El Reconocimiento del Interés Social de la Minería en el Derecho

This section reviews some recent studies related to accounting practices in Sri Lanka. These studies are mainly focused on social, cultural and political implications of accounting practices in textile, traditional fishing and plantation industries. In addition, Wickramasinghe et al. (2004) conducted a study in a privatised telecommunications company in Sri Lanka (see Section 5.2.2; according to the information provided in their study, the organisation is undoubtedly Sri Lanka Telecom).

Wickramasinghe and Hopper (2005) studied how and why cultural and political factors are important in the transformation of management accounting controls in Sri Lanka. They studied management accounting controls in a textile mill in a traditional Sinhalese village, where “domestic politicians and aid agencies tried to transform a society based on a traditional MOP [mode of production] and beliefs in Kingship to neo-liberal market capitalism” (p. 476). Their findings show the failure of trying to impose externally developed and conventional (according to popular text books) management accounting practices because the workers resisted. Wickramasinghe and Hopper found that management accounting controls took on unexpected roles when confronted by a traditional, rural culture based on kingship obligations. That is, management accounting controls were used to legitimise and defend the prevailing social and political issues.

Wickramasinghe and Hopper (2005) only examined budgeting in the textile mill. They did not consider change in accounting practices as a whole. Further, they analysed differences in budgeting systems in the organisation during five periods based on cultural and political factors. However, as I found, definition of periods according to a few factors has limitations in explaining change. First, determining changes by comparing a system at two distant points in time will ignore what has happened in between those two points. It may also ignore, not identify, or dismiss other factors that may have caused the changes. For example, during my study, I found it difficult to categorise the transition of Sri Lanka Telecom merely based on the cultural and the political background of the organisation. Indeed, one of my main findings is that accounting practices of Sri Lanka Telecom have been influenced by many other factors, such as the global telecommunication industry, technological developments in

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telecommunications and interests of the ownership, in addition to the cultural, political and economic context. Therefore, I tried to identify the various instances of change of all of these aspects in the context in which the organisation is operating and how these changes are related to change in accounting practices of Sri Lanka Telecom. When we observe influences of many aspects, we can construct change in the context as a sequence of events. Then we can see how each event is linked to another, rather than comparing two delineated periods. Jayasinghe and Wickramasinghe (2007) show how and why certain calculative practices are applied in the traditional fishing industry of a village in Sri Lanka. They claim that the notions of “total institution” (empirical context) and the “articulated mode of production” can be used by accounting researchers to get an understanding about their research sites beyond the formal organisation. Reflecting on the experience of Jayasinghe and Wickramasinghe, the evidence I found in completing this study indicates that the accounting practices of the organisation and the context of the organisation are inextricably linked. Studying the context of an organisation reveals the unique characteristics of use of accounting practices, even though on the surface practices in different contexts generally appear to be similar.

Jayasinghe and Wickramasinghe (2007) found unique techniques of calculations in the fishing industry of the village, in spite of the transformation of the village into a modern economy and way of doing business. Those calculative practices contained specific local vocabularies, aimed at achieving the villagers’ day to day economic needs and supporting the interests of some social groups. Their study gave different results compared to previous studies on determinants of use or non-use of accounting practices, such as social and state institutions, the level of literacy of people and norms of reciprocity. They claim that even though people of the village can read and write, villagers did not use general accounting practices. Their findings show that the calculative practices used in the fishing industry of the village are closely related to its social, cultural and political norms. According to them, limiting a study within the formal boundary of an organisation only describes how accounting is practised.

Alawattage and Wickramasinghe (2008) studied the role of accounting in a political hegemony using evidence from a tea plantation in Sri Lanka. They claim that, in contrast to their review of the role of accounting in Western contexts, their study shows that accounting lacks the power to make dramatic changes in organisations. According to them, the role of accounting in enterprises of developing countries should be understood within the

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evolutionary context of political hegemony. For example, they show that, even though accounting was used to measure the labour usage, acreage, etc., to ascertain the production function and to provide information for financial reporting purposes, accounting had never been used by the management in the tea plantation to control the labour process. Instead, such calculations pertaining to labour were used broadly, to benchmark and to represent the existing political domination as “norms”. Accordingly, the calculations based on such norms, as manifested in budgets and estimates, reproduced the political domination, rather than causing any dramatic change in the organisation. Alawattage and Wickramasinghe note that any deviations of performance from these estimates were justified by managers by referring to issues involved with labour discipline, claiming that such issues are beyond the control of accounting practices and management due to political hegemony.

