, you could say that welfare states are just kind of a blip in the trajectory of capitalism, something that we won through massive social movements and struggles throughout the 20th century. And for me, there’s a huge issue that those things are rapidly being dismantled. And what’s really interesting – I suppose this is why I find it really helpful to draw from more contemporary social theorists – is trying to understand exactly what’s going on. Because it’s almost like these things are going on, but somehow we’re always a little behind in understanding exactly what is going on. So definitely Marx would be a theorist that I find really amazing and helpful. But I think there is also understanding other aspects of the world, why it is that capitalism keeps on surviving despite not really doing a good job in terms of social advancement, and understanding how welfare states have been dismantled. But still if you talk to middle-class people in the world in the West, they kind of imagine that they’re still there. It’s really difficult to imagine, for academics sitting a lovely university office in Edinburgh, that there are so many people in Britain coming up against systems that used to be there to support them, but they’re no longer there. So we don’t really see that. So I suppose understanding that and how it’s hidden, often by accounting, helps you think about ways that you can start to change that.
Cameron: If you’re wanting to build an argument that this is what’s going on, there are two general approaches to describing what is going on in society. One would be to try to establish what’s the general trend, what’s the average experience of people, what are the things that are the social laws or rules that hold. And you can amass a whole bunch of data to show that there are these correlations, whether statistical or otherwise. And then there is the approach to research where you are going after something very specific, that shows something that is at the very least an exception to the rule, and is deserving of our attention. So this requires you to take different approaches to gathering data. I know that you’ve done a lot of work where you’re sitting in a room talking to someone. It’s not just looking at databases or vast historical archives, you’re talking to people. Can you tell me about that approach to research and what it does for you?
Christine: Well, lots of people would say, “Oh, you know Christine Cooper, she’s prejudiced, she’s too ideological.” And it’s definitely true that I have lots of preconceived ideas about the world and how it operates and how the powerful stay in power and how they make more money and all of that stuff. But of course people by definition are human beings, and I suppose I’ve got all my prejudices and everything, but I really like to speak to people, as many people as I can, when I’m doing some research, because they always shock me and change my mind. But you think you’ve got it. So, something I’m really against is tax avoidance schemes, for example. If you go talk to a partner in a Big 4 accounting firm, who’s a tax partner who does all this stuff, while I might not agree with their perspective on the world necessarily, it’s really interesting to understand why they do what they do, what animates them, how they got to that position, the pressures on them to do the things they do. I don’t think I’ve ever done an interview where my prejudices haven’t been undone – and some of them have probably been reinforced, of course – but just to understand people is really important.
Cameron: How do you get access to people on the inside of an organization? What do you do as a researcher to get in the door?
Christine: Pretty much, I’ve been lucky. I think there’s two things with this. Mainly, I just write to someone or phone them up, and they normally just say yes. If I was a journalist, they probably wouldn’t speak to me because people are scared. If I can demonstrate that I’m an academic, this is academic research, I’ve gone through the correct ethics procedures, they can have as much or as little anonymity as they want, I’ve thought a lot about the questions I’m going to ask them: often then people are very willing to speak to you. The other thing is, I don’t think I’ve ever had an interview where people haven’t wanted to talk for much longer than the time that we’ve allocated. And that’s I think because very few people have the chance to think about what they’re doing, and to actually talk about it. Probably for most people, their spouses, their mates, are not so interested in talking about their job. And then this person rocks up that is actually fascinated by every single thing that they tell them. So it’s kind of like therapy. And people often go, ”You know, I was going to say that, and now I’m thinking about it, perhaps I don’t think that.” So interviews are endlessly fascinating.
Cameron: It sounds like a fairly intimate approach to research, actually seeing people work through their own thoughts.
Christine: Yeah, yeah. Because I suppose we’re asking challenging questions, trying to understand why people do what they do. It’s actually … well, probably nobody really understands that perfectly.
Cameron: Do you have any examples of specific interviews that you’ve done that stick in your head?
Christine: O my gosh! Well, sitting here in Edinburgh, there was an interview that I did in Edinburgh with someone called Clive Fairweather, who was the Chief Inspector of Prisons.
Cameron: Now, is this an interview that was anonymous in your paper?
