accounting activism and bourdieu's ‘collective intellectual’ – reflections on the icl...

Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2013) xxx–xxx

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YCPAC-1764; No. of Pages 18

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Critical Perspectives on Accounting

jou r nal h o mep ag e: w ww .e ls evier . co m/lo c ate /c pa

Accounting activism and Bourdieu’s ‘collective intellectual’ – Reflectionson the ICL Case

Christine Cooper, Andrea B. Coulson *

University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom

A R T I C L E I N F O

Article history:

Received 4 April 2012

Received in revised form 15 January 2013

Accepted 20 January 2013

Available online xxx

Keywords:

Bourdieu

Collective-intellectual

Intervention

Neoliberalism

A B S T R A C T

The aim of this paper is to reflect upon the practice of accounting academics as ‘collective

intellectuals’ – inspired by the actions and conception of Pierre Bourdieu. While

accounting researchers have drawn upon Bourdieu’s theoretical contributions on habitus,

field and capital, little attention has been paid to his later, more critical ideas and practice

of intervention post 1995. As a result, accounting research has yet to discover Bourdieu’s

work on the ‘collective intellectual’ and, thus, consider its contribution to our

understanding of how accounting academics can participate in a form of activism against

neoliberalism that would not be in contradiction with professional norms of rigorous

research. Rather, activism could enhance academic research.

Central to this paper is a reflection on a case of intervention involving a diverse

collection of academics and activists who came together to launch a coordinated response

to a large-scale industrial disaster in Scotland in 2004. The collective in question took

various interventionary steps to campaign for a Public Inquiry into the disaster and seek

justice and accountability for workers past and present. These steps are analysed with

respect to the methods adopted and the work and practice of Bourdieu’s collective

intellectual.

� 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

In his book Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2, Pierre Bourdieu (2003) sets out the case that the ‘‘neoliberalvulgate’’ appears to be beyond discussion and contestation. The strength of neoliberalism is, in part, the result of theextensive, unremitting work by its massive intellectual workforce. In light of this, Bourdieu argues that against ‘‘such power,based on the concentration and mobilisation of cultural capital, the only efficacious response is a critical force of contestationbacked by similar mobilisation but directed towards entirely other ends’’ (Bourdieu, 2003, p. 12). In other words, Bourdieurecognised that resistance to neoliberalism requires an immense intellectual counter-force. While the work of building anintellectual counter-force is not limited to academics, Bourdieu saw the untapped potential of the academe. He stated thatthere is a critical energy which hitherto remains within the walls of the ‘‘scientific city’’ where academics find it moreprofitable to ‘‘reserve the products of their labours for scientific publications read only by their peers’’ (Bourdieu, 2003, p. 13).In effect Bourdieu issued a rallying cry to stimulate academic researchers to intervene in the world of politics. However, thiscall to arms was not simply an appeal for academics to attempt to publish their work beyond the academy. Rather thatacademics should engage in social interventions with other academics and activists – a conception that Bourdieu termed

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 1415483179.

E-mail address: [email protected] (A.B. Coulson).

Please cite this article in press as: Cooper C, Coulson AB. Accounting activism and Bourdieu’s ‘collective intellectual’ –Reflections on the ICL Case, Crit Perspect Account (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2013.01.002

1045-2354/$ – see front matter � 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2013.01.002


mailto:[email protected]


http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/business/officialReports/meetingsParliament/or-07/sor0906-02.htm


C. Cooper, A.B. Coulson / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2013) xxx–xxx2

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‘‘collective intellectuals’’. Bourdieu states that it ‘‘is clear that no compilation made by an archivist, no matter how detailedand exhaustive; no discussion within parties, associations, or trade unions; no synthesis by a theorist can substitute for theproduct of a confrontation between all those researchers oriented towards action and all the thoughtful and experiencedactivists of all the European countries’’ (Bourdieu, 2003, p. 16). Neither the most sophisticated political debates nor the bestresearched exposes of corruption or political failure will bring about change. Social movements, in their various forms, arerequired to do that.

Reflecting upon Bourdieu we argue, intervention as collective intellectuals enables new opportunities to promote endsbeyond the neoliberal vision and furthers opportunities to create ‘‘utopian possibilities’’ and progressive social change(Bourdieu, 2008b). Central to this paper is the recognition that accounting researchers can participate in a form of activismagainst neoliberalism that would not be in contradiction with professional norms of rigorous research.

A number accounting research papers have drawn on Bourdieu to argue that accounting academics can intervene in thepublic space in a way that draws on their specific knowledge and methodological defence for interventions to be effective(Cooper et al., 2005; Everett, 2003; Neu et al., 2001; Shenkin and Coulson, 2007). Our interest is distinct from prioraccounting research in that we focus on accounting academics acting as collective intellectuals. The paper presents andreflects upon our activities when we formed a collective with academics from other disciplines and activists in the aftermathof the ICL (Glasgow, Scotland) factory explosion, in 2004, in which nine people were killed and thirty-three injured. Each ofthe academics brought subject specific knowledge and research skills which were relevant to the case, while the activists hadan expertise derived from previous health and safety campaigns. Initially, the collective was concerned that the public bodyresponsible for workplace safety, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), due to its lack of independence and inadequatefunding, may have been implicated in the disaster. And yet, it had been given a role in searching for the causes of theexplosion. We were therefore animated to provide a counter-weight and to support calls for accountability of both ICL andthe HSE.

The first section of the paper highlights the use of Bourdieu’s theoretical work in accounting research which reveals howaccounting is implicated in domination and the reproduction of power. There are relatively few studies which concern hisinfluence on the promotion of progressive social change and only passing reference has been made to Bourdieu’s collectiveintellectual (Cooper, 2005; Hamilton and O hOgartaigh, 2009; Shenkin and Coulson, 2007). In the following section, weclarify Bourdieu’s position on social movements and his conception of the collective intellectual with a particular focus on hiswork post 1995 and membership of the political group Raisons d’Agir. This section ends by exploring the role of academics ascollective intellectuals and is followed in the next section by a brief explanation of the key features of the ICL case. We thenfocus on the practice of accounting academics intervening in the public realm as collective intellectuals. The collective’sformation and interventions are analysed with respect to the methods we adopted and our notion of accounting. The workand practice of Bourdieu is taken as a retrospective guide to frame the nature and effectiveness of our interventions. Thepaper ends with our reflections on our activities as collective intellectuals. We now turn to extant accounting research which,in the main, draws upon aspects of Bourdieu’s writings to explain how accounting is implicated in the replication of thestatus quo.

2. Contribution and limitations of Bourdieusian accounting research

Bourdieu’s work on the related concepts of doxa, field and habitus as well as his writing on social, cultural, symbolic andeconomic capital have arguably been highly influential on the understanding of accounting. However, in spite of Boyer’scorrect observation that, in many respects, Bourdieu’s entire analytical work tends towards identifying the factors governinginstitutional change and transformation (Boyer, 2003, p. 70), much accounting research draws upon his work as a theory ofcultural reproduction used to explain accounting’s role in the maintenance of power (Nash, 1990). For example Alawattage(2011) adopts a Bourdieusian lens to unearth the way in which accounting calculative practices serve to reinforce the rigidhierarchical structures in gem mining in Sri Lanka. Again looking at Sri Lanka, Jayasinghe and Wickramasinghe (2011) set outto expose how so-called ‘‘development accounting’’ serves to perpetuate rural poverty and maintain the status quo.Hamilton and O hOgartaigh (2009), while concerned with a very different field of study, argue that by dominating thedeclaration of ‘‘true and fair view,’’ the auditor effectively reinforces the status quo and the constitution of hierarchy andinequity that exists in the accounting field. In the field of education, McPhail et al. (2010), draw upon Bourdieu todemonstrate how class divisions are reproduced in the field of education and the implications this has for new entrants to theaccounting profession. Also in the field of higher education Everett (2008), sets out a Bourdieusian theoretical explanation ofthe practices which ensure that proximity to the editor of a top accounting journal significantly increases one’s chances ofpublishing in that journal. Neu (2006) draws on the theoretical insights of Bourdieu to examine the relationship betweenaccounting and public space in the context of educational reforms in Alberta, Canada.

The project of unearthing the systems of domination, we would argue, is an invaluable one for academics in the sense thatunderstanding how social systems operate is an essential step in the process of bringing about progressive social change.Golsorkhi et al. (2009), point out that the means by which systems of domination are reproduced without consciousintention by agents is a central issue for Bourdieu. Academics, armed with Bourdieu’s scientific method, are able to lay barehow systems of domination operate. ‘‘Putting their rational instruments of knowledge at the service of a domination alwaysmore rationalised, or rationally analyse the domination’’ (Bourdieu, 1997, p. 121, in Malsch et al., 2011). However, Bourdieu’sconcepts have proved amenable to piecemeal adoption into extant paradigmic projects and have failed to fully exploit the



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critical possibilities of Bourdieu’s scientific method and open up the habitus to reflexivity and change (Emirbayer andJohnson, 2008; Golsorkhi et al., 2009; Malsch and Gendron, 2013; Malsch et al., 2011).

A small number of accounting studies have made use of Bourdieu’s work to examine how to change dominant practice inorder to foster progressive social change (Neu, 2006; Everett, 2003) or to repel more regressive change (Kurunmaki, 1999;Oakes et al., 1998). Oakes et al. (1998) and Malsch and Gendron (2013) clearly demonstrate that it would be entirely wrong tosee Bourdieu as a theorist of social reproduction and unchanging historical development. This paper as well as reflectingupon academic praxis as a Bourdieusian collective intellectual also embraces Bourdieu’s analysis of change. The next sectiondiscusses Bourdieu’s position on change alongside the context of Bourdieu’s intellectual and political development and hislater work on the collective intellectual.

