International Accounting Standards in Africa: Selective Recursivity for the ‘Happy Few’?

Abstract

This study explores recursivity in international accounting standard‐setting, focusing on participation of actors from African countries. While the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Foundation bases its legitimacy claims as a global standard‐setter on a combination of expertise and a formally transparent set of recursive procedures for consultation of stakeholders, empirical results show that participation in the latter is geographically very uneven. The article argues that conceptual mismatch between the standard‐setter's objectives on the one hand and the socio‐economic, cultural and political conditions in many African countries on the other leads to selective recursivity that is problematic for the former's legitimacy and effectiveness. These findings are of wider relevance for debates on global standard‐setting and development.

Professional action in global wealth chains

“…Regulators try to monitor and understand what clients and professionals are doing. The political, economic, and social positions of many of these professionals recursively reinforce what is possible within the transnational economic and legal order, including the financial and legal possibilities offered through wealth chains (Halliday & Carruthers 2009;Tsingou 2015;Botzem et al 2017).…”

Globalization and Business Regulation

“…Alternatively, governance communities will develop informal processes of translation, adaptation, and vernacularization of global templates, norms, and codes, thus institutionalizing a process of "glocalization" (Drori et al 2013). In other cases, universal global standards will be integrated into national legislations and become hybrid in the process; this is essentially what happened with international accounting standards or with competition regulation (see Botzem et al 2017, Djelic 2011.…”