David J. Cooper

David J. Cooper is a Professor of Accounting at the University of Alberta, Canada. He is the co-founder, along with Anthony Tinker, of the academic journal Critical Perspectives on Accounting and is also a long-time associate editor of Accounting, Organizations and Society. He is best known as a central figure and co-founder of the critical accounting and public interest accounting movements: movements which emphasize the importance of not only studying the roles of accounting in organizations and society but also using this knowledge to intervene in the public sphere.

David J. Cooper
Born
London, England
Alma materUniversity of Manchester (PhD)
Known forCritical accounting research
Scientific career
FieldsAccounting
Institutions

Life and career

Cooper was born in London, England. He completed his undergraduate studies at the London School of Economics in 1970 and his PhD at the University of Manchester in 1980.[1] In the early 1990s, he moved from the United Kingdom to Canada, eventually accepting a research chair at the University of Alberta. He has continued to lecture widely and has held visiting positions at Oxford University, the London School of Economics and the University of Edinburgh.[2]

Intellectual contributions

Cooper has pushed our understanding of three aspects of accounting practice. First, his research on the political economy of accounting during the 1980s, helped to incite a vibrant research tradition on the role of accounting numbers in social struggle.[3] Political economy of accounting approaches acknowledge that accounting numbers both selectively re-present social reality and act as a distributional mechanism for allocating societal resources.[4] These insights have been taken up and used to study a variety of public interest accounting topics such as environmental reporting[5] as well as class and gender-based aspects of financial reporting.[6]

Second, Cooper’s research on the accounting profession has illuminated the intersections among public accounting firm practices, the organization of the accounting profession, and the associated societal-level consequences.[7] This stream of research draws upon the sociology of the professions literature, extending this literature to show how the accounting profession is similar yet different from other professions such as medicine and law. The research also traces how globalization has impacted on the organization and activities of public accounting.[8]

Third, Cooper has theorized and practiced the role of the specific, public intellectual.[9] Building on the insights of Foucault and Bourdieu, Cooper showed the importance of using accounting expertise to intervene in the public sphere. The interventions included the United Kingdom Coal Board interventions in the 1980s as well as the debt/deficit interventions and privatization interventions in Canada in the 1990s.[10]

More recently, Cooper has served as a board member and resident accounting expert for the Parkland Institute, a Canadian-based public think-tank.

Intellectual lineage

Cooper has supervised and/or acted as mentor to a group of prominent accounting academics. These include Keith Robson (editor-in-chief of Accounting, Organizations and Society), Vaughan Radcliffe (who has studied public secrets within governmental accounting),[11] Dean Neu (another public interest accounting researcher),[12] and Daniel Martinez (who studies NGO accountability).[13]

References
  1. Cooper, David. "CV" (PDF). Retrieved December 16, 2018.
  2. Centre for Accounting and Society. "Professor David Cooper and Professor Christine Cooper join the University of Edinburgh Business School". University of Edinburgh Business School. University of Edinburgh. Retrieved 14 December 2018.
  3. Cooper, David; Sherer, Michael (1984). "The value of corporate accounting reports: arguments for a political economy of accounting". Accounting, Organizations and Society. 9 (3–4): 207–232.
  4. Cooper, David (1984). "Discussion of towards a political economy of accounting". Accounting, Organizations and Society. 5 (1): 161–166.
  5. Gray, R.; Kouhy, R.; Lavers, S. (1995). "Corporate social and environmental reporting: a review of the literature and a longitudinal study of UK disclosure". Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal. 8 (2): 47–77.
  6. Tinker, A.; Neimark, M (1987). "The role of annual reports in gender and class contradictions at General Motors: 1917–1976". Accounting, Organizations and Society. 12 (1): 71–88.
  7. Preston, Alistair; Cooper, David; Scarbrough, Paul; Chilton, Rob (1995). "Changes in the code of ethics of the US accounting profession, 1917 and 1988: The continual quest for legitimation". Accounting, Organizations and Society. 20 (6): 507–546.
  8. Cooper, David; Greenwood, Roysten; Hinings, Bob; Brown, Rob (1998). "Globalization and nationalism in a multinational accounting finn: the case of opening new markets in Eastern Europe". Accounting, Organizations and Society. 23: 531–548.
  9. Neu, Dean; Cooper, David; Everett, Jeff (2001). "Critical Accounting Interventions". Critical Perspectives on Accounting. 12 (6): 3–28.
  10. Berry, A.; Capps, T.; Ferguson, P.; Hopper, T.; Cooper, D. (1985). "Management control in an area of the NCB: rationales of accounting practices in a public enterprise". Accounting, Organizations and Society. 10 (1): 3–28.
  11. Radcliffe, Vaughan (2008). "Public secrecy in auditing: What government auditors cannot know". Critical Perspectives on Accounting. 19 (1): 99–126.
  12. Neu, Dean (2000). "Presents" for the "Indians": land, colonialism and accounting in Canada". Accounting, Organizations and Society. 25 (2): 163–184.
  13. Martinez, D.; Cooper, D. (2017). "Assembling international development: Accountability and the disarticulation of a social movement". Accounting, Organizations and Society: 6–20.
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