3. Bourdieu’s position on social change, social movements and the collective intellectual

Bourdieu’s work sets out a theoretical lens through which to view the infinite interplay of variations and invariableswhich characterise human activity and he has never overlooked contradiction, conflict and crisis as animators of change.Boyer (2003) suggests that Bourdieu’s work contains at least five mechanisms to explain change and crisis. These are –innovation instigated by the dominant players in a field (systems of domination have to be in perpetual motion to beeffective); the entry of new actors (this can be easily seen in the economic field when a new actor introduces a new means ofmaking profits, for example by moving into new sectors); the shifting of borders between fields brought about by thestrategies deployed in them (radical innovations can sometimes lead to the creation a new field out of old fields, for example,in the 1960s when established monopolies in computing and telecommunications joined together); battles for State power(for example the battles over the public/private divide); and finally the desynchronization between habitus and field due tochanges in context. This desynchronization is a frequent source of change or even crisis and can come about in a variety ofways – through shifts in general demographics that affect the lifestyle or gender relations or even simply through a change inthe rate equivalency between different forms of capital within a field which, in turn, will alter the responsiveness of anactor’s habitus formed in a prior context. In some cases the complexity of interdependencies between fields can cause crisesaffecting the conditions and factors of domination within them. Boyer (2003) suggests that Bourdieu’s awareness of thebattles for state power explains the proliferation his interventions, particularly in political arena, after 1995. It was at thisstage that Bourdieu’s thinking about collective intellectuals became more concrete although, his thoughts on collectiveintellectuals had been forming for some time (Swartz, 2003).

3.1. The collective intellectual

The development of Bourdieu’s concept of a collective intellectual should be contextualised in light of the politicalchallenges wrought by neoliberalism and Bourdieu’s own experience and political actions. In Bourdieu’s early work, akin toWeber (1958), he argued that the role of social scientists was to aid in the analysis and interpretation of social phenomenawhich would enable politicians and others to make better informed decisions. However, his later work revealed a ‘‘shift inintellectual strategy from one of trying to speak to a left government, as an expert, to one of developing a ‘‘collectiveintellectual’’ strategy. . . that would reaffirm and defend the autonomy of intellectual work from political powers and speakforcefully and critically of abuse of power in whatever form’’ (Swartz, 2003, p. 808). It could be that Bourdieu’s final breakwith a belief in traditional socialist parties was precipitated by the Mitterrand government’s failure to respond to his work onthe problems of the Grand ecole system (Bourdieu, 1996). Bourdieu’s work took on a qualitative shift in respect of his attitudetowards the public role of academics.

For Bourdieu (2003) the fight against neoliberalism was an inherent part of being a collective intellectual but he alsonoted the pivotal role played by what he described as ‘‘autonomous collective intellectuals’’ who work in autonomous ‘‘thinktanks’’ and who reproduce neoliberal ideology. Wacquant (2002, p. 556) explained that the ‘collective intellectual’ could beseen as Bourdieu’s

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‘‘project of building across disciplinary boundaries and national borders to bring together the joined symboliccompetencies of artists and scientists to bear on public debate and to reconstruct a viable progressive agenda true tothe historic ideals of the Left betrayed by the neoliberal turn of socialist and labour parties everywhere. Against thefaddish and facile prophecies of postmodernism, he believed not only in social science as a knowledge enterprise butalso in sociology’s capacity to inform a ‘rational utopianism’ needed to salvage institutions of social justice from thenew barbarism of the unfettered market and withdrawing state. Bourdieu conceived of a unified social science as a‘public service’ whose mission is to ‘denaturalize and defatalize’ the social world and to ‘necessitate conducts’ bydisclosing the objective causes and the subjective reasons that make people do what they do, be what they are, and feelthe way they feel. And to give them thereby the instruments to master the social unconscious that governs theirthoughts and limits their actions.’’

Bourdieu himself stated that it was his involvement with the strikes of December 1995 that directly led to his own praxisas a ‘collective intellectual’ through the establishment of the group Raisons d’Agir (Reasons to Act) and the publishing ventureof the same name Liber Raisons d’Agir.

se cite this article in press as: Cooper C, Coulson AB. Accounting activism and Bourdieu’s ‘collective intellectual’ –ctions on the ICL Case, Crit Perspect Account (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2013.01.002



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3.2. Social movements – Raisons d’Agir

Bourdieu (2008a) wrote:

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‘‘The working group Raisons d’Agir, which we established immediately after the December strikes to try to givepractical embodiment to the kind of ‘‘collective intellectual’’ for which I had been calling for many years, was born outof a concern to produce instruments for a practical solidarity between intellectuals and strikers. We met on a regularbasis and brought out very cheap booklets presenting the results of the most advanced research on important political,social and cultural problems, along with concrete proposals for action as far as this was possible. The first in this serieswas my own booklet Sur la television, which was extraordinarily successful (sales have now reached 100,000), enablingus to finance the subsequent booklets without a problem – I forgot to say that we actually established a publishinghouse.’’ Bourdieu (2008a, p. 279)

Raisons d’Agir was primarily made up of sociologists, economists and academics from other disciplines who shared asimilar critical view of neoliberalism and the economic fatalism brought about by the changing role of the state and themovement towards globalization (Bourdieu, 2003; Swartz, 2003). However, for Bourdieu communicating within socialmovements and to those marginalised outside was critical. Communication would be most efficacious if activists wereembedded within the process. This expanded Bourdieu’s traditional view of intellectuals to include all members of the socialmovement including a public call for the formation of effective groups of collective intellectuals – comprised of alliancesbetween scholars, unionists, artists and various branches of the social movements that were highly critical of politicalcompromises and active ‘‘in producing and distributing instruments of defence against symbolic domination’’ (Bourdieu,2000 reproduced in Bourdieu, 2008a, p. 387).

Liber Raisons d’Agir – played a critical role in ‘‘making visible what was hidden in the customary perceptions of the socialworld’’ (Bourdieu, 2008a, p. 272) and providing an ‘‘international popular encyclopaedia in which activists from all countrieswill be able to find the intellectual weapons needed for their struggles’’ (Bourdieu, 2008a, p. 279). Freeing channels ofcommunications also involved giving voice in the academic press both to intellectuals from other disciplines and otheractivists in the social movements through journal special issues such as Les Inrockuptibles, ‘Joyeux bordel’ (December 1998–January 1999). This was supported by coordination of political interventions through the wider press and public lectures anddebates (Bourdieu, 2008a). One of the primary objectives of Raisons d’Agir was ‘‘to place the analytical skills of researchers atthe service of movements resisting neoliberal policies, and thus counterbalance the influence of conservative think-tanks’’(Bourdieu, 2008a, p. 272).1

3.3. Collective intellectual strategies

In terms of strategy, the ‘‘collective intellectual can and must, in the first place, fulfil negative functions: it must work toproduce and disseminate instruments of defense against symbolic domination. . .’’ (Boudieu, 2003, p. 20). The fight againstsymbolic domination involves an understanding of symbolic violence and misrecognition.2 Symbolic violence is theimposition of categories of thought and perception upon social actors who then accept their dominated position as ‘‘natural,fair and inevitable’’. The incorporation of structures into the unconscious makes symbolic violence more powerful thanphysical violence in that it is embedded in the very modes of action and structures of cognition of individuals, and legitimatesthe social order. Thus the first function of a collective intellectual is to develop a negative critique of power. But secondly acollective intellectual should provide a positive re-intervention and creation of alternatives, allied to Bourdieu’s possibleutopias (Oslender, 2007, p. 108). Oslender (2007) argues that of utmost importance in fulfilling both functions, is the need tofree, rather than constrain, our view of collective intellectuals.

Bourdieu (1985) highlighted his fundamental belief that intellectual legitimacy lies in autonomy (as far as is possible)from all relations to power. So, as emphasised by Swartz (2003, p. 814–5), it is important to remember that Bourdieu‘‘believed that his more direct political involvements did not compromise his rigorous and objective practice of sociology as ascience. In his words, the challenge was to ‘‘think politics without thinking politically’’’’. To ‘‘think politics’’, means usingBourdieu’s concepts to understand the reproduction of power, change and contradiction. So, we draw upon hisunderstanding of the bureaucratic fields, their importance in terms of symbolic capital creation as well as categorization andstructuring, the relative position of fields, which capitals are significant and so on; whereas ‘‘thinking politically’’ involvesthinking about how to enhance our position on our own fields. Of course it is entirely possible to think politics and thinkpolitically. Understanding the rules and structures of fields, their illusio, which capitals are important and so on, would

Bourdieu, both his role in the Centre de Sociologie Europeenne and his role in Raisons d’Agir represented the practice of the collective intellectual

honoured both his scientific tradition and commitment to a social movement encouraging utopian possibilities. Bourdieu’s tradition as both a

gist and anthropologist aligned to the reflexive nature of his theoretical perspective meant that there had always been a dialectical relationship

n Bourdieu’s research (broadly defined) and the actors he engaged with. Much of Bourdieu’s early work (for example, the highly detailed cultural

f class in Distinction, published in 1979) demonstrates his use of empirical work to refine his theoretical understanding. . .While it is clear that

u’s efforts to change the world took on a different form in the 1990s, this paper would argue that Bourdieu’s whole project was truly Marxist in the

hat he was committed to understanding the world in order to change it.

recognition is integral to symbolic violence.

se cite this article in press as: Cooper C, Coulson AB. Accounting activism and Bourdieu’s ‘collective intellectual’ –ections on the ICL Case, Crit Perspect Account (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2013.01.002



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enable actors to more easily enhance their positions. Academics may well find ways to use their collective intellectualexperience to enhance their position within the academic field. However, unless they are thinking about leaving theacademic field, academics will perhaps be less animated to enhance their position in the ‘‘field of political struggle’’.

