Temporalities of Crisis: Accounting for Future Past Pandemics, a seminar by Professor Aziza Laguecir (EDHEC Business School)

Temporalities of Crisis: Accounting for Future Past Pandemics

by Professor Aziza Laguecir (EDHEC Business School)

Abstract: 

This paper revisits the role of accounting in pandemic crisis governance by shifting attention from post-crisis accountability and emergency response to anticipatory preparedness practices. Moreover, rather than viewing crises as isolated events, we adopt a longitudinal historical perspective to analyse France’s pandemic preparedness from 2005 to 2021 through qualitative content analysis of Planning, Programming, and Budgeting (PPB) documents, legislative debates, and public reports. By combining Koselleck’s historical semantics with Luhmann’s concept of temporal differentiation, we show that PPB functioned as an enduring anticipatory structure designed to render future pandemics calculable and governable. In contrast, pandemic outbreaks served as disruptive events, exposing the limitations and contradictions of this structure. During such events, a disjunction arose between the pandemic expected within PPB (the future-present) and the pandemic as it actually occurred (the present-future), revealing significant blind spots in PPB driven by its long-term planning focus and reliance on political cycles. By foregrounding the multiple temporalities of preparedness, the paper shows that accounting for pandemic preparedness is not simply a matter of learning from past experiences, but is shaped by shifting political expectations and by how responsibilities to past actions and future outcomes are balanced.

About the speaker:

Professor Laguecir's research interests include management accounting and control systems and practices. More specifically, she developed two main axes of research. The first focuses on the public sector (elderly care, healthcare, and social housing), where she explores cost and funding systems. The second axis deals with surveillance and control systems in contemporary digitized organizations, with a particular interest in fraud and accounting scandals. Professor Laguecir explores the ethical aspects of costs and controls on both axes.

Her work has published papers in prestigious academic journals: British Accounting Review, Accounting Forum, Journal of Business Ethics, JPBAFM, Management Accounting Research, Accounting, Auditing &Accountability Journal, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, British Journal of Management, Organization Studies, ISMO, Accounting Horizons. She is also involved in several scientific committees and currently serves as the JPBAFM associate editor.