The politics of accounting, race and ethnicity: a story of a Chiefly-based preferencing

This research utilises theories of institutionalised patterns of discrimination to tell a story about how accounting becomes part of discourse orientations that are deeply rooted in notions of racial identity and differentiation. By exploring the complex demands for a financial re-structuring of a South Pacific State-owned enterprise, the research study not only highlights accounting's enrolment in processes of preferencing that assume hegemonic and exclusive strategies based on pre-existing patterns of Chiefly power. But, through an ethnography of the Fijian pine industry, the study also shows how accounting becomes involved in perpetuating existing institutionalised inequalities in a society practising forceful racist exclusions. In the process, the paper also highlights that accounting change and requests for its change emerge not only because there is a search for new financing strategies and performance indicators, to sustain a Chiefly-based preferential initiative, but also because accountancy practice institutes a certain faith and expectation. In doing so, the paper focuses on the way in which indigenous identity initiates a new ethnic expression of accounting.