Central to the provision of support for social movements was maintaining the credibility of the group of collectiveintellectuals and ensuring their ‘objectivity’ was derived from linking the search for feasible utopias with a rigorous use ofthe scientific habitus as well as pursuing new channels of communication for the results (Lenoir, 2006). Bourdieu (1990)argues that the habitus incites regularised practices without producing perfect obedience to rules. The habitus is, inBourdieu’s words (1977, p. 72 and 95), ‘‘the strategy-generating principle enabling agents to cope with unforeseen and everchanging situations . . . a system of lasting transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at everymoment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations and actions and makes possible the achievement of infinitely diversifiedtasks.’’ The scientific habitus of academics means understanding new situations through the lens of various theoreticalunderstandings. However, a space always remains for intellectuals to choose to conform to the scholarly orthodoxy orchallenge its truth claims (see for example Cooper, 2005; Neu et al., 2001).

Researchers must strive to understand both the illusio and doxa of the fields which they are studying and the illusio anddoxa of their own scientific field (Bourdieu, 2000). Thus academics must understand their own subject-basedpresuppositions and their genesis and are permanently tasked with investigating the evaluative and cognitivepresuppositions of their fields. This is an on-going process for critical accounting researchers but they must be awaretoo of the doxa of critical accounting which is itself subject to forces and manoeuvres.3 For the purposes of this paper, criticalaccounting researchers are (correctly) suspicious of the positivistic belief that accounting numbers are ‘‘neutral’’ and simplyreflect reality (rather than dialectically also creating it) to the extent that they are also (correctly) suspicious of the role ofnumbers. Furthermore, they are concerned about the role of auditors and the social functions of auditing.

It is important to continually strive to understand one’s own habitus and illusio, while recognising this is nevercompletely possible. So, as we discuss later, one of the first activities of the accounting academics in our collective was totrawl though the financial statements. We find it difficult to know whether this was because of our ‘‘academic accountinghabitus’’. Bourdieu wrote that ‘‘One would be falling into a form of scholastic illusion of the omnipotence of thought if onewere to believe it possible to take an absolute point of view on one’s own point of view’’ (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 119; cited inGolsorkhi et al., 2009, p. 787–788). The academic’s habitus from her upbringing overlaid with her academic habitus can serveto hide her actual relation to the research undertaken, her choice of that research topic and her choice of epistemological,theoretical and methodological frameworks (Golsorkhi et al., 2009).

While Bourdieu viewed the vantage point of the university as providing an academic with an ‘objective’ perspectivewhich was vital for reflexive practice and securing different forms of capital, he saw engagement in the public sphere asnecessary to situate and reflect upon intellectual thought. At a basic level, Bourdieu’s early scholarship identified a scientificmethod through which academics as public intellectuals secure a distinction between ‘‘the world of the academy and theworld beyond’’ (Webb et al., 2002, p. 144; see also Cooper, 2005). Further, this scientific method reveals important points onthe collaborative potential of a homologous group of ‘intellectuals’, drawn together to strengthen their intellectual capitaland to synchronise their desires to intervene in the public sphere. Interventions offer opportunities to transform ourunderstanding of the world and therefore change what is acceptable within the field as well as outside of it.

In summary, this section has argued that aside from his work on the reproduction of power, Bourdieu’s work containsmechanisms to explain change and crisis. A practical example of one of these mechanisms which involved change broughtabout by the economic field’s battle for increased power over the state. This culminated in neoliberalism and served tosolidify Bourdieu’s thinking on the collective intellectual. Bourdieu’s collective intellectuals are collectives of activists,academics and others who share a common aim of revealing the technologies which underpin power as well as setting outpossible alternatives. In order to understand the overt and hidden reproduction of power, researchers must understand theillusio, the doxa and the types of capital which are essential to the practice of fields.4 Researchers must try to understandtheir own doxa and illusio, although this understanding may never be complete. Research to unearth symbolic violence canonly be done through rigorous empirical work (see for example, Oakes et al., 1998). Finally, researchers must disseminatetheir work beyond the academic field. This will present several challenges, not least setting out complex research inunderstandable form and operating beyond the academic field where different rules apply.

The remainder of this paper is devoted to a reflection on our interventions in a case involving a diverse group ofaccounting academics, other academics and activists who came together to launch a coordinated response to a large-scaleindustrial disaster which occurred in Scotland in 2004. We pay particular attention to the accounting intellectuals. We beginby setting out a brief explanation of the disaster.5

3 It is beyond the scope of this paper to seriously research this issue, but academic manoeuvres include citing the most powerful in the field until their

point of view becomes doxic. One can see this in the ‘‘taken for granteds’’ of critical accounting and how these have shifted over time.4 This can reveal symbolic power and violence and it also presents researchers with the opportunity to better ‘‘think politics’’. It could be that Bourdieu

was himself a virtuoso in this regard. He himself possessed significant symbolic capital – both through his own name, and through the institution in which

he worked. Maintaining one’s ‘‘academic distance’’ (as we discuss in more detail later) could be a strategy for maximising the impact of an academic’s

symbolic capital.5 A much fuller account can be found in Cooper et al. (2011).




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4. The ICL case

4.1. The explosion

On 11 May 2004, nine employees were killed and more than thirty-three injured in an explosion at the ICL Tech Ltd. ofGrovepark Mills in Maryhill, Glasgow.6 The explosion was caused by a corroded pipe which carried liquefied petroleum gas(LPG)7 from a tank in the yard into the factory building. The pipe which went into the basement of the factory leaked LPG intothe basement, creating an explosive atmosphere. The explosion occurred when a worker went into the basement to collectmaterials stored there. Between 1975 and 1988 HSE inspections repeatedly expressed concerns about the siting of the LPGtank and in 1988 a specialist HSE inspector visited ICL and recommended that that the underground pipe work carrying LPGvapour into the factory should be excavated to check its state. If this had happened and the pipes had been correctlyprotected, it is highly likely that the explosion would never have happened.

ICL Tech Ltd was located in a former weaving mill which had been constructed in 1857. This building had undergonenumerous alterations throughout the decades and would not have complied with current day building standards which aredesigned to prevent floors collapsing onto each other as they did in the ICL case. All but one of the nine who were killedworked on the upper floors by the collapse of the building rather than the blast. Sixty-six people were working on thepremises on the day of the explosion. ICL Tech Ltd was a subsidiary of ICL Plastics Ltd Group. The group was non-unionised.

Employers have legal responsibilities to ensure the provision and exchange of information and instructions that enableemployees to be properly informed about risks and health hazards and to provide appropriate training. In ICL there were noelected safety reps so it was incumbent on management to directly inform the workforce on information from the accidentbooks and any assessments made under Control of Substances Hazardous to Health (COSHH) regulations. Workers’testimonies provide clear evidence that ICL’s organisation of health and safety representation and consultation may havefallen short of legal compliance.8

The lack of a trade union at ICL should also have made the HSE vigilant about the firm’s health and safety management,not least since HSE research suggests the academic consensus that trade union organised workplaces are at least 50% saferthan non-organised workplaces (for a discussion of this evidence see James and Walters, 2005). Indeed, the anti-tradeunionism and lack of legally required consultation and open discussion provides good reason to suspect that there werelikely to be particular health and safety issues worthy of investigation at ICL. Those problems should have been picked up byHSE visits to the plant, particularly after HSE was contacted directly by employees about issues that they clearly felt could notbe resolved through existing safety management and consultation systems.

On 20th May 2004, details of the proposed forensic investigation into the blast were released. The Crown Office andProcurator Fiscal Service and Strathclyde Police would carry out a joint investigation with the Health and Safety Executive.Scotland’s chief law officer, Lord Advocate Colin Boyd, and Bill Callaghan, the chairman of the Health and Safety Commission,were reported to have agreed the parameters of the joint investigation (Doherty, 2004). The appropriateness of having theHSE taking a lead role in the investigation when the HSE itself may have been implicated in the circumstances leading to theexplosion was highly questionable. It was within this setting that a group of ‘‘collective intellectuals’’ (herein after collective)was formed. The collective did not feel that individual HSE employees were necessarily at fault, rather that there werestructural problems with the HSE. Neoliberal policies mean that the HSE is severely under-resourced and so incapable ofadequately policing organisations. This was the genesis of calls made after the explosion for a full Public Inquiry rather than afatal accident inquiry which would simply look at the causes of the deaths. From the outset our project was entirelyBourdieusian. The collective wished to unmask the relations of power and disseminate their research beyond the academicfield. They were cognisant of the forces which would be arrayed in defence of ‘‘small businesses’’, promoting hostility to tradeunionism, and to ensure that the sanctions against those who could be broadly implicated in the explosion would be lenient(or non-existent).

4.2. On the formation of our group of ‘‘collective intellectuals’’

To state that several intellectuals and activists ‘came together’ in autumn 2004 to conduct independent research into theICL disaster would merely be to report a simple fact without providing any insight into the constitution of the group ofcollective intellectuals. The first thing to note is that the social capital of the collective played a part in its constitution. Someof the collective had been involved in previous engagement in diverse overlapping research and organised campaigningactivities stretching back decades in some cases, while others were simply work colleagues. In all, the collective initially

6 The group includes Stockline Plastics Limited and the case is often referred to as the ‘‘Stockline’’ disaster.7 Also called GPL, LP Gas, or autogas.8 In the run up to the explosion there had been complaints about health and safety issues within the factory. It was reported that in 1998, plastic coater

Jim Fletcher complained to management that too many ovens were in use on the one floor, causing intolerably hot conditions for employers. He claimed that

he left the firm after complaining about the lack of ventilation. The same complaint was later made by ex-worker, Scott Cameron, who left the firm the same

year, claiming that the close proximity of the gas devices meant an explosion in one oven would set the others off. Other staff at the Glasgow firm

complained that they were not offered any protection to stop them inhaling tiny plastic particles prevalent throughout the factory floor (Burns, 2004).




