Accounting for altruism: tracing the transformation of the modern-day charity in the United Kingdom

Suleman, Rani (2021) Accounting for altruism: tracing the transformation of the modern-day charity in the United Kingdom. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

This thesis examines the transformation of the modern-day charity as a result of accounting reforms mobilised by accounting standards, practices and actors. It does this by studying (i) the emergence of charity accounting standards, (ii) the notion of public benefit and the ways in which it demarcates charities from other organisations and (iii) the processes through which trustees make sense of their roles and responsibilities. Attentive to the aspirations, agendas and relationships among key actors and institutions, this thesis studies the conditions which shaped the transformation of UK charities into an accounting entity which were responsible for its activities and performance. These actors include the state, accounting standard setter, charity regulator and the courts. It adopts a qualitive methodological approach, drawing on 40 semi-structured interviews and archival documents to facilitate its examination. The research questions are: ‘how did the emergence of charity accounting standards come to play a central role in building the regulatory capacity of the Charity Commission of England and Wales?’, ‘how has the shifting notion of public benefit reshaped how accounting practices are used to define charities in England and Wales?’, and ‘how do charity trustees make sense of the juxtaposition between the juridical construction of the role and their lived reality? The first substantive chapter considers the emergence of charity accounting standards and how evolving notions of accountability came to narrow its focus on financial reporting within the pre-neoliberal and neoliberal era. The second chapter studies how the statutory notion of public benefit came to reside at the heart of how charities are defined. It also explores the negotiations and contestations between the state, regulator, courts and the wider charity sector which led to accounting practices playing a central role in transforming the abstract notion of public benefit into concrete forms of compliance. The third chapter is concerned with the gap between the abstract construction of the role of a charity trustee and their lived reality. It examines how charity trustees make sense of their roles and responsibilities, and manage the complexity and burdens of the role in order to make the role doable.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2021 Rani Suleman
Library of Congress subject classification:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HF Commerce > HF5601 Accounting
Sets:	Departments > Accounting
Supervisor:	Power, Michael and Mennicken, Andrea
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4385

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