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 

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

Aziza is Professor in Performance Management at EDHEC Business School. She is also one of the editors of the 3* ABS Journal Accounting Forum.