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comprised of nine actors (seven researchers and two activists campaigning on the issue of health and safety).9 In that sense, itwas ‘‘unbalanced’’ in terms of its leaning towards academics.

The second key factor was an understanding of the fields which impacted upon the case. These were the statebureaucratic fields (the Health and Safety Executive and the Police Service); the juridical field; and the Trade Union field. Theacademic experts required were therefore from the disciplines of occupational health and safety and trade union organising;occupational health; corporate crime, social policy and criminology. The collapse of the building further required someonewith an expertise in architecture. Thus individual intellectuals were invited to form the collective on the basis of theirdisciplinary expertise, as well as previous social linkages. What did not seem intuitively obvious was the contribution whichcould be made by accounting academics. One explanation for this is the social symbolic violence of accounting. Accountingremains a kind of hidden dark art which is too difficult for ‘‘ordinary people’’ to understand. For this reason alone, accountingacademics could play an important role in any collective intellectual group. Moreover, while economic capital is notnecessarily a ‘‘trump card’’ on all fields, economic capital is one of the easiest forms of capital to translate into other forms ofcapital and is therefore always important. The accounting academics became part of the collective because of their priorresearch connections with other members.

In order to cover the relevant arenas in any particular project the secondary habitus (disciplinary expertise) required canbe discerned from an understanding of the fields which are involved in any particular case. But what about the uniquedispositions of the researchers (their primary habitus) and their sense of practice? From an ontological perspectiveresearchers and their practice are the result of their own vectory through social space which may serve to mask their relationto the research topic as well as their choice of topic and their epistemological, theoretical or methodological framework(Golsorkhi et al., 2009). It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss what may ‘‘radicalise’’ any particular individual. Whilethere may be common factors in each of this particular group of collective intellectuals’ pasts, Bourdieusian theory is notdeterminist. But the collective were strongly critical of the dominant neoliberal political economy and devoted tocampaigning against its consequences, particularly those affecting workers. The undermining of the welfare state and theconsequent erosion of the limited protections it afforded to many ordinary people has compelled the researchers,individually and collectively, to commit to the sort of engaged research activity exemplified by Bourdieu and his colleagues.Their history of participation in social interventions certainly habituated the group’s members to cooperative forms ofworking and the broader concern with social justice certainly encouraged the team to commit to the long hours of unpaidwork required (Darlington, 2002; Kelly, 1998). It is difficult to conceive of how such a critical project could have beenundertaken within the conventional parameters of funded academic research – as set out later, the collective met in theevenings and at weekends.

The collective initially met to discuss the possibility of setting up a broad ranging inquiry into the explosion since felt thatthe official investigation may well miss the broader social factors surrounding the explosion. As stated earlier, the groupwere also concerned about HSE involvement in the official investigation. Before work started, the collective was invited byIan Tasker, the Scottish Trade Union Congress (STUC) employee who was the organiser of a support group set up by the STUCfor the victims of the disaster and their family and friends. Our fledging collective agreed in advance of this meeting that itwould not continue if the support group were not behind our project. While, as a collective, we concentrated on our owndisciplines, at this meeting we were confronted by serious issues, not least, dealing sensitively with the members of thesupport group. This was beyond our ‘‘scientific competences’’. Throughout, the whole episode, from the first meeting,throughout the trial, sentencing and the Public Inquiry, the victims and their families acted with unfailing dignity. And thecollective were deeply moved by their courage.

Thus members of the collective initially went to a victim support group meeting at the STUC involving ICL workers, pastand present, and members of bereaved families to discuss the possibility of writing an independent research report on theissues surrounding the explosion and received broad support. In a desire to find out how to prevent such a disasterhappening again, the support group welcomed the offer of an opportunity to have a broad-ranging independent report. Andso, while the official investigation into the explosion was going on, our collective using our different areas of expertise beganto conduct research and write an independent report.

The principal aims of the collective’s report were as follows:

– to
understand as fully as possible the circumstances and contexts within which the disaster occurred. These include thecompany, its regulation, structure and financing, its work practices, employment relations, built environment and healthand safety practices.
– to
ensure that the experiences of those workers and ex-workers, who wanted their voices to be heard, were fullydocumented. Workers’ experiences can be a vital source of knowledge in the prevention of future disasters. Workers’silence has all too often led to a lack of justice: legal, social and economic.
– to
build up a picture of what working life was like inside the factory. – to consider the role played by inspection, regulation and enforcement agencies that directly and indirectly determine the
policies and practices of companies such as ICL.

9 One of our members, Peter Bain, passed away while the research was ongoing.




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The report would set out an alternative account of the disaster from that provided in the conventional media. The initialpress reports contained much speculation about the cause of the disaster, stories about the victims and their families and thetraditional messages of sympathy from the Queen, the Prime Minister and other public figures (see for example Burns, 2004;Qureshi, 2004). And, as we discuss in more detail later there was also much made in the press about what a lovely family firmICL was, and how the owners had dedicated their lives to it (see for example, Buie and Tinning, 2004, p. 5). Part of our task ascollective intellectuals was to set out the systems and structures of domination which underpin such doxa. This necessitated,as set out earlier, an analysis of the explosion within a broader social context. All members of the research group recognisedthe need to engage effectively so as to guarantee that the voices of workers and ex-workers were not marginalised by themore powerful voices of corporate and legal entities and some of the state bureaucratic fields. As such, the collectiveintended to act as a counterweight; ensuring the social accountability of institutional processes through the provision ofsupplementary information gleaned through independent research.

5. Methods

In terms of method, Bourdieu is less concerned with research instruments than the researcher’s epistemological stancewhich should always recognise that models which attempt to explain practice are not interpenetrated with the principle ofpractice itself (Golsorkhi et al., 2009). In other words, research which is concerned with understanding and challenging thestructure of power on fields can only be done through rigorous empirical work. We cannot understand the world by justthinking about it – we need to engage with it. Collective intellectual research has specific aims – to make visiblemisrecognition and symbolic violence which have served to limit potentialities and to reconstruct a viable progressiveagenda. Arguably, the normative foundations of collective intellectual research give it a specific methodological hue from aphilosophy of science perspective. Collective intellectual research may be judged according to its ability to resist the excessesof neoliberalism and engage with those outside of the collective. The ability to engage was a source of tension for thecollective, as will be discussed next in relation to the victim support group and the HSE.

5.1. The support group

As set out earlier, the victim support group meetings were hosted by the STUC10 in their offices in Glasgow. Membershipof the group was ‘‘voluntary’’ and comprised of around 20 people. The support group was difficult to understand usingBourdieu’s concepts. The group members formed a class, in the ‘‘sense of a group mobilised for struggle’’ (Bourdieu, 1985, p.725) and were closely geographically positioned within the social space (Bourdieu, 1985). In some senses, although akin tobeing a ‘‘numerically small’’ class, the group was arguably too small to be conceived of as a Bourdieusian field, especially ifone considers, for example, the relatively much larger and powerful economic field. However, the group exhibited many ofthe characteristics of a field which would prove useful in terms of ex-post evaluation (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). Forexample, analogous to a field, the group prescribed its particular values and possessed its own regulative principles. Andthese principles delimited a socially structured space in which different agents (according to their hierarchical positions)struggled either to preserve the group’s boundaries and form, or to change its boundaries and form. This is in keeping withBourdieu’s understanding of fields as spaces of conflict and competition. The illusio and animator of the group developed intothe desire to find the cause of the explosion and to ensure that lessons should be learned which would prevent somethingsimilar from happening again. Thus, again, the group exhibited the characteristics of a field as ‘‘a space of play which exists assuch only to the extent that players enter into it who believe in and actively pursue the prizes it offers’’ (Bourdieu andWacquant, 1992, p. 19).

At the beginning, our collective could potentially have become part of the support group. However, this had the potentialto throw the group into crisis. Of Boyer’s (2003) five Bourdieusian mechanisms of change and crisis, set out earlier, themerger of the collective with the support group would have invoked at least three. The collective would have introduced newactors (who were not suffering the grief of those in the group, and who had different interests), the strategies of the collectiveand the support group were not identical and the introduction of a new form of (academic) capital could have engenderedde-synchronization in which academic capital would become a new form of currency which would alter the responsivenessof the habitus of the actors in the group. The collective were both fearful of worsening the suffering of the victims andrecognised our relative differences. Although we did not join the group, a number of workers and ex-workers volunteered toparticipate in our research into the disaster and provide inside accounts of ICL. Subsequently, one ex-worker (LaurenceConnolly) involved in whistle-blowing on the risks to health and safety at ICL became part of the collective, bringing thenumber of actors in the collective to ten.

Tensions developed within the support group over strategies for finding the cause of the explosion and ensuring thatlessons should be learned which would prevent something similar from happening again. As a space of conflict andcontradiction, the group would constantly change. Some support group members wished to become more politicallyengaged – setting up petition stalls in the local area, forming alliances with other groups such as Families Against Corporate

10 While ICL was a non-unionised company, the STUC has an interest in Health and Safety issues and also had close connections with a legal firm which was

representing some of the victims.




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Killing (FACK) and so on.11 The group was economically disadvantaged and as such was constrained in its engagement withother fields. It had scant resources to acquire the forms of capital required for such engagement. Furthermore, it was subjectto the symbolic violence perpetuated by the legal field which has immense symbolic power. Thus the call for a Public Inquirywas a doxic demand by the group – the legal field will dispense ‘‘justice’’. However, the group was not totally devoid ofresources – it possessed significant cultural capital. The employees had first-hand knowledge of the working practices withinICL. Without seeming to canonise them, the actors in the group were very proud, did not want charity and were incrediblydignified. While our collective engaged very well with the support group, our interactions with the HSE staff and their tradeunion (GMB) were particularly disappointing. The next section discusses this, and the wider context of the HSE further.