Alawattage and Wickramasinghe (2008) claim that their study helps to resolve some theoretical and empirical issues related to contextual differences between the West and developing countries. Their claim implies that we can expect similarities of how accounting practices are used under similar circumstances. That is, organisations in similar contexts would have similar accounting practices, and these are used to achieve similar objectives. However, findings in this thesis show that individuals even within the same organisation, or two organisations within the same context, assign different meanings to accounting practices. Therefore, we should study why such differences can occur.

Alawattage and Wickramasinghe (2009) conducted another study in the tea industry in Sri Lanka. They studied how a subaltern group (people with a lower status in the society) in the company, Ceylon Tea, Sri Lanka, used unorthodox, non-calculable methods originating from and deployed within the social group, but unknown to other groups of the society. The subalterns utilised their unorthodox calculative methods to change governance and accountability structures. Alawattage and Wickramasinghe found that use of those accounting methods led to changes in the structural conditions that were favourable to the subalterns, who previously were controlled and suppressed. They claim that subalterns effectively used these unorthodox accounting practices to communicate with society at large, and so demand emancipatory reforms in the hierarchical system in large-scale plantations.

My criticism of these few studies relating to accounting practices in the Sri Lankan context is that they are narrowly focused on cultural and political contexts. None of them are focused on why and how accounting practices have changed in organisations in Sri Lanka. Even the

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study by Wickramasinghe and Hopper (2005) is about differences only in the budgeting systems in a Sri Lankan organisation and did not cover change in accounting practices as a whole. Also, the Wickramasinghe and Hopper study was the only longitudinal one.

A longitudinal study would provide evidence about change in accounting practices that were due to various reasons at various moments, enabling researchers and readers to gain a more comprehensive understanding of change in accounting practices, rather than a partial discussion focused on only one or a few aspects of change and confined to a specific period of time. This thesis exemplifies such a study. It examines accounting practices of the first telecommunications organisation in Sri Lanka over its entire formal existence (i.e. as a legal entity), along with the changing context of the organisation: it identifies specific reasons, gives evidence of specific instances of change and provides different explanations for change in its accounting practices.

As alluded to in Chapter One, having reviewed the literature on organisational change, Quattrone and Hopper (2001) claim that the overwhelming majority of theories, both those using rational choice approaches and those using contextualist approaches, consider change as an entity going from one state to another. There are two related and fundamental concepts referred to in this literature that are common to definitions of organisational change theories: firstly the presumption of the existence of an organisation (with various attributes that are all subject to change), and secondly, that change occurs over time. According to these assumptions, everyone perceives the same organisation, which is presumed to exist. Even so a question arises as to whether individuals perceive the same attributes and the same change process. For example, is the way that the organisation is perceived at a given point of time by one employee similar to the way the organisation is perceived by another employee?

Broadbent and Laughlin (2005) take a slightly different approach in explaining the nature of organisations. They claim that organisations exist with their own histories, even though organisations are not independent of their present-day stakeholders. They claim that the history of an organisation is a story created by different individuals, depending on their knowledge about the past and how they see the past, which is heavily subject to their preconceived ideas, interests and current requirements.

As alluded to earlier, I came across an example of this in Sri Lanka Telecom. A person who supported privatisation of the organisation related that before privatisation accounting

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practices were not popular and the organisation did not prepare commercial accounts. Thus, according to him, in its past forms, the organisation did not utilise much accounting information. In contrast, I found Administration Reports from the late 1930s showing that the organisation did indeed prepare commercial accounts at that time, including profit and loss statements, balance sheets, capital accounts, statement of cash balance and inventory records. This contradiction of evidence may be due to that informant wanting to show support for the privatisation of the Corporation, and wanting to prove that accounting was an essential requirement to be successful. Thus, he claimed that it was difficult under government ownership to implement accounting practices he believed were new. Other possible explanations are that the term “commercial accounts” had different meanings in the two contexts, or that the informant was indifferent about the historical situation so far back in time. We have to take those personal opinions into consideration in constructing knowledge about the circumstances and events associated with a named organisation and interpreting changes. The above claim by the informant shows that interpretations of change in accounting practices are subjective and, thus, that an historical account should not rely entirely on the present incumbents or participants.

In gathering evidence for this study, I noticed that informants chose to explain different changes based on their knowledge, experiences and interests. Not only that, but they also had different perceptions about the attributes of the organisation and its accounting practices. Therefore, the meanings they attached to attributes and changes in the organisation they were all referring to by the name Sri Lanka Telecom, and to accounting practices they associated with that organisation, were not the same. The implication of this diversity for me is that, if I were to assume a single static organisation exists for everyone, I would be ignoring the multiple realities constructed and perceived by my informants. That is, no one, or hardly anyone, perceives the same organisation, the same attributes or the same change process.