Christine: Well, the reason why I don’t the need to say that this was anonymous is because I was doing joint research with someone called Phil Taylor. We went to interview the Chief Inspector of Prisons, and we had taken recording device and asked if we could use it, and he said, “Look, the first thing I’m going to say is that everything I say is on the public record.” So he was happy not to be anonymous, for us to say what he said, and so we recorded it. He’d actually been very senior person in the British military at some point in his career before he became the Chief Inspector of Prisons, and he actually said to us, I thought this is so interesting, he said when he was younger, he had this prejudice that people in British prisons should be put on a scaffold alongside their social workers. Disposed of. Let’s put it that way.
Cameron: Oh dear!
Christine: But then he said, you know, after three months of working as the Chief Inspector of Prisons, he undid his prejudices of a lifetime. And he said that, talking to people in prisons, he actually started to realize that prisoners – and I know people go to prison and they’ve done really mean things to other human beings – but he said they were actually victims, too. And the way that he said it was really kind of visceral. So it’s absolutely fascinating to understand this man’s trajectory. He actually set up an initiative, I forgotten the name but it’s something like the Fairburn [actually, Airborne] Initiative, I don’t think I’ve got that exactly right, which took young men, and rather than going to prison, they get some kind of military-style training with him. So he put his money where his mouth is, to some extent. I think we see popular culture images of prisons on TV and stuff like that, sometimes they are comedies, sometimes they are more serious, but I think until you actually step into a prison and get the feel of it … I can’t imagine being locked up in a cell. We have a tendency to think that we know about everything because we’ve seen it on TV, but the actual reality of our understandings and prejudices is going to be undone if you then have to really experience something.
Cameron: You don’t always get the access that you’re after. I know that for the paper that you and Darlene Himick and I worked on, on social impact bonds, you had to use freedom of information requests. Is that the term is used in the UK?
Christine: Yes.
Cameron: You have to make an official application under the regulations that govern the government, to get them to disclose documents to you, and then they come out and there’s all these redactions and stuff. Is that process a useful one for academic researchers, given how difficult it is to get information and then it comes out with all these redactions?
Christine: It's really interesting, this whole idea of the government are transparent, because this is a 21st-century myth that governments are more transparent now, because of putting out all these performance metrics and everything. And definitely, yes, in the UK it's very useful that they have freedom of information, but you don't ever really get the information that you really need. So there isn’t the transparency that politicians like to say that we have. It takes a really weird form of these mad performance metrics. You can go to websites is and find out about any of the state institutions, but once you start to ask difficult questions, it is actually very difficult to get the answers. During that project, I don't think anyone actually refused to speak to us, but getting the contract documents was difficult.
Cameron: So what kind of information was redacted in those contract documents for the social impact bonds?
Christine: it was really just the financial information. For example, there are five key performance indicators in the contract, and you can find out about those, but they were all attached to certain amounts of money and that was opaque. To some extent we managed to work it out, more or less. It was a bit like a jigsaw, you can piece together the information. It was exactly the same when I was working on private prisons. Then you can get the contract between the state and the private prison company, but they would remove the fines for not meeting contractual obligations. But again you could try and work that out. So lots of the research that I've done is little bit like investigative journalism, where you have to try and fit things together and ask people questions, and sometimes someone will tell you something, and then you can ask someone else and you can gradually work out what's going on.
Cameron: You have a long history of getting out into the community to do your work, out into society trying to make an active difference yourself. Where does that come from? Is that just part of your family upbringing or did you have a conversion experience along the way as an academic?
Christine: No, I was definitely a political activist even as a school girl. That may have just been part of the spirit of the times. I was born in 1956, so I was not exactly a child of the 60s because I was only a teenager at the end of the 1960s, but I think all of those social movements, I found them really appealing. Definitely by the end of the 1960s, I was going on demonstrations and campaigning for things. And also beginning to read Marx and some of the early social theorists, and that has stuck with me throughout my life. I suppose what happens is you get a group of friends. Some of the friends from then I'm still friends with today. In some ways, this is just what we do. Of course I understand that this isn’t what most people do. I live in a bit of a bubble.
Cameron: How does this kind of engagement affect the way you go about your research? Does it change the questions you go after or does it change the way that you go after them?