5.2. The HSE

The HSE can be conceived of as a small part of a (state) bureaucratic field. It is part of the UK’s Department for Work andPensions (DWP). In the financial year 2010/11, the DWP was one of the largest government departments with a budget ofalmost £161bn. The majority of this budget, 95%, is spent on social welfare payments (pensions, unemployment benefits andso on). HSE’s share of the DWP’s budget in that year amounted to £203m (0.12%). The neoliberal setting under which itoperates is symbolically hostile to ‘‘restraints on trade’’ and government ‘‘interference.’’ This symbolic hostility is reinforcedby financial cuts to its budget. In the year 2011/2012, the HSE’s net operating costs were cut by 13.8% to £174.912m, mostlyachieved by a reduction in staff of 28712 (The Health and Safety Executive Annual Report and Accounts 2011/12, HC204). It isthus an organisation which is under threat – the state donated symbolic capital of the HSE is waning and its resources areshrinking. Such is the neoliberal hostility to the HSE that it would be incredibly difficult to mount a campaign (especiallyduring this austerity period) to increase their funding.

While our collective was strongly of the opinion that the HSE is under resourced, the HSE staff and its union rather thanembracing the collective demands for increased funding for the HSE (unsurprisingly) saw the collective as a threat. In thissense, the HSE staff and its union ‘‘thought politically’’. The actors we encountered from the HSE struggled to protect theirown immediate interests, especially the interests of those HSE staff who had been directly involved with ICL. Neoliberalismhad produced a supervision agency so eager to protect itself and the powerful that their mission had become blurred. Amember of HSE staff (perhaps inadvertently) revealed a whistle-blower to the management of ICL, against their own policyposition. Further, they had not followed the advice of one of their specialist inspectors in 1988 to dig up and inspect the pipewhich caused the explosion (see Cooper et al., 2011). If HSE actors could have thought politics (by analyzing the socialstructures which they operated within) we think that they would have seen this as an opportunity to lay bare the problemswhich they are facing in terms of an extreme lack of resources. The HSE was so constrained by its inability to ‘‘think politics’’that it demanded that our universities removed our report for our websites even though the report argued for increasedresources for the HSE. Academics in the collective worked at different universities. Some of these removed the report whileothers refused to. In any case the report was publicly available on the Hazards Magazine website13 so we did not take thisfurther. We did not want to threaten the job security of individuals within the collective.

5.3. Connective summary

This section set out a brief account of the ICL explosion and the construction of the collective intellectual and supportgroups, how these interacted with each other and how the collective failed to engage with the HSE. The initial motivation forthe formation of the collective was the concern that the under resourced HSE could have potentially been partially culpablefor the explosion, and yet, had been given a role in searching for the cause of the explosion. The collective recognised thatwork-place deaths, injuries and ill-health occur within specific institutional settings, one of which is a state sponsored healthand safety regime centred around the HSE. However, the HSE reportedly had only 68 inspectors to police 81,000 workplacesin Scotland at the time of the explosion (Beck et al., 2007a). While the collective were planning to research the broad contextof the explosion, they met with the support group and then set about working in their own arenas. The collective onlyoccasionally reported back to the STUC group.

The first task of the accounting researchers in the collective was to understand the structure of the company, itsownership and control and its financial position. This was important since there was an array of forces at work, to deflect anyblame away from the factory owners and to portray the explosion as an inescapable accident. While it could have been anaccident, it was too early to understand the cause of and/or the culpability for the explosion. The owners were frequentlydescribed in the press at the time as devoted to the company14 and the connotations evoked by the ‘‘family’’ firm tag madethe factory sound warm and friendly. It was further reported that the chairman (Campbell Downie) had been semi-retiredsince 1997, playing little part in the day-to-day running of the business. Downie was reported as insisting that his chief

11 Their habitus was not one of political activism. They worked in a non unionised company.12 In 1994, HSE had 4545 staff. By April 2005, this had fallen to 3903 and in April 2010, the combined HSE and Health and Safety Laboratory (HSL) staffing

figure was 3702. Hazards issue 113, January–March 2011, http://www.hazards.org/votetodie/ishsefinished.htm accessed 14th August 2012.13 http://www.hazards.org/icldisaster/news.htm.14 See for example – family firm with 30-year history, Evening Times (Glasgow), 12th May 2004, p. 6; Elizabeth Buie And William Tinning, Couple devoted

their lives to family firm; The Herald (Glasgow), 12th May 2004, p. 5.


http://www.theiclinquiry.org/




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executive was tough on health and safety, imposing every new procedure and passing all inspections with flying colours(Leask, 2004). Downie’s response to the disaster was to try to evade responsibility by appealing to neoliberal doxa andportraying himself as a semi-retired chemist who benevolently provides work for the poor of Glasgow (Leask, 2004). Asacademics, we were concerned about the patterns of domination revealed in the case, the way in which accounting was usedby the dominant actors and what it was possible to discern from the publicly available accounting information; not about thebenevolence (or otherwise) of the key actors. It was an organisation which was hyper cost-conscious (see Taylor andConnolly, 2009) which resisted spending money on the new pipe – the root cause of the explosion.

Less than two months after the explosion, it was reported that Downie told staff that their basic salaries would be cease tobe paid after July 9 (Simpson and Henderson, 2004, p. 8). Downie said that financial data was destroyed in the explosion andthat ICL accountants advised that it was not possible to establish the financial position of ICL Plastics. In order to unearth thefinancial position and the control structure of ICL we turned to the publicly available accounts.

6. The art of accounting

Research began at Companies House.15 Three types of filings (Unaudited Abbreviated Accounts, Current AppointmentsReport and 363s Annual Return) were analysed for each part of the company for the three financial years prior to theexplosion. These were the financial reports ending 30th November 2003, 2004 and 2005. We used these to clarify thefinancial capacity of ICL and unearth the structures of power within ICL.

In terms of the structure and control of ICL, we found that ICL Tech Ltd. was one of six subsidiaries of ICL Plastics Limited,and that the company structure was as follows:

In the year to 30th November 2003, the company had four directors, Lorna Downie (wife of Campbell), Campbell Downie,Margaret Brownlie and Stewart McColl. Both Margaret Brownlie and Stewart McColl lost their lives in the disaster. In the twofollowing years, Lorna and Campbell Downie remained the two sole directors with Lorna Campbell also acting as CompanySecretary. Companies House records further revealed that the dominant shareholder is Campbell Downie who owns almost68% of the shares. The accounts are highly suggestive that Campbell Downie was in control of the whole group of companies.He was a director in the parent as well as each subsidiary except Brisbay. Nicholas Downie (his son) was a director of Brisbay.From the accounting information, it appeared clear that ICL Plastics Group was a Downie family controlled business.

We then turned to the economic strength of the company. At the time of the research project, the latest filed accounts ofICL Tech Limited were for the year ended 30th November 2005. These accounts state that the company is entitled toexemption from audit under Section 249A (1) of the Companies Act 1985. They also note that they are abbreviated accountswhich were prepared in accordance with the special provisions of Part VII of the Companies Act 1985 relating to smallcompanies and with the Financial Reporting Standard for Smaller Entities (effective June 2002). In short, the company at thecentre of the explosion legally produced abbreviated and unaudited accounts. The accounts available at Companies Housefor ICL Plastics Limited (for year ended 30th November 2005) are, like the accounts of ICL Tech Limited, abbreviated andunaudited. They are signed off by Campbell Downie. While it might be argued that full annual report and accounts are fairlyopaque, the information in abbreviated accounts is significantly less than their full counterparts. For example, theabbreviated accounts of ICL Plastics Limited do not contain profit and loss accounts, so it was impossible to tell how andwhere the company made its profits. It is impossible to ascertain how much salary was paid to the directors. While theaccounts do not show any dividends being paid to the shareholders, directors who were also shareholders could have

15 All limited companies in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland are registered at Companies House, an Executive Agency of the Department for

Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). There are more than 2 million limited companies registered in Great Britain, and more than 300,000 new companies

are incorporated each year.




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received generous salaries, as could have the Company Secretary. Moreover, ICL Plastics qualifies for exemption frompreparing group accounts on the grounds that it is a small sized group. The accounts for ICL Plastics Ltd therefore refer only tothe parent company and it is impossible to tell how inter-company transactions are dealt with. However, our collectivecolleagues, who body mapped, and interviewed ICL workers16 were told that they felt that there were some complicatedtransfer pricing activities within the company. So we went to one of the research sessions with the workforce to discuss this.It appeared that quite sophisticated techniques were used to transfer money around the company.

It is also impossible to tell from the accounts of all the companies in the group, which were prepared on an ‘‘historic cost’’basis, how much the assets (land, buildings, equipment and so on) are currently worth. Some of the land potentially occupiesprime real estate. In particular, the land on which ICL Tech was situated would have lucrative development potential. Whilethe accounts were opaque in terms of non-current asset values, they revealed that ICL Plastics owned significant amounts ofcash.

Financial Year ended

16 The non-accounting research included in-depth interviews with a group of seven ICL workers and ex-workers representative of d

functions in the plant. This was essential for the group to understand ICL’s habitus. Both ‘risk mapping’ and ‘body mapping’ exercises we

workers provided unrivalled evidence of working conditions, potential hazards and symptoms of ill-health.17 At the time of writing, the most recent set of accounts shows a cash balance of nearly £1.2m.

