Accounting and the third enclosure movement : beyond intellectual property rights, debates concerning accounting knowledge, international accounting standards and expertise

The recent debate at the American Accounting Association Annual Congress concerning the "privatisation" of AAA journals served as a springboard for considering the "freedom" of accounting knowledge, research and thought more generally. The production of knowledge in the 21st century is now intricately linked with intellectual property rights and consequently the latest moves by (in particular) the World Trade Organisation in support of new laws on intellectual property. The economic ideology underpinning the expansion of Intellectual Property is "trickledown" economics. Intellectual property laws come in the form of copyrights, trademarks, patents, and related rights. Concern has been expressed about intellectual property laws by the legal profession and various social movements sometimes described as the "commons movement", the "CopyLeft" and the "dot.communists". In this paper we will draw upon the emerging literature of the "commons movement" as a framework for our analysis of accounting knowledge and technologies such as international accounting standards. The paper initially discusses the first enclosure movement and makes analogies with the 'second movement' which although concerned with state-created property rights; this time the property in question is mainly "intellectual" rather than physical land. In the next section, we consider the debate regarding AAA journals, this area although not all encompassing is topical enough to allow the authors to highlight some of the ideas surrounding intellectual property and freedom. We then use this debate to address the main focus of the paper which discusses accounting knowledge more generally, through the enforceable adoption of international accounting standards (IAS/IFRS) thanks to an international cartel-aided privatization. An understanding of the globalisation of these new standards is important because it represents a new form of enclosure in accounting knowledge. International standards globalized to shape the life of billions of people in the world are architected by a group of few white men experts cherishing the market ideology. In this new wave of enclosure, 'the third enclosure movement', accountants from big auditing firms and market regulators and agents become the new lords of accounting knowledge. Their expertise substitutes intellectual property (IP) rights to secure their benefits and interests. Above all, such a discussion aims to show the difficulties associated with the co-existence of private knowledge and public interest.