Christine: That's a good question. Probably all good research should do this, but I always have an eye to try to understand the deeper structures of how things operate. It's one thing to say, oh yeah, it's the power of money, it's the rich. But how does that actually work? How does the social system keep re-creating itself such that, mainly, there is very little change of class position within society. Now I understand that there is some movement, but on the whole there really isn't that much social movement. So it's understanding how things really operate. And perhaps, at the end of my work, it's like, could we have this coming? Could we have stopped this? If we want to set about reversing it, how would we actually do that? I'll give you an example. There is some work I'm doing at the moment, we've done a couple of wee interviews, but is really mainly archival research. All of Margaret Thatcher's archives now are freely available online, so you can sit at your desk and read cabinet papers with her handwriting on them. Lots of her personal files and documents, they're all online. And it seems that, when she took power, she started to impose austerity, she started to cut the budgets of what I would call the more socially-oriented institutions of the state. She increased police funding and things like that, but the more left-hand side of the state stuff, the budgets were cut. And of course she privatized anything that she could. When you read her documents, you realize that they moved with trepidation, at first. They did a lot of experimenting to see if things worked, and then they'd push harder and faster and speed up other processes. I've written a couple of papers about privatization and public finance initiatives and stuff like that, but it seems like while we were busy campaigning against those cuts and against privatization, much more quietly she was actually making some significant changes to what I would call the architecture of the state. She took the big old state bureaucracies, where, you know as a Bourdieusian researcher, there was a very strong habitus of social service and public service in those big old institutions, and what she found was that pumping them full of accounting, lots of performance metrics and management control systems, didn't actually change that ethos. And so the way that she set about changing the ethos was to split them all up into much smaller agencies and get rid of the tier of senior civil servants, and replace them with new business managers. So she actually totally reconfigure the architecture of the British state. What that means is, if we get a labour government, they are really going to be working in business-type structure of government. So it took Margaret Thatcher at least seven or eight years before she started to be able to even bring about small changes in terms of this agencification. So if you have a labour government, it would take them two terms, at least, to start to reverse those things. So for me, part of that story is to understand exactly how she did that, the accounting mechanisms that she used, where she got her advice from, exactly how those things played out. And reading archives where she scribbled notes on her papers and everything is really insightful to get a little bit of an understanding about how she was thinking, and what was actually going on. And so it's almost like asking the question of what now? That stuff was almost like a quiet revolution. The people like me there were activists, I'm sure he never went on any demonstration against agencification. It sounded really mundane. I mean, now, with the benefit of hindsight, you can see what was actually going on.
Cameron: So your experience in engaging in the social issues changes the way you think about these issues is an academic.
Christine: Yes. More in terms of, is it possible to reverse it? Should we have seen something different happening? So more in terms of the activist side of it.
Cameron: Right. When you're engaged in this kind of activism, do you have a specific role as an academic there? Do people know that your professor and drawn those kinds of resources that you might bring, or are you simply there as a citizen?
Christine: It just depends. But both. Of course, I go on demonstrations just as a citizen. I'm part of a group that's working on corporate governance policy taxation policy, for the Labour Party. So in those issues then, I suppose we do draw upon the prestige of being academics. This is very much our research. And definitely, we’re not making policy for the Labour Party, we’re just suggesting ideas that can then perhaps feed into their policy if their Conference agrees it, and so on and so forth. So as academics, we’re coming up with ideas and research that perhaps, though it may take a different form than the proposals we've come up with, can help to inform that policy. So we’re not members of the Labour Party discussing policy at Conference, or what's actually going to go well with the public, we’re just trying to come up with really thoughtful, well-researched ideas. That's an important separation. I was part of a campaign against prison privatization, which is part of the prison research I was doing, and we would write academic reports that we hoped would inform the social movement. But I think as an academic you could write the best paper that explained the meaning of everything, and it’s never going to change anything. I mean, it's social movements that really change things.
Cameron: This is one of the underlying questions of this whole podcast series that I'm doing, which is, what is the connection between academic research and what happens next in society?
Christine: So yes, as academics we can write this really impressive stuff that's well grounded in research, but if it doesn't connect with people who can animate this change, it’s not really going to change very much. At the moment, lots of socially progressive ideas are very much under attack, and perhaps we’re also keeping those ideas alive, which may also be really important.
Cameron: Before we wrap up, I want to talk to you about the other side of your work, the mirror image of your engaged research, which is your role as an editor of Critical Perspectives on Accounting, which we refer to as CPA. This is where the discussions amongst academics happen, as opposed to the kind of discussion you're having facing outward from the academy when you’re engaged in activism. What's the point of that internal academic discussion? Why do we as academics spend so much effort in preparing and publishing research that's really only going to be read by other academics?