Please cite this article in press as: Cooper C, Coulson AB. Accounting activism and Bourdieu’s ‘collective inteReflections on the ICL Case, Crit Perspect Account (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2013.01.002

Cash holding

30th November 2003
£897,511
30th November 2004
£455,187
30th November 2005
£749,950
The accounts also stated that by the end of November 2005 ‘‘the amounts and allocations of insurance recoveries have yetto be fully specified’’ with respect to the event on 11 May 2004. Overall, there was little doubt that the parent company wascash rich. Moreover, it owns potentially valuable land. Any suggestion that ICL was in too precarious a financial position topay adequate compensation to the workforce, because of a lack of financial data seemed misplaced. Moreover, it is clear fromthe parent company accounts that it was expecting a payout from their insurers. The likely amount of this did not appear inthe accounts.

There is excellent work in the critical accounting domain which is damning of the audit process, and yet we wereuncomfortable about its lacunae in the account filings of ICL. Stuart Riddell, the then head of ACCA Scotland wrote that audit‘‘is both a valuable discipline and a guarantor of good financial housekeeping internally and the best source of comfort forexternal stakeholders’’ (Riddell, 2003, p. 27). While Riddell’s position is partial and represents the interests of ACCA, we toowere concerned that ICL could submit totally unaudited accounts (which would then be relied on in court to establish theirability to pay a fine for a criminal conviction – see further details later). The cultural capital of critical accounting researcherswould produce an acute understanding that financial accounting information fails to provide important information onmany issues. Perhaps then, it was almost a surprise to discover that the accounts did prove to be an important source ofinformation.

Aside from analysing the accounts and filings from Companies House we also interviewed an ex-accountant of thecompany. He told us about the practices of the management of the company. He said that he had no doubt thatCampbell Downie was in total control of the company and that Downie would go into the offices later in the day andinvest cash in the money markets. We were unable to verify what the accountant told us, but his story might explain thevery large cash holdings of the company.17 This interview reinforced our findings that ICL was a family firm which wasvery closely run by a shrewd businessman with cash available for investment of his choice. As a family run business, theowner, and his management team could well have intimate knowledge of the everyday operations and the staff whoworked within ICL.

The accounting chapter of the collective’s independent report was founded on an analysis of financial information setwithin the context of our overall case analysis. It appears under a section entitled ‘‘company structure, workplace profile andemployee relations’’ supported by a sub-section on methods of financial analysis (see Beck et al., 2007a, p. 51–54) and isrevisited at the end of the report when considering ‘‘problems and recommended solutions’’ (Beck et al., 2007a, p. 147). Theseprimary references are characterised by interpretations of accounting based on publicly available financial informationnoted above and complemented throughout the report by notions of accounting practices and accountability. While we weresurprised by the information which such abbreviated accounts could reveal in conclusion the report highlights problems of‘‘opacity in the accountability processes’’ due in part to a lack of disclosure and transparency in the financial information(Beck et al., 2007a, p. 147).

While the collective’s report could not be published ahead of the court case, the accounting (and other findings of thecollective) was successfully used to maintain momentum in the campaign for a Public Inquiry. We next turn to the legalproceedings.

ifferent sections/

re used whereby

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7. The legal proceedings18

On 17th August 2007, the operators of ICL Tech Ltd and ICL Plastics Ltd pled guilty to four health and safety chargesbrought under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 which had led to the deaths and injuries (see Crown Office andProcurator Fiscal Service, 2007b). The decision to prosecute under health and safety legislation meant the seniormanagement of ICL could escape the stigma of being accused of killing people through their negligence (Brown, 2006).

A statement was read in court to outline the very basic event which caused the explosion. In the court, mounted on anapproximately metre square white board was the L-shaped pipe which ultimately led to the explosion. It had been installedin 1969 without corrosion protection which was contrary to industry guidelines. This was in spite of the fact that the ICLplant produced plastic coatings to protect underground pipes from corroding. Originally the pipe was laid above ground. Butit was concreted over in 1972 and no corrosion protection was added to the pipe. In 1980, a steel floor was installed over thebasement area, sealing it off where the LPG pipeline entered the building. It was estimated that it would have cost £405 to digup the pipe and replace it (Leask, 2007). Although the HSE had recommended that the pipe be excavated and checked thecompany had successfully resisted this recommendation (for a more detailed account of this aspect of the case see, Cooperet al., 2011).

In court many questions went unanswered and the agreements between the prosecution and defence went unchallengedas did the submissions by the defence. Outside court, the families of the victims demanded ‘‘It is now time for the concerns ofthe families to be taken into account and we continue to call for a wide-reaching Public Inquiry that provides us with answersas to why these health and safety breaches occurred’’ (McLaughlin, 2007, p. 6; Families Against Corporate Killing, 2007).Central to the calls for a Public Inquiry was the belief that the role of the Health and Safety Executive needed to be examinedin addition to that of ICL.

During the case, the ICL legal counsel, Mr Jones, urged the judge Lord Brodie not to bankrupt ICL; he said that ‘‘It wouldonly add to the tragedy if further hardship were inflicted on the survivors and their work colleagues19’’ (Devlin, 2007, p. 11).On 28th August 2007, the court reconvened for sentencing. ICL Plastics and ICL Tech were each fined £200,000 for breaches ofthe Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 (see Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, 2007a).20 To say that this amountwas met with stunned silence in court would be a gross understatement. It was incomprehensible that such a fine could beset given ICL’s cash holdings.21 In addition, while land and property were valued on a historic cost basis and had been writtendown to almost negligible levels in the company’s accounts, it was estimated that the site at Grovepark Mills, where theexplosion occurred, had an insurance value of £2.2 million and was cleared at the expense of the local authority and canpotentially be sold. This information was made available to the court, yet despite this and other questions surrounding theappropriateness of the valuations presented in the accounts Lord Brodie made it clear that ‘‘it would be inappropriate for theCrown to present an independent valuation of the accused companies’’ (Court of Session statement, 27th August, see CrownOffice and Procurator Fiscal Service, 2007b). The fine was set at an affordable level for ICL. Lord Brodie said that the level ofthe fine took into account the fact that the firms wanted to remain in business and continue to provide employment.Following the announcement of the fine, an ICL statement stated that, ‘‘For the future, the company’s commitment is tomaintain employment and business relationships which provide the stability and opportunity necessary for us all to moveforward’’ (Mitchell and Quinn, 2007).

The pro-business judgement and the dissatisfaction of the families over the whole process made the fight for a PublicInquiry more pressing. Immediately after these legal proceedings were complete our independent report, ICL/Stockline

Disaster: an independent report on working conditions prior to the explosion was issued (Beck et al., 2007a). The next sectionfurther discusses our report and the activities of the collective while it was being written.

8. The report of the collective intellectuals and the public inquiry

The key recommendation of our report was for a full Public Inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the ICL tragedywith a remit to explore more generally the management and regulation of health and safety in Scotland. In this respect, theevidence from the report provided some preliminary conclusions about problems with the regulation and management ofhealth and safety, and proposed some solutions that should be explored by a full Public Inquiry. The diversity of issuescovered in the report is representative of the potential influence of this group of collective intellectuals and their respectivecapitals. For example, the report proposed that the rights of workers, in trade unions and non-unionised workplaces, need tobe extended and their position more effectively protected when they raise health and safety concerns. This was particularlyimportant because the report identified the role of agencies such as the HSE in inspecting, regulating and enforcing healthand safety laws as limited and inadequate.

18 The insights contained within this section include those drawn by the authors of this paper in attendance at the legal proceedings and further details

were accessed by reference to the transcript of legal proceedings obtained through the Crown Prosecution Services.19 During the court case it became very clear that the Downies’ economic power was significant in that they hired two very eminent Queen’s Councils

(Mike Jones QC and Paul McBride QC) who did an excellent job in their defence. The bereaved families had no such representation.20 In the same year, British Airways were fined £121.5m (by the UK’s office of Fair Trading) and $300 (by the US Department of Justice) for colluding over

the setting of fuel-surcharges for cargo and long-haul passenger flights.21 For the financial year ended 30th November 2003 £897,511; 30th November 2004 £455,187; and 30th November 2005 £749,950.




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The independent nature of the research group allowed the authors to adopt a position from which to politically andpractically challenge the role of the HSE in inspecting all aspects of the plant and call on the Inquiry to investigate the HSE’sactions in the case and their potential collaborations with ICL management. The collective also questioned the legal systemfor lack of clarity in relation to who should be prosecuted for serious corporate offences and how they should be prosecutedand opacity in the accountability processes within the financial information. The timing of its release served to expand anddeepen the calls of this social movement for a Public Inquiry (see for example Edwards, 2007; HSE, 2007; ICL, 2007; Salmond,2007). While the report (Beck et al., 2007a) was the primary resource of the collective, other commentaries were released bymembers of the collective to add weight to the voice of the collective (see for example Beck et al., 2007b, 2007c).

The process of preparing the report was also aligned to the campaign for a Public Inquiry, and so, while the report wasbeing prepared we meet with the local MP for the community in which ICL was physically located, Ann McKechin, and MSPPatricia Ferguson to discuss our findings and a list of recommendations for the Inquiry to address. One outcome was AnnMcKechin penned a foreword to the collective’s report adding power to the communication. Both politicians expressedpublic support for a Public Inquiry into the disaster. A number of letters were sent to the national press, building on links toeditors known to be sympathetic to the case, to seek to expand social support for a Public Inquiry and keep the campaignvisible. The group of collective intellectuals further strengthened the call for a Public Inquiry while being interviewed for aBBC Radio 4 programme (Face the Facts) devoted to the ICL disaster.

