| This dissertation examines pension accounting in Canada from the perspective of its impact on society. The dissertation consists of three separate but related studies. The first study, intended to investigate the limits of this dissertation in "improving" the social impact of pension accounting in Canada, examines how various groups of accounting researchers have used "public interest" and other roughly synonymous terms. In a content analysis of over 400 accounting articles published since 1926, the study demonstrates how the linguistic habitus of researchers is constrained by participation in academic discourse. The second study seeks to demonstrate the constitutive role played by accounting in the social safety net for the elderly in Canada. An early attempt at income protection, the 1908 government annuities scheme, is compared to the present comprehensive retirement income system, using the theoretical vocabulary of governmentality. The study suggests that accounting has played an instrumental role in constructing retirement as a (largely individualized) savings problem and in preparing calculative citizens for their participation in retirement. The third study examines the role played by accounting in constructing the demand for public protection of private pensions in Canada. The case at the heart of this study is the 2001 bail out of the Algoma Steel pension plan by the Ontario government. Building on existing literature on accounting as simulacrum and hyperreality, the study examines the way that accounting numbers serve as reconfigurable signs that construct appropriate "crises," motivate government intervention and stakeholder acquiescence, and redistribute economic risk. |