Christine: That's an excellent question. I suppose that is one that, increasingly, in any case, is being asked of academics, who now, aside from their teaching and their research, are being asked to demonstrate the impact of their research. But to some extent, that marks quite an opportunity for our field, because we have quite a lot to say about practice. Understanding, let’s say, the way that environmental accounting is done in big organizations, is that actually going to change the practice of organizations? I suppose that is the question. I think it's going to perhaps edge people little bit towards more outward looking approaches to their research, which, of course not in every single case, but in some cases, would be a good motivator for doing well-grounded, well-understood empirical research, that then also has public policy or social implications. Nonetheless, our role as academics isn't just to give people advice on what to do on any kind of social issue. I think it is also to struggle with these ideas that help us to understand the world better. So I think it's okay to be inward looking as well. When I'm the editor and I open up on Friday and look at all the new papers that have arrived in the Elsevier inbox, lots of those papers are just really talking to each other and not really looking outwards. I think it's important that academics have got the space to struggle with those ideas. And I think also that the genesis of new understandings is quite slow. We could take 10 years trying to understand something. Eventually, it's good if it is spread outside, but I don't think that should always be the immediate imperative of every single piece of research that anyone ever does. I don't know what you think about that. It's an interesting question.
Cameron: Yes, I struggle with that. I think that there is room in society. I think society, whether we want it to have room for this or not, society is made up of these local discourses, where conversations happen that really matter to those people, and you need a huge multiplicity of all these different conversations going on. So to say that all academics must be totally outward-looking, and totally focused on practice, and never do something that simply engages their own community, is to deny the value of community itself.
Christine: Yes, that's true.
Cameron: Can you maybe explain for the listeners who don't really know how these things work, what does it editor of an academic journal actually do?
Christine: [laughs] On a very mundane technical level, an academic or a group of academics could spend a year, or more than a year, working on one of these manuscripts. It will be on a certain subject, and they will do lots of empirical work and try to relate that to some kind of theoretical perspective. Then they send it to our journal, and then the editor gets it and reads it. At that stage, there's two decisions. One is, we have norms about what is publishable in our journal. So we'll decide, does it fit with the scope of the journal? Lots of the papers that we get, I would describe as not really being critical.
Cameron: So they could be good papers, they're just not a good fit for this particular journal.
Christine: Yes. And it's terrible for people. You can imagine, you put your heart and soul into something for over a year and then someone says, no, we don't want it. That's kind of tough. So we can suggest other outlets. Some manuscripts out there, we’re not going to proceed with them. Other ones, we think they are going to be of interest to our readership, and we think that they are going to have the level of empirical work and theoretical work that you need to get published in the journal, so we send it to two reviewers. They're blind reviewers, although sometimes of course, you may know who has written the paper. Then you wait, and the two reviewers hopefully will come back and they make decisions on the paper. They can say they feel it should be rejected, or major revisions, or revisions. They could say accept, but it never seen that happen.
Cameron: Not in the first round!
Christine: Nothing is perfect. You get new eyes to look at something. Then as an editor, I would reread the paper and read the comments and give a steer to the authors. Especially if the reviewers have got different ideas about how the paper should be developed, I can add in my tuppence worth. And then I send it back to the writers of the manuscript. Then they take sometimes a year, perhaps more than that, sometimes less than that, to revise it, and then we get it back and I can have a look at it to see if they've taken on board, at least to some extent, the reviewer comments. Then it goes back to the two reviewers for further comments. This backwards and forwards could go on four or five times before we eventually accept the paper. Probably too often what happens, is I think it's got a really good idea, really interesting, so I send it to the reviewers and the reviewers also agree that is really interesting and worth pursuing, so they make really good comments back, and it goes back to the authors. And I think, partly just due to the time pressure, they hardly change anything on the manuscript. And at that stage, then, it could be rejected, really because nobody believes that the authors of the paper are prepared to put in the hard yards to make it of a publishable standard. So at any stage in this backwards or forwards, the paper can fall out the system. So it's hard! Anyone who thinks that what academics do is easy, it's absolutely not. You get a lot of rejection and pain.
Cameron: [laughs nervously] Yes. A good day, a good review, is one that didn't actually say “reject.” But even one that says we think this paper has potential and we look forward to your next revision, you still – I don't know about you – but I take it as a stab through the heart, because they didn't like my little creation. They didn't absolutely love it and I did.
Christine: Yes, exactly. Because you wouldn't submit a paper unless you think it’s perfect, and of course nothing is perfect but it's the best you could do.
Cameron: Just for full disclosure to listeners, I'm an associate editor on the same journal so I am familiar with these processes. I'm interested in your views as the Managing Editor on how we as a journal and we as an academic community go about developing voices, developing researchers, in areas that are underfunded and in an academic sense marginalized. It's very easy for us to get paper submissions from the UK, the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia. Much more difficult to find good quality, as we understand quality, good quality submissions from some areas of Africa or South America. So how do you go about making sure that we don't simply continue to reinforce the perspective of well-trained — when we say well-trained, we mean people who are trained the way we are.