On 18th October 2005, a parliamentary motion supported by the collective demanding a Public Inquiry into the ICLexplosion received the backing of a cross-party group of 68 MPs who called on the government to urge the Scottish Executiveto launch a Public Inquiry as soon as possible (see McKechin, 2007). A social movement was building momentum. This wasdemonstrated and encouraged by the establishment of a website for links to our communications and those of other actors.22

On 1st October 2007, it was announced that there would be a Public Inquiry. The Public Inquiry was split into two parts.The first began on 2nd July 2008 to look at the circumstances surrounding the explosion and the second on October 14th tofocus on the lessons learned. The collective intellectuals submitted their independent Report to the Public Inquiry with a listof recommendations for the Inquiry.23 Despite numerous offers being made by the authors of the report to Lord Gill, asChairman of the ICL Inquiry, to provide expert testimony at the Public Inquiry an opportunity to be heard was not provided.From the point of view of the Public Inquiry, the voice of the collective addressed to the Public Inquiry was contained withintheir written report (as acknowledged by the Chairman of the Public Inquiry, see Gill, 2009).

We were disappointed by the narrow focus of the Public Inquiry since we had hoped and campaigned for a broad ranginginquiry. The disappointment was in part due to our failure to understand a fundamental change in the law and itsimplications. The Inquiries Act, 2005, abolished the Tribunals of Inquiry (Evidence) Act 1921, which guaranteedindependence by giving inquiry chairmen (sic) a free hand in all important decisions. The 2005 act gave ministers powers toexclude the public from all or part of an inquiry, to control publication of the final report, to restrict the publication ofdocuments, to insist on the omission of crucial evidence from the final report ‘‘in the public interest’’, and even to sack thechairman or a member of the inquiry panel. In the event, as one family within the support group expressed to us ‘‘we thoughta Public Inquiry would mean our fight was over, but this is just the beginning’’. A new battle arose over the terms of theInquiry. Disappointingly, the ICL inquiry stayed within the very narrow remit of the cause of the explosion and did notconsider the broader implications of the case as we had hoped for. But at least, the Public Inquiry was independent of the HSE.It produced a painstaking, rigorous analysis of the history of events leading up to the explosion. And its extremely narrowfocus produced technical recommendations about similar LPG installations. To this extent, it fulfilled the desire of thesupport group to discover the exact cause of the explosion with the hope that such an accident would never happen again.

The Public Inquiry did not address the extent to which the HSE is under resourced both economically and symbolically.Similarly, the Inquiry failed to consider concerns expressed about the dearth of accounting information and lack ofverification of accounts lodged at Companies House. No comment was made about the paucity of the fines. Overall, while wewere perturbed by the narrow remit of the Public Inquiry, it produced some useful findings. The next section containsbroader reflections on our experience of acting within the collective.

9. Reflections on the academic intellectual as a collective intellectual

The collective saw no contradiction between the approach adopted in Bourdieu’s Weight of the World as ‘‘giving a voice tothose without one’’, and Wacquant’s (2002) entreaty to provide the theoretical tools to enable actors to understand thelimitations of their thoughts and actions. Thus our report attempted to lay bare the structures of domination, gave a voice tothose who do not normally have one and was a rallying cry for a Public Inquiry. At the initial meetings, the collective wasanimated by the production of a report; there was no thought of writing academic articles or books. We met outside of‘‘normal’’ academic hours, at weekends and in the evenings normally at the house of one of the collective. This was an‘‘emotional’’ experience – the collective were extremely concerned that our activities would not inflict more pain on thoseinvolved and we were also aware that our activities would not be seen in a good light by some of those with an interest in the

22 http://www.hazards.org/icldisaster/news.htm.23 See Beck et al. (2007a) – full inquiry details including written submission and transcripts can be found on the official website http://

www.theICLinquiry.org.







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case. For example, it was disquieting to be contacted by senior staff in our institutions about the HSE reaction to our report. Inthe following sections we will discuss the part played by the various capitals possessed by the collective, how these wereameliorated, and other lessons which could be learned through participation in the collective.

9.1. Social capital

Perhaps the single most important reflective lesson learned from the ICL case is the benefit of being part of a collective andhow this enables the creation of social as well as cultural capital. The intellectuals’ membership of the academic field gavethem research support in terms of access to libraries, the internet, and a space to think and work and so on. Some of theacademics involved also brought social capital derived from their membership of other networks. This took the form of a kindof ‘‘moral support’’, through which their activities would be reflected as being important and worthwhile (akin to the kind ofsupport one receives from their family). The activists in the collective drew upon their supportive contacts within the media.These connections were important since it was extremely helpful to have the collective’s work portrayed in a positive light inthe media. In short, the collective pooled their social networks and created a powerful ‘‘family’’ to fight for the Public Inquiry.

9.2. Intellectual/cultural capital

As stated earlier, research which is concerned with understanding and challenging the structure of power on fields canonly be done through rigorous empirical work. We cannot understand the world by just thinking about it – we need toengage with it. The accounting academics gained a more nuanced understanding of the practice of accounting through theirresearch. Participation enabled a ‘‘real scale’’ feel for what it means to be a small company which does not have to produceaudited accounts. It made rules very real and live – they ceased to be something ‘‘on a page’’ to be transmitted to students.The accounting academics also learned that it is possible to glean some information about a company from its accounts andother company filings. In this case the important information was cash, directorships and shareholdings. This enabled apractical reinforcement of what the collective had been told about the power and structure of the company by some of itsworkforce. This information was not readily available from the accounts of ICL Tech, the subsidiary whose factory wasdestroyed in the explosion. This subsidiary’s accounts showed a profit of £13,065 in the year prior to the explosion and a cashholding of just £8005. In order to develop a more complete analysis of the company, the accounts of the parent companywere required.

It was furthermore possible to develop a better understanding of the practical impact of the paucity of accountinginformation from other intellectuals and activists in the collective and communications with ICL employees (past andpresent), others in the victim support group and politicians. Employees were interested in confirmation of their day today experience of wealth in the company and expenditure (or not) on health and safety. Of particular interest was the£405 it would have cost the company to replace the pipe which ultimately led to the disaster and the £400,000 cost of thefines in light of the loss of lives and £897,511 cash held at the end of the financial year by the ICL group before thedisaster.

However, the ‘‘interdisciplinary cultural capital’’ development of individual actors was sparse. Bourdieu insisted thatmaintaining ‘‘rigorous’’ academic research standards meant maintaining academic disciplinary boundaries and in aBourdieusian manner, the intellectuals in our collective worked within their own boundaries. Arguably however there is adownside to this practice. For example, Sandoval (2000), drawing upon Derrida and Barthes, identifies the ‘‘academicapartheid24’’ that keeps post-structuralism, postcolonial theory, ethnic studies, queer theory, hegemonic (white) feminism,and, especially, U.S. third world feminism isolated from and in limited conversation with one another, despite their commonundercurrents. In other words, progressive work is maintained in individual academic silos and there is little space for ‘‘crossfertilization’’ and the growth of interdisciplinary progressive cultural capital. Bourdieu’s relational perspective, which insiststhat ‘‘society’’ (which Bourdieu replaces with field and social space) does not consist of individuals but rather expresses thesum of relationships in which individuals find themselves,25 suggests that more interdisciplinary understanding would bebeneficial. This would provide a better appreciation of the relatively autonomous spheres of ‘‘play’’ that cannot be collapsedunder an overall ‘‘social logic’’.

While the collective met regularly to give feedback on individual findings, and it is certainly the case that the collectivedeveloped an understanding of many of the issues, there was probably insufficient attention paid to sharing of insights asidefrom those directly implicated in the explosion. This may have been unavoidable. In terms of academic output, theintellectuals have their own disciplinary feel for the game. So for example, as accounting academics, we would not be able topublish in (for example) a sociology journal without a significant amount of academic work. Partly for this reason, multi-disciplinary publication by intellectuals in the collective was not pursued. Multidisciplinary publication was also ofsecondary importance to maintaining the symbolic capital of academics within their discipline, managing institutionalpressures and dealing with potentially competing interesting in authorship that may result.

24 Lavie (2002) used the term in a very different way. She sets out a case that among Israeli academics there is a racinated, class-based apartheid among

women who dwell in the halls of academe.25 This is akin to Marx’s Die Grundrisse expression of society.




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9.3. Symbolic capital

Intellectuals possess significant symbolic capital – their titles (professor, doctor and so on) and their affiliation toprestigious institutions. This symbolic capital made certain aspects of our research easier. For example, it enabled us toinfluence the actions of politicians. Before the disaster the local community MP Ann McKechin had engaged by post andtelephone with Laurence Connolly to discuss his health and safety concerns at the factory and the whistle-blowing incidentin which he was identified to ICL management by a HSE representative visiting his workplace (see further Taylor andConnolly, 2009). However, he misrecognised his rights as a citizen and his standing with his elected representatives. His lonepolitical battle did little to better his circumstances and he lost his job at the factory. When the collective (including the samenow ex-employee) met with Ann McKechin the nature of the engagement and result was visibly different. Hearing theconcerns of the collective she agreed to pen a foreword to the report adding power to the communication. Both politicianswith whom we met, Ann McKechin MP and Patricia Ferguson MSP supported a parliamentary motion to urge the ScottishExecutive to launch a Public Inquiry.

Academic symbolic capital is a resource that can be ‘‘used’’ by activist groups which need a symbolically valued ‘‘voice’’.The neoliberal press characterisation of activists, whether in the form of striking workers (holding the country to ransom),green protestors (a little grubby and unemployed/lazy) or feminists (man hating hyenas), is normally derogatory; thus if anacademic is classified as an activist, their symbolic capital could be diminished. In a similar vein, the collective felt that itssymbolic capital may serve as some protection against criticism from politicians, journalists and others who disagreed withits project. It could be that Bourdieu (a virtuoso in his own theory) acted to maintain his symbolic capital; if he adopted aperemptory tone in interviews, it could well have been a form of ‘‘protection’’.26

9.4. Habitus

The collective intellectuals involved in this case have similar backgrounds, are of a broadly similar generation, similarpolitical views and live within a very narrow geographic space so perhaps, in a sense, their primary habitus was similar. Astrength of the collective was its provision of homology across various fields. This was important in de-limiting thediscursive fields represented and co-ordinating the discourses of academics and activists within the collective. In particular,it helped us to limit the view of accounting as a dark art and develop a notion of accounting that was more accessible,revealing its role in interpreting the cause of the disaster. In this sense, the discourse of the collective becomes a form ofsocial wealth arising out of collective experience and a resource to promote utopian possibilities. This alongside, theengagement of the collective made the members feel that their work was valuable in that it may have a genuine socialimpact.

