Corporate governance and accounting systems: a critical perspective

In this paper, corporate governance is understood as an ideological perspective of the superiority given to the interests of a bourgeoisie, the accounting systems being only the place of validation of these interests. Mixed with the illusion of accounting systems seen as giving informations to shareholders taken as rational, corporate governance allows to build a better mask of dominant interests by focusing the attention on conflicts of interests between shareholders and managers. It induces to think that the structuralization of a device of control by and around the board of administrators could allow a shareholders activism which would possess a “true” democratic substance, diverting then of the “real” ideological project of corporate governance. The demonstration ends with a criticism of the role of auditing firms considered as broadcasting a managerial ideology.