Christine: This is a huge issue, and I suppose that one individual journal can't solve all of the huge structural problems. There’s a few things that we started to do at the margins to help. We started to make inroads, to work with people in South America. A couple of years ago, I was at a conference in Colombia, and there were people from all over South America, from Argentina, from Brazil, lots of different countries. They were all coming together for a critical conference, and we did some master classes and engaged quite a lot with the academics there, spoke a lot with the PhD students, and we are going to have another conference in Colombia which is also specifically designed to try to help people from South America. We are going to have a special issue of the journal, so that when we get papers, we’re working with them on the basis that we understand that not all of the papers that are being submitted are from academics that have had the Anglo-Saxon, Anglophone, economic-North training. So we can actually put more work into helping them develop those papers so that they look like meeting the criteria with respect to quality. The conference isn't until October or November. We're not really accepting yet, but we've already had one submission and it looks really interesting. So then we can perhaps start to develop a whole group of academics that have got a critical mass, that can develop each other, and then get their own conferences going. Something we've also spoken about as well, is you’ve got a huge problem – even if you had the best training, let's say in Europe, but you’re non-Anglophone – there’s a huge issue with just writing in the complex English that we like to see in journals in our field. So we will take submissions from people in French, and we've just started a trial run of taking papers in Spanish. We feel that Spanish – and of course I understand there's people speaking Portuguese there, as well – will really help at least some people in South America. When it comes to Africa, I'm going to the African Accounting Association Conference this year, and of course that's not wholly helpful unless I meet people there, and then I can start to form relationships, and help, or at least comment on their work and so on and so forth. Those things really develop slowly, and they're not fast enough. These are little tiny things that we’re doing. They're not solving the problems. And definitely, not having open access, I mean, if you work at some universities you can't even read work in CPA, so how could even think about trying to publish in CPA because you don't know what kind of things we publish. So those things are huge issues, huge!
Cameron: Where you see the movement going for open journals, where these subscription barriers are removed? Is that something you think holds a lot of promise, or is it just too difficult?
Christine: This is optimistic, I think. I've heard there are certain editorial boards and editors that wholesale walked away from the capitalist publisher, and set up their own journal. Of course and what happens is, behind the academics that left, there's going to be another heap of academics that would just be really happy to walk into their shoes. Nonetheless, something that we seriously need to think about in the critical community, is at least setting up an association, and perhaps then, once that is set up, thinking about a journal. And I don't know how the mainstream publishers are going to start to deal with the pressures for open access. In some senses, it's up to them, but in some ways, if they do address it and they do allow open access, they are still going to make lots of money if they want. It's a battle that we can fight and perhaps win.
Cameron: That sounds optimistic!
Christine: Yeah, I think it is optimistic. But I think there is enough … and that's what I'm saying, it's really hard to know, behind the scenes, how the big publishers are going to be. They're going to be in negotiations with governments and with massive funding bodies and so on. I know that with Plan S, it's got lots of great big supporters, the European Union, the Bill Gates Foundation. It’s not just Christine Cooper and her mates. These are huge social forces that are trying to push this. I don't know, who knows, perhaps they can come up with compromises. Perhaps you could say countries that have got a GDP that’s less than so much, on some kind of index, you can have this for free. But the trouble is, how then do you prevent everyone in the world from registering at those universities and getting everything for free? I don't know. But really, I think there's a big enough pressure for this to happen. I'm hoping it will happen.
Cameron: Well, if there is one thing I know about you, Christine, it’s that you're not a person who ever backs down from a battle. So I'm very glad to see you on the front line of that particular battle. It's a difficult thing that we as academics wrestle with, because we’re paid by the public sector and we give away our work for free to the private sector, and then they turn around and charge our universities for subscriptions on the work that we were actually paid to produce. So it is certainly problematic. At any rate, I’ve really appreciated your willingness to be on the podcast. It's fascinating to talk with you. We could go on! But I’ll let you go. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Christine: Yeah, thanks. Thanks.
Links
Prof. Cooper’s faculty profile at the University of Edinburgh
Her Wikipedia page
Critical Perspectives on Accounting
Her article with Phil Taylor on prison privatization
Credits
Host: Cameron Graham
Producer: Bertland Imai
Photos: University of Edinburgh
Music: Musicbed
Recorded: June 4, 2019
Location: York University and University of Edinburgh