The critical accounting researchers used their theoretical lenses to make sense of the case.27 In the collective, they wereable to think politics in the sense that they drew upon Bourdieu’s concepts to recognise the functioning of society – thebureaucratic fields, their importance in terms of symbolic capital creation, the relative position of the various fields, whichcapitals were significant and so on. However, it would be incorrect to say that some collective members did not also ‘‘thinkpolitically’’. Part of the habitus of academic researchers in the UK is a competitive search for publishing opportunities. On anyfield actors seek opportunities and struggle for position. The academic field is no different; so while academics may enter acollective, their academic illusio may not change. Academics who participate in collective intellectual groups are subject tothe same pressures as other academics. As UK academics the collective were subject to the demands of the ResearchExcellence Framework (REF).28 While the REF puts significant strain on individual academics, paradoxically, it can serve to‘‘protect’’ them so long as collective intellectual work leads to publications and social impact. This means that collectiveintellectuals need critical journals. At the same time, critical journals should also benefit from ‘‘activist’’ research whichshould bring a theoretical development with an empirical edge to them.

9.5. Practice lessons

Central to the ICL case was the production of the research report. Following Bourdieu (and the Raisons d’Agir publishingventure) the production of research communications is a key contribution by academics to broader social movements. Thereport came out at a critical stage in the struggle for an independent inquiry and played its part in that struggle – in this sensea successful intervention. Academic research is valuable as part of the process of building social movements.

26 Arguably, Bourdieu’s feel for the game was reflected in his own writing in which he mainly referenced other ‘‘great’’ (mainly male) ‘‘symbols’’.

Bourdieu’s Distinction and La Domination Masculine were criticised for appropriating the work of many French feminist scholars without due citation (see for

example, Armengaud F. and Jasser G. Pierre Bourdieu: grand temoin?, Nouvelles questions feministes, 1993; 14(3): 83–88).27 An academic habitus would include a manner of critiquing and judging, ways of acting and thinking. In other words, the academics brought their (in

most circumstances) annoying traits of scepticism and constantly looking beneath the surface of events for deep causes. In a similar way, the members of

the collective who do not work within the academic field brought valuable scepticism to the collective.28 The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the new system for assessing the research output of UK higher education institutions (HEIs).




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Perhaps the most obvious ‘‘lesson’’ involved recognition by the collective of the hurdles which have to be surmounted inorder to build a progressive social movement.29 There is a heavy weight of forces ranged against alternative points of view. Itis here that the Bourdieusian concept of symbolic violence is most useful. From a broader social perspective, within the UK,‘‘health and safety’’ is a derogatory term, and the HSE is perceived as, if anything, too efficacious. This is a form of symbolicviolence that hampers campaigns for better health and safety practice in the UK. In Bourdieu’s terms, what ultimatelyremains lacking in the ICL case is a larger sustained social movement to intervene for greater change and ultimately therecognition of utopian possibilities. The creation of such a movement would have involved collaboration with academics andactivists in Europe and would present a significant challenge for any collective. The trade union movement (while working tobuild links) has not achieved this goal, perhaps because the full time staff of the trade union movement are struggling withtoo few resources and falling membership (Brownlie, 2012).30

In terms of accounting, while the filings and financial accounts are decidedly lacking in so many ways they helped us tounearth the structures of power within ICL and offered some understanding of the financial capacity of ICL. Examining thefinancial accounts of ICL before and after the disaster provides some understanding of the impact of the fine, a point ignoredby the Public Inquiry. Here we found the net current assets figures to be instructive.

Year

29 Profound social change from be30 Around 6.4 million employees in

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£220,507 £236,855 £198,132 £293,292 £347,529 £416,072 £443,167
From the cash balances it appears that, the amount of cash held by the company in 2007 dropped significantly – almost tothe same extent as the fine. However, for some reason, the creditors figure dropped significantly too. The same patternoccurred in 2008. Did ICL want to appear to be less ‘‘cash-rich’’ around the time of the Inquiry? It is impossible to tell. Perhapsmore importantly, it appears from the accounts that the fine had absolutely no impact on the company whatsoever. It was atbest symbolic. Our accounting intervention gave out the signal that in the face of neoliberalism corporate killing couldremain virtually unpunished.

In summary, the collective came together in response to the ICL disaster. In so doing we have ultimately responded toBourdieu’s rallying cry to stimulate academic researchers to engage as collective intellectuals conducting activist research asa source of intervention in the public space. We offer our reflections on the case and Bourdieu’s conception of the collectiveintellectual to others interested in participating in a form of activism against neoliberalism which uses their professionalnorms of rigorous research.

10. Summary and conclusion

Bourdieu’s earlier writings seem to suggest that there may have been a phase in his life in which Bourdieu believed thathis work within the academic field would perhaps lead to some form of progressive social change. A series of events occurredwhich produced a qualitative shift in Bourdieu’s work; he saw the need to take his work outside of the academic field and tobuild networks (social capital) and distribute pamphlets (cultural capital) specifically designed to redress the excesses ofneoliberalism. In terms of the events which may have brought about this change, there could have been disappointment withthe Mitterrand (socialist) government of 1988; Bourdieu’s research while writing the Weight of the World (La Misere duMonde, Bourdieu, 1999); the growing inequalities in France; and the Paris rail strikes.

Few critical researchers thus far have considered Bourdieu’s more ‘‘activist’’ work since 1995 which calls for academics toparticipate outside of the field of academia within progressive social movements and how this fits with his role of thecollective intellectual. The research group involved in this paper could be considered to be a group of collective intellectualswithin the meaning of Bourdieu and defining the collective is fundamental to making it visible. Acting along with otherparties such as Families Against Corporate Killing, the collective influenced the decision to hold a Public Inquiry. This was asuccess to the extent that the questions we raised and recommendations we made in the public interest could not have beenanswered in a criminal court.

Our primary tool for intervention was our independent report which called for a Public Inquiry and based on our researchfindings made recommendations of issue the Inquiry should address. The report while mainly written by academics basedupon their scientific methods was designed for a broad audience. All of our engagements and communications with other

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parties served to reinforce the message and recommendations of the report. The report was particularly important in termsof our fight against the consequences of neoliberalism because our research findings identified the role of agencies such asthe HSE in inspecting, regulating and enforcing health and safety laws as under resourced, in particular under staffed, andinadequate. It proposed options for the reform of the HSE along with the system of sentencing corporations that commitserious health and safety offences. And it further called for the rights of workers, in trade unions and non-unionisedworkplaces, to be extended and their position more effectively protected when they raise health and safety concerns throughdedicated specialist hazard centres. In terms of accounting, we made visible the opacity in the accountability processes duein part to a lack of disclosure and transparency in the financial information especially in relation to health and safety. It isdifficult to judge the overall impact of the report. In the short-term, the collective did not build a lasting social movement.But it may still be seen as part of a larger project – it is still publicly available on various websites and can be used as aresource in future campaigns internationally.

We brought our collective interests together to lay bare conditions of oppression, address some forms of symbolicviolence/misrecognition and search for ‘feasible utopias.’ Our calls for clearer accounting information and a stronger healthand safety inspectorate may appear to be, at best, rather modest and perhaps somewhat reactionary. However, Bourdieuhimself recognised that activists face the risk of appearing conservative because in a neoliberal world they have to defend‘‘the most progressive achievements of the past. This situation is all the more paradoxical in that one is led to defendprogrammes or institutions that one wishes in any case to change, such as public services and the national state, which noone could rightly want to preserve as is, or unions or even public schooling, which must be continually subjected to the mostmerciless critique. Thus I am sometimes suspected of conversion or accused of contradiction when I defend a public schoolsystem of which I have shown time and time again that it fulfils a function of social conservation’’ (Bourdieu, 2003, p. 23). Wesee Bourdieu’s warning as addressing ultra left positions and postmodernism. It is fairly easy to dismiss the accountingprofession, accounting practice, the HSE and the British legal system; or to adopt a postmodern move, such that they are alldeconstructed to oblivion. It is much more difficult to contribute practically by working ceaselessly to unite intellectuals andactivists to resist the cultural and economic forces mobilised in the service of neoliberalism. For all its difficulties, we argue,that it is worthwhile doing exactly that.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the bereaved families and members of the STUC support group for sharing with us; the workersand ex-workers from ICL Stockline who spoke to us and whose knowledge, courage and tenacity in the face of great adversitywas an inspiration. To Laurence Connelly for giving so much of his time and sharing his knowledge and experience of lifeinside ICL. To Bridget Fowler for her careful, thorough comments on an earlier draft and two anonymous reviewers whogenerously provided very helpful and thoughtful comments. Huge thanks too to Julz and Tobias for love and inspiration.

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[Chapter IV].


http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.1658651.0.stockline_disaster_the_most_damning_verdit.php

http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.1658651.0.stockline_disaster_the_most_damning_verdit.php

http://www.fack.org.uk/

http://www.hse.gov.uk/press/record/iclresp100907.htm

http://www.iosh.co.uk/

http://www.iosh.co.uk/

http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/news/display.var.1659124.0.0.php

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accounting activism and bourdieu's ‘collective intellectual’ – reflections on the icl...

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