Darlene Himick

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Ottawa

Reporting the costs of pension plans has ?challenged the accountant's imagination? (Matthews, 1960) for decades. Recent financial reporting has been under pressure to reveal the more ?true? costs of pension plans, even if that means revealing their failing health. As part of this call, the actuarial methodology upon which pension accounting is base...

This paper examines the recent phenomenon of social impact bonds (SIBs). Social impact bonds are an attempt to marketize/financialize certain contemporary, intractable “social problems”, such as homelessness and criminal recidivism. SIBs rely on a vast array of accounting technologies including budgets, future cash flows, discounting, performance m...

This study focuses on the Governmental Accounting Standards Board’s (GASB) Pension Project which, over 2009-2012, deliberated a highly contested issue over the “correct” discount rates to be used in the discounting of pension liabilities on government financial statements. We analyze the arguments used by participants to justify their preference an...

In this study, we examine the ways in which actuarial consultants attempt to motivate their clients to see pension-related accounting regulations and market volatility as ‘risks’ that need to be managed through particular risk-mitigating technologies. This study is predicated on 23 interviews conducted with actuarial consultants and their clients a...

This paper examines the role of accounting in assigning financial values to stakeholder claims. Stakeholder theorists have called for metrics managers can use to coordinate stakeholder claims. We argue that accounting already serves as the dominant example of such a tool, and that its role in measuring and representing stakeholder claims, and how t...

Pension funds have become major targets for the incorporation of climate change into their investment decisions. Recently, divestment from carbon intensive companies or industries has been the object of a wave of campaigns directed at these institutional investors. This paper uses Foucault’s dispositive of security to investigate the decisions of o...

Acknowledgements: The lands where we live, learn and work hold the ancestral connections and stories of Indigenous peoples since time immemorial and their histories, languages, and cultures continue to influence our vibrant communities. However, colonization has orchestrated the displacement of First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples from their ance...

This paper expands on a letter recently submitted by a group of Canadian business academics to the Independent Review Committee on Standard Setting in Canada (IRCSSC) in response to the committee's proposed Canadian Sustainability Standards Board. We highlight sections of the IRCSSC's Consultation Paper that we find problematic and draw on accounti...

This article introduces anarchist-informed approaches of collective decision-making, self-organizing, and anti-hierarchy into emancipatory accounting research through the study of direct action and its prefigurative practices. At its most basic form, direct action is a means of bringing about social change in such a way that the action itself model...

Purpose The purpose of this Editorial is to reflect on the potentials and challenges of qualitative research in financial accounting and introduce the four papers included in this Special Issue. Design/methodology/approach The authors draw on and discuss extant literature and the papers included in the Special Issue to develop our assessment of th...

This study investigates how one important accounting professional authority—CPA Canada—discusses accounting ethics and exhorts its members to think about ethics-related issues. To do this, we rely on empirical evidence of the types of arguments used by CPA Canada to describe what they consider acceptable moral justifications in a variety of practic...

Purpose Profit is often moralized by activists, but scant research has carefully examined what profit is for these activists or how they use it to create a more just world. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how social movements use counter accounts of profit as tools of resistance. Design/methodology/approach A multiple case study design...

We investigate one episode of the “financialization” of accounting: the debate over the “correct” method to discount defined benefit (DB) pension plan liabilities for US public sector financial reporting. We outline this issue from the pre-agenda, agenda-setting and alternatives selection phases of the standard setting process, through to the polic...

The US equity market has witnessed the rising power of institutional investors over the past three decades. Yet even as these institutional owners become more powerful, their effect on corporate social responsibility (CSR) still remains unclear. The present study attempts to fill this gap by examining these investors’ influence on CSR along the dim...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the accounting notion of “human depreciation” helped the defined benefit pension plan emerge as the dominant means of dealing with an aging workforce in the first half of twentieth century USA. Design/methodology/approach – The study examines historical material to identify the intersection...

Despite the increase in the acceptance of responsible investing (RI) in general (Allianz, in www.allianzglobalinvestors.com, 2010), the global community is still witnessing unprecedented levels of practices that can only be categorized as “unsustainable”. It appears, then, that either the inroads made by the RI community have not kept up with the i...

This study focuses on the Governmental Accounting Standards Board’s (GASB) Pension Project which, over 2009-2012, deliberated a highly contested issue over the “correct” discount rates to be used in the discounting of pension liabilities on government financial statements. We claim that this debate comprises an ethical dimension and analyze the eth...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to shed light on accounting's role in bringing about a pension reform project in Chile under the authoritarian regime of Augusto Pinochet. The paper aims to reveal the specific role that the pension reform played in the regime's broader ideological goals, thus highlighting the need to reflect upon its origins...