The hegemony in transfer pricing practices: The case of a Chinese organisation

Recent decades have witnessed an increase in adopting post-positivistic approaches to understand management accounting as a social rather than a technical practice. Under this, researchers have adopted various social theories to offer alternative explanations for the emerge of different management accounting practice other than environmental pressure or technical demands. However, transfer pricing research remains to be positivistic – holding neo-classical economic assumptions, and recognising transfer pricing as a contingent practice (E.g. Dikolli & Vaysman, 2006; Göx & Schiller, 2006; Chang, Cheng, & Trotman, 2008; Pfeiffer et al. 2011; Bouwens & Steens, 2016; Hussein et al., 2017; Cools, Emmanuel, & Jorissen, 2008; Cools & Slagmulder, 2009; Plesner Rossing, 2013). Based on 7-month fieldwork in a Chinese private group enterprise, this research aims to sets an alternative agenda for understanding transfer pricing practices vis-a-vis power relations in organisations. In particular, I examine the interrelationship between structure and organisation, dominant and dominated social groups, and how these interrelationship shapes the transfer pricing practice. The interpretations of Gramsci’s work on hegemony is adopted as the theoretical basis for this research.