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Alessandro Stefano Ala &#38; Irvine Lapsley (2019). British Accounting Review. Volume 51, Issue 5, pp. 1008-39Abstract. This paper examines the recent European public sector accounting reform which introduces controversial calculative practices for the recognition of criminal activities in national accounts. Namely, accounting for unlawful drug production and drug trafficking, and accounting for prostitution. Challenging the presumption of accounting neutrality, this study analyses this “accounting for crime” policy from a semantic and an epistemological view point as a cognitive system of creation of meaning and formation of knowledge. The analysis reveals the polyhedrality of neoliberalism, and the way it exerts its influence on society through its circuitous discursive process of social construction and transfiguration of reality which flows crosswise its multiple dimensions. At the macro level this policy operates as a ‘hegemonic project’: It bonds together the economic and political interests of different ‘historical blocs’, making the implementation of these practices a matter of ‘common sense’. At the micro level this policy functions as an ‘apparatus of governmentality’: It encapsulates the cognition of crime within a panoptic logic of economic rationality, transforming its outcome into a contributory value of a country’s prosperity. In this context, this study outlines the centrality of accounting practice as a pivotal tool of the neoliberal ideology: It permits extending the realm of calculative methodologies to the commodification of human weaknesses, addictions, and sexuality, in a rational process of accounting to balance the supply and demand of sex and drugs, between prostitutes and clients, pushers and addicts.Keywords: Government accounting, crime, accounting neutrality, ideology, neoliberalism and accounting, neoliberal discourse hegemony, governmentalityEXCERPT“1. INTRODUCTIONThe importance of accounting in society is accentuated by its potential for quantifying many aspects of contemporary life. The emergence of new calculative practices is a matter worthy of analysis due to their aptitude for translating matters of quantification into issues of the social order (Miller, 2001, Vollmer, 2003). Albeit accounting has an ‘aura of neutrality and objectivity’ (Funnel, 1998), its calculative practices are not an instrument of neutral depiction of reality. Accounting mediates the comprehension of the external reality through the use of ‘conventions’ (Diaz-Bone and Salais, 2011, 2012) which are ‘arbitrary, political and moral in nature’ (Chiapello, 2017, p. 57). In this sense, the calculative practices of accounting can be better explained as a cognitive tool through which some aspects of reality are mentally classified, understood and represented. […] Foucault theorises ‘neoliberal governmentality’ as a system of social construction of epistemological mechanisms necessary to channel the individual cognition of reality within a panoptic logic of economic rationality in a manner which is suitable to the pursuit of specific political and economic interests (in Foucauldian parlance these are called ‘apparatuses of conduct of conducts’). The use of Foucauldian discourse analysis implies, therefore, examining the calculative methodologies for the computation of the outcome of crime (and its corresponding representation in financial reports) through this theoretical lens to explain ‘the effects of the conventions incorporated into accounting’ (Chiapello, 2017, p. 57). In this light, in the discourse analysis the focus is on the way the policy of “accounting for crime” fulfils the objectives of ‘framing and education’, i.e. it ‘describe[s] the world from a specific standpoint and teaches users to see the world from that perspective’, and in the ‘construction of the world’, i.e. it brings ‘things into existence that would not exist without them’ (Chiapello, 2017, p. 57).” (p. 2/7-8)https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